UC & Supported Housing

I’ve just noticed the minutes of a meeting a few weeks ago about this.  There seems to be some move towards devolving this to Home Countries and, possibly, LAs in England.

Interestingly though there is one fairly strong point minuted.

Lord Freud agreed that HB and Supported Housing may not go into Universal Credit system from the outset and that a pilot or similarly robust impact assessment process may be necessary to ensure that the changes and procedures associated with them were robust.

There was a DWP ‘internal’ request about 2 yrs ago for views from HB authorities about future funding of the ‘not for the brick & mortar’ charges in Supported accom. that are eligible for HB and whether they should be covered by Supporting People etc funding in future. I have in the back of my mind that there was a subsequent more formal review / consultation on possible removal of these charges for HB eligibility.  I assumed DWP were looking at this issue following the UtT Rivendell Housing decisions and our meaning of “sheltered accomodation” cases with a desire to transfer the high cost of many supported housing ‘rent’ elements to some other govt depts budget!

This was a DWP meeting in late March.