Devon County Council has been funding adult homelessness prevention services for nearly ten years. It says they are intended to help people “whose homelessness is not just a housing issue, but something that is inextricably linked with complex and chaotic life experiences, that can lead to disproportionately poor health and well-being, high levels of health and social care need and cost, and premature mortality.”
The services are aimed at achieving lasting recovery for people escaping from traumatic events and homeless situations, including rough sleeping, by supporting them in temporary accommodation until they are ready to move on into independent living.
The county council’s annual £1,455,000 contribution to the cost of delivering these services currently enables five local charitable, non-profit organisations to support around 250 people at any one time. While the funding does not pay for accommodation directly, it is aligned to accommodation provision, paying for support hours delivered in managed multiple occupancy hostel settings as well as via a countywide floating service.
150 households currently receive this support in Exeter, while nearly two-thirds of the floating support is targeted here.
Devon County Council, Exeter City Council and East Devon District Council agree on the rising complexity of adult social care needs, in particular in younger adults, and the increasing levels of support needed to meet these needs year on year. East Devon District Council says this makes “resolving their homeless situation even more challenging, against a backdrop of extremely limited resources, in particular supported accommodation and support services”.
Exeter City Council says there were 224 rough sleepers in the city last year – the most ever recorded – while the number of single homeless people approaching it for housing support increased by nearly a third to 753.
Until now there has been also been agreement that the homelessness prevention approach followed in the city works. A recent government-funded report concluded that this form of intervention is “effective, both in human terms, and for the public purse” with “positive cost to outcome benefit ratios” involving “relatively small amounts of council investment” that “can lead to significant benefits”.
It also found that “projects offering wrap-around services as well as housing support, and with a person-centred approach, can be particularly effective”.
However in January the county council announced that it intended to make £50 million of unspecified spending cuts in its £696 million 2023-24 budget. Its finance director Angie Sinclair described its approach, which involved increasing spending in some areas while reducing it in others, as a “re-prioritisation”.
Then, a week after passing its budget in February, it said that it planned to cut the funding of five adult social care services, including the £1.5 million adult homelessness prevention service contract.
According to its own budget impact assessment there is a “very substantial risk that if the preventative work of many VCSE [Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise] organisations ceases the burden on frontline statutory services will increase even more”.
A county council adult social care report warned three days later that the “public sector needs to be aware that VCSE cannot continue to mitigate their service reductions”. It also admitted that increased street homelessness and rough sleeping, job losses and adverse impacts health and well-being, including “risk to life” and “exploitation” were probable consequences of its planned cuts.
Others went further. Peter Stephenson of St Petrock’s, Fiona Carden of CoLab Exeter, Penny Blackmore of EDP Drug and Alcohol Services and Si Johns of YMCA Exeter said, in a joint letter to Devon’s MPs, that the cuts would cause an “inevitable and significant increase in homelessness and rough sleeping” across the county.
They added that as “the vast majority of those who will be affected” face “multiple health and social inequalities including poor mental and physical health, and substance addictions” there would “inevitably be a major impact on other Devon County Council budgets”.
Shelter’s Stuart Francis-Dubois said the cuts could have “potentially tragic consequences”, adding: “We know that many young people using these services are on the edge and that the services deal with suicide attempts on a regular basis.
“Without these services it is likely that some young people will take their own lives as a direct result of the proposed changes.”
Rough sleeper sheltering at Exeter Guildhall
East Devon District Council said the cuts would have “a devastating effect”, putting the “established and effective supported accommodation model that has been set up to successfully assist people with a recognised support need at great risk” and undermining and disrupting the “significant amount of work that has gone into tackling rough sleeping over a number of years”.
It added that the “already high and escalating numbers of people in homeless and rough sleeping situations would increase significantly further”, increasing the need for “hospital admissions, GP and hospital appointments, mental health service support, police and probation assistance and interventions”.
Exeter City Council said it was “likely that the accommodation projects will shrink or close” as a consequence of the cuts, resulting in “up to 84 households becoming homeless and needing crisis intervention” in Exeter alone, leading not only to increased levels of rough sleeping but also forcing more young people into homelessness.
A report produced on behalf of Devon’s district councils found that “in Exeter and Teignbridge alone the complete withdrawal of this support contract is likely to result in an annual minimum cost to housing alone of £2 million”.
There has also been extensive criticism of the county council’s cuts impact assessment, including the inaccuracy of many of its claims and assumptions and the fact that, as the county council has not undertaken any service delivery monitoring for five years, it lacked the data necessary for proper evaluation and to ensure its Public Sector Equality Duty obligations would be met. The city council described it as “uninformed”.
