We are developing strong partnerships to ensure a collective understanding of Housing with Care and supply and demand and to oversee developments, as Staffordshire is a diverse county, and we aim to have the right type of Housing with Care in the right locations for our residents.
What we will do
Work together - The County Council’s partners include the eight District and Borough Councils in Staffordshire, the County Council, the NHS, Registered Social Landlords, as well as housing developers, private landlords and care providers, and we will also work with other partners including Homes England. The County Council will work collaboratively with partners as they deliver their statutory and legislative duties that support the delivery of good quality Housing with Care provision.
Joint training - To help support our partnership working, we are together embarking on a range of joint training so that we all have a shared understanding of Housing with Care and can jointly tackle the challenges our residents sometimes have in accessing it.
Detailed delivery plans - The Strategy will be delivered through the development and implementation of detailed delivery plans for each of the key areas of work, co-produced with people with care and support needs and with our partners.
These plans will cover:
- Extra Care: The term 'extra care' housing is used to describe developments that comprise self-contained homes with design features and support services available to enable self-care and independent living for older people.
- Supported Living: Supported Living schemes support people with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, autism, or mental health conditions to live independently in the community. Schemes can be shared houses or clusters of flats or may be single households
- Shared Lives, a highly flexible form of supported living and gives individuals the opportunity to live within a family.
- Major and Minor Adaptation including Disabled Facilities Grants: These are grants provided by the local authority to help meet the cost of adapting a property for the needs of a disabled person.
- Homelessness and Rough Sleeping support for people with social care needs: Housing, care and support for people who do not have a home and who have social care needs.
- General housing needs: Housing that meets the needs for the population of people with care needs.
Structured approach - We aim to adopt a strategic and structured approach to improve the alignment of care and support needs across Housing with Care and deliver our ambitions, which will include:
- Working in partnership with providers to take a flexible approach in making Housing with Care provision available for people with a wide range of needs and consider new business models to enable this.
- Implementing innovative and technologically enhanced housing, care, and support solutions, that help people to live independently in a safe home and community environment that provides opportunities for them to participate, shape and become actively involved in their communities.
- Implementing provision where people’s capacity to age well is supported by having ready access to social and communal services, family members, neighbours, and the broader community.
- Implementing housing with care provision that is affordable to local populations and offers security of tenure and greater independence, health, and wellbeing
Maximised outcomes of those with social care needs - Our Strategy aims to maximise the outcomes of people with social care needs and provide best value for money by offering good quality and cost-effective services that support people, and those that may care for them. We want people with social care needs to live as safely, independently, and healthily as possible, with the right care, at the right time, in the communities of their choice, whenever possible. It is important that our strategic objectives for Housing with Care help us to deliver this.
Sufficient housing with care services - We will work with our strategic housing and care partners and support them to deliver sufficient housing with care services that reflect adult social care needs including:
Housing Authorities, Housing Developers, Registered Providers of Housing, Private Landlords
developing an appropriate mix of accommodation, properties, sizes, and types by working together to ensure that Local Plans reflect the requirements for our diverse communities.
- Delivering a mix of tenures including rented and social housing suitable for a range of individual circumstances.
- Schemes offering good quality housing alongside good quality care that promote independence, meet people outcomes, and offer a less restrictive environment where people can take positive risks.
- Developing models of housing management support are aspirational and promote recovery for people with mental health conditions, so that they can support people to live more independently and encourage people to move away from provision that is no longer suitable for their needs. This approach will alleviate issues such as creating dependency on care services and bottlenecks in care provision that prevents further referrals for support.
Registered Providers of Care, Community and Voluntary Sector Organisations, Public and Private Sector Institutions.
- Maximising choice of care for people in a way that does not jeopardise their tenancy and housing arrangements.
- Offering a range of care appropriate for people with a variety of needs - from intensive personal care to less intensive and non-regulated support.
- Commissioning Housing with Care schemes which offer ready access and actively seek to connect with community assets, and work with local voluntary organisations.