Housing and Homelessness Summary Year end 2020-21

The Housing Solutions Team provides free, expert housing advice to residents of all tenures in the borough. The team has a strong focus on preventing homelessness and can advise people with housing problems or assist those people in finding somewhere to live.

In April 2018 a change in homelessness legislation with the introduction of the Homelessness Reduction Act, brought a significant change in the way the Housing Solutions Team assess homelessness applications and monitor outcomes.

The new Homelessness Reduction Act places two additional statutory duties on local housing authorities:

The prevention duty – requires councils to intervene to prevent homelessness at an earlier stage, when a household is at risk of losing their home in the next 56 days. This is particularly relevant for those living in privately rented homes who are served with notice and provides more opportunity to support people directly into another tenancy.

The relief duty - requires councils to offer more advice and support to anyone who is already homeless, regardless of whether they are in priority need and may involve offering accommodation.

The duties that existed under the previous homelessness legislation, known as the main duty, remain in place. A main housing duty is owed where homeless households are eligible (certain persons from abroad are ineligible for housing assistance), have a priority need for accommodation and are not homeless intentionally.

For the year 2020 - 2021, the Housing Solutions Team;

• Prevented homelessness for 187 households and relieved homelessness for 136 households.
• Accepted a full duty under the homelessness legislation for 185 households and helped them into accommodation.

The table below shows the number of cases where a full homelessness duty has been accepted and where homelessness has been prevented or relieved for each quarter of 2020 – 2021:

 

During 2020-21 the Rough Sleeper Team provided 161 clients with support, advice, and assistance to help them move off the streets, and 101 rough sleepers were housed during the same period into more settled accommodation through friends, the Private Rented Sector, Supported Housing, Social Housing, and helped to return to the local authority area they came from and where they have support networks.

This included rough sleepers housed in an emergency due to the Covid 19 Public Health pandemic.

The Council’s new duties under the Housing Act 1996 Part 7 (as amended) are to Prevent or Relieve homelessness. Interim accommodation may be provided whilst we look to assist people that are homeless into alternative accommodation. If we are unable to relieve their homelessness we may have a duty to provide them with temporary accommodation until a more permanent solution is found.

The number of households in temporary accommodation as of 31 March 2021 was 209.