Perhaps most strikingly of all, the county council failed to notify any of the service providers or the county’s other local authorities that it planned to axe the funding before publicly announcing its plans. The service providers were told their contracts were being terminated on the same day as the public consultation on the cuts began, 22 February.
YMCA Exeter public consultation responses summary
932 responses had been submitted by the time the consultation closed on 19 April. Not one supported the cuts. We know this not because the county council promptly published a summary, but because Si Johns of YMCA Exeter used freedom of information legislation to compel the county council to release the consultation responses.
There was near-universal condemnation of the county council’s plans. Local councillors from across the political spectrum, support service users and providers, national homelessness charities and policy research organisations all urged a rethink.
One local council leader said the cuts made “little financial or practical sense” and seemed to be a “short term financial fix which can only lead to problems of much greater scale in the future, all the while imperilling our mutual efforts to protect the most vulnerable in society.”
Councils and councillors from across Devon’s districts made direct representations to County Hall, and raised objections at Health and Adult Care scrutiny committee meetings in March and June. They exhorted the county council to pause the cuts to gather accurate information on their impact, including their wider costs, and at least to ensure that alternative provisions were put in place.
All to no avail. As James McInnes, the county councillor who is responsible for adult social care, made clear at last week’s cabinet meeting, the county council has no intention of changing the spending decisions it made at the beginning of February when it set its 2023-24 budget.
He said the county council’s statutory responsibility to improve health and reduce health inequalities has nothing to do with it, despite its own impact assessment admitting that “the cohort of individuals supported by this contract have the poorest health and well-being within the county”.
He appeared indifferent to the staff redundancies, loss of skills and evictions of more than a hundred vulnerable people that the cuts would entail, saying that the service provision contract term and conditions entitle the council to terminate it without further notice.
He said that the consultation had enabled the county council to “listen to people’s views” which he said would be “given due regard before final proposals are developed and presented to cabinet for decision”, adding that “people with eligible needs” would continue to have them met “in ways that are improved from a best value perspective”. By this he apparently meant the county council’s perspective, provided it no longer spent any money on their support.
When asked to explain how the county council would meet the increased costs that would result from the cuts, for which it would be responsible under its statutory obligations, as it had apparently not accounted for them in its budget, he said the county council does “not see eligibility [for adult social care services] as a financial burden”.
He added: “Through our vision and strategies, we have set out our approach to how we will support people, in the first instance in a strength based and short-term way that promotes their independence and if possible without the need for commissioned and on-going statutory funded services.” In other words, there wouldn’t be any cost increases as the county council had no intention of spending any money on support services either way.
YMCA Exeter stop the funding cuts campaign image
The county council’s Health & Adult Care scrutiny committee is now due to meet next Thursday, supposedly so county councillors can examine what adult social care director Tandra Forster claims are “developing” recommendations, before cabinet confirms the cuts in a month’s time. Her report to the committee doubles down on James McInnes’ evasions.
It says the county council has “worked hard to understand the impact of its proposals” and has “engaged with those potentially impacted, including all district and city authorities across Devon”. It nevertheless entirely omits the up to date financial, service performance and impact information supplied by those authorities and the service providers to the consultation in its responses summary.
It says: “the council is committed to supporting the prevention of homelessness”, adding that “the ending of our contribution to the fund will not mean that people will now have unmet adult social care needs”. However it also says it “will exercise its duties to ensure those who need an assessment under the Care Act receive one, and to consider how care and support needs can be met, if identified”, revealing its hand.
It even manages to claim that other county councils “do not directly contribute funding in this area” while also mentioning “those who do”.
It then presents an “options appraisal” in which all options simply refer to the same financial considerations, which are that its 2023-24 budget does not include funding for any option other than a full cut, and says the consultation “has informed a refreshed equalities impact assessment, analysis of options and recommendation to cabinet”, as if its position has changed since January.
This updated impact assessment, which is supposed to be attached to the report, is absent despite the Local Government Act 1972 stipulating that local authority meetings should not go ahead if any reports for the meeting have not been made available for inspection alongside the agenda five clear days before the meeting takes place.
When we asked the county council to account for its decision not to publish the updated impact assessment alongside the agenda for this meeting, as required, it took seven hours to answer, then said the impact assessment “will be updated” for the August cabinet meeting. Which is odd, as James McInnes said it had already been updated before the July cabinet meeting.
It also said the scrutiny committee would have to make do with the impact assessment it produced before the consultation took place.
Is there any chance the county council will change course? The determination to cut homelessness prevention funding it has demonstrated over the past six months, and its apparent willingness to compromise its integrity to get its way, suggests not, however unanimous the opposition to its plans and however wasteful they may be.
