Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 18th February 2024
Today’s blog is basically a rant, for which I apologise, sort of.
The boy is desperate for his own place. He’s 29 so that doesn’t seem unreasonable, and he’s been wanting his own place since before the first lockdown. I appreciate that most young people these days are struggling to move out of the family home and get their own place. Young people I know who are trying to get a mortgage are only able to do that if they are in a relationship with two incomes and the bank of Mum and Dad providing the deposit. Even those who are looking to rent are needing to demonstrate their income to potential landlords and often have parents as guarantors.
The issue for the boy is that even though he does have some paid work at MacDonalds, it’s a zero-hour contract and at the moment he’s mostly only getting one 5-hour shift a week. That means the majority of his income is still Universal Credit, and sadly, this doesn’t make him a great catch for most landlords (even with case law that says discriminating in this way contravenes the Equality Act). Another issue is that he also needs some adaptations to a property to make it work for him. He can be quite noisy, and that means we need some decent quality soundproofing – not something any landlords I’ve come across are prepared to do. The private rental market is therefore completely off the table.
That leads us to the council housing list, and I won’t bore you with the stats about how likely he would be to be offered a property that would work for him (think winning the lottery odds). So, we are looking at registered social landlords and the issue where we live is that every single registered social landlord, is tied up with a support provider. Yes, you heard me right; you can have a tenancy, but to stay in that tenancy, you must be supported by a particular organisation, whether or not they are any good, whether or not they can offer support workers you like and trust. It’s a bit like my landlord telling me that to rent my house I must use all the organisations on his list for the day-to-day support I need …get my car fixed at his nominated garage, use his preferred gym, chiropractor and accountant. Check this out where you live – it's more common than not.
Last year, the boy was offered a self-contained flat which looked really promising. It was in a great area that he knows, and is close to his work, the girl and the train station. There were five other self-contained flats in the big converted Edwardian building, and there was an office with somebody working in it 24 hours a day – so back up if he needed it that would have massively reduced the direct support he needed. Perfect, except there was a catch. The housing association, working with a separate (but specified as I’ve just explained) provider organisation was offering these flats for 12 – 18-month tenancies for young people needing to ‘learn independence skills’, and once he’d somehow achieved that (not sure what the test was) he would have to move on. Really?
The boy is lucky as he has a fab social worker who completely understands what good support looks like for him and has set that out clearly in his support plan – to have his own place (not sharing), with a team of people who can support him in his work and living his life. He’s lucky because for most young people with learning disabilities, the go-to option for not living in the family home is what we euphemistically call ‘supported living’, which involves identifying three people (or four or five or six) who have never met each other, potentially have nothing in common apart from their label or diagnosis and offer them the chance to live together with a shared lounge, kitchen and bathroom. Anyone fancy that? The go-to option for older people (once you need more than 4 visits a day) is residential care.
I met a colleague for lunch on Friday who told me about a woman she is trying to help who, after some spectacularly tough things happening in her life, found herself placed (and I choose my words intentionally) somewhere where she is sharing with people she doesn’t know, in a village where she knows no one, with no public transport. She has asked to move to her own place in the nearby town where friends, family and her wider support network are. The response from her social worker was that ‘she is not ready for independent living yet’ and that ‘there are no beds available in supported living services’ in the town she wants to live in.
My dear friend has this weekend made the decision that her husband is not able to live at home anymore because for the last year, she has not been able to get any support and now she is at the point where she is so tired and feels so let down that the offer of residential care feels like the only solution.
So, my question and challenge to you folk working in councils or within organisations that offer housing or support to people: how do we change this? How do we see how completely NOT gloriously ordinary this situation is? Why can the system not see that where we live, and the support we need are two completely separate things?
The first sentence of the Social Care Future vision is, ‘We all want to live in a place we call home’ …not we all want to live in a place where we can learn independent living skills that we might have to move out of in 12 months …or to live with people who we don’t know or necessarily like ...or to live with people that are assessed to have the same needs as us.
Rant over.
PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast is here! Come and listen to episode one where I catch up with the wonderful Anna Severwright from Social Care Future!