£200 million to be spent?!

[malc]

if it was n e lincs yes but what i've heard of other councils track records then no.

[bowlingbun]

Is a new home your "own" home. My mum has lived in hers since 1968, I've been here since 1976. Moving elsewhere wouldn't feel like my "own" at all. Can't imagine that you'd have green and spotted woodpeckers as daily visitors in the garden of a new build. In my area, a National Park, getting any ground to build any house on is a challenge - a helicopter flies over periodically to check that people haven't done any unauthorised work on their properties! Most existing properties can be adapted with a bit of imagination - obviously some cannot, and for them, it would seem sensible for the residents to move, but would it need to be a brand new property in any case? Simply moving from a house to an adapted bungalow would surely suffice? A member of my family is elderly and very disabled, only just managing at home, so exactly the sort of person who might qualify, in theory. Her large bungalow could be made far more suitable for her needs BUT she is resistant to any change, and too poorly to cope with the "upset" of both large scale adaptations or moving. Either way it would involve huge amounts of extra work for me, and I already have more than I can comfortably manage. How best to deal with our ageing population is really difficult. Has this idea been thought through enough?

[Guest]

Social housing built specifically for the use of people who are elderly frail or who have disabilities already exists and is available both for rent and for shared-ownership. Hertfordshire CC has documented the savings to that LA by providing this type of housing, I believe I provided a link to the document on an old thread.

In order to widen the discussion beyond that of people who are elderly or who have family carers, I think that it is also worth pointing out that there are younger disabled people as well as elderly people who have no family member able and/or willing to care for them and who wish to remain in the community rather than be moved to residential care and for whom the provision of this type of housing has provided a solution to enabling them to live more independently.

[bowlingbun]

England has 39 counties, according to a website I found, so that's approximately £5m per county, or £1m per year, over a 5 year period. Assuming a housing cost of £100,000 per property, that's ten properties per county per year. The aim of the money is to keep people in their own homes for longer, rather than go into residential care. The assumption is therefore that most people go into residential care because of unsuitable housing - is this correct? Parsifal is right of course, there have been schemes for special needs housing for a long time. Whilst it may save councils money (presumably by council tenants moving from larger unsuitable homes into purpose built adapted properties) that would seem to me to be more of an issue about housing stock and best use of resources, not much about keeping people out of residential care. Are the young disabled moving into a new adapted home of their own avoiding residential care, or the parental home? This seems to be a very different scenario from an elderly disabled person in need of a lot of care, but every bit as valid. Are the government right in putting money in new homes to keep people out of residential care? I would be interested to hear everyone's views, really don't know if they are right or wrong.

[Guest]

The money saved in Hertfordshire was the difference between the cost of residential care and the cost of keeping people in the community through the use of purpose-built housing, i.e. it was the saving to the Social Care budget and had nothing to do with management of housing stock or the use of housing finance allocation.

People with disabilities have as much right to live as independently as their peers if that is their choice and it is feasible, many do by living in adapted or pupose-built properties. In terms of validity, I would suggest that the need for suitable adapted or purpose-built housing is greater for the younger person than for the very elderly, there is a world of difference between a very elderly, frail person spending the last few months or years of what was previously an independent life in residential care or being cared for within the family unit and a person who has no alternative to spending all of their adult years in residential care or within the parental home solely due to a lack of housing which can accommodate their needs.