Housing-Related Floating Support Service - Appendix 2 - Wider system financial implications
District and Borough Housing Teams
17% of adults referred by District and Borough Housing Teams were supported by the Floating Support Service to secure new accommodation in 2023/24. If this support had not been available and the households had gone on to be placed in temporary accommodation, this would generate an additional cost to the housing authorities in the region of £9,900,000 per annum.
Hastings Borough Council
Hastings BC made 276 referrals into the service in 2023/24. It costs Hastings BC an average of £15,800 pa to accommodate a household in privately procured temporary accommodation (TA), so, considering the very high success rate of the BHT service (87% successful outcomes), if those 240 households (87% of 276) didn’t have their homelessness prevented it would cost Hastings Borough Council over £3.7m a year to provide them with temporary accommodation. This would be a 50% increase in Hastings Borough Council’s current, already unsustainable and unavoidable, spend on TA. Plus, that is only for one year, it is realistic to say that with the increased demand we would double current times for households spent in TA before a permanent home is available. So, a four year stay in TA for those 240 households is an extra cost of just over £15m to Hastings Borough Council.
BHT Sussex
In the 12 months Oct 2023 - Sept 2024, BHT supported 275 eligible adults to claim Attendance Allowance. Based on the 93% success rate for applications for Attendance Allowance in the Service, this constitutes annualised additional income of £903,000 for East Sussex residents.
We also supported 993 people/households in fuel poverty to reduce debt and keep their home warm.
Children’s Services
Savings made by reducing the funding for this service would lead to potentially higher costs for Children’s Services, especially in relation to families who have been found intentionally homeless and had their housing duty discharged by the Borough and District Housing Authorities. The number of families being found to be intentionally homeless has risen over the last two years at an increasing cost to Children’s Services in cases where accommodation must be funded for families with no other housing options under S.17 of the Children’s Act 1989. Referrals to the East Sussex Floating Support Service are regularly made to assist in the prevention of families becoming intentionally homeless in the first place and to support those that have had their housing duties discharged to move on from high-cost temporary accommodation funded by Children’s Services to their own privately rented accommodation. Spend on providing accommodation for these families has more than doubled in the past two years and will continue to increase. There is a risk that more families will end up homeless and potentially intentionally homeless if they are not able to access specialist housing advice and support. The cost to ESCC in 2023/24 of supporting families found intentionally homeless was £639,000 and the forecasted cost for 2024/25 is £575,000.
Rother DC
“The Floating Support Service is an effective homelessness prevention tool and demonstrates better value for money than investments made after a household becomes homeless. The housing and homelessness system is in crisis. We have reviewed the performance of the ESFSS within Rother in 2022/23 and estimate the degree of reduction proposed could mean we experience an additional 200 temporary accommodation placements. It could increase our net temporary accommodation costs by up to £1.4m, which is almost 10% of our total net revenue budget.”
“RDC is concerned that the degree of the budget reductions to this specific service is heavily weighted on homelessness prevention and risks tipping some district and borough Councils into a position where they cannot deliver a balanced budget.”
Please note, the figures contained within this section have been provided by the relevant organisations and are unvalidated.