At last night’s meeting of Kettering Borough Council’s Research & Development [Scrutiny] Committee, members were given an update into homelessness and the number of families in temporary council accommodation.
This is a new all time record which perhaps was not surprising given this figure has been rising month on month for the last three or four years!
The committee was given a verbal report with an accompanying power-point presentation which contained a great deal of information and a lot of facts. I complained that a written report, or at least a copy of the slides, was not circulated to members before hand. This would have allowed us to prepare our questions or discuss the matter with colleagues and would also be available to the public and press on the council’s website. It also means that of 36 Councillors in Kettering only six actually got to know the details..
This refusal to put things in writing and rely on verbal briefings on-the-night is standard practice at KBC and something I have complained about many times before.
In response to this growing crisis the council are however doing things like reviewing their IT, reviewing the ‘Keyways’ allocation system (the recently tried to take a number of people off the housing list although this was rejected after complaints from councillors), introducing new forms of case management, having weekly meetings and sharing performance information within the housing allocation team (I asked if this information could be shared with councillors and the answer was no!), build new partnerships with other organisations and housing associations, and hope to use private landlords more in the future to help with demand.
Relying on the private sector was mentioned again and again, including by Conservative Councillors, a point I found ironic as we have been previously told time and time again that it has been a failure of the private rented market that has contributed to the crisis, a point I made which was agreed by senior officers.
The council are also “constantly reviewing policies and procedures”, including their eviction policies to make it easier to throw people out of accommodation (I’m not entirely sure how that helps the situation over then turning property around more quickly perhaps).
To me all of this sounds like simply tinkering around the edges and until the fundamental issue of there simply not being enough social housing in the Borough, due to massive underinvestment over a number of years, is dealt with the numbers of homeless families will keep rising and the financial pressure on local tax payers will keep going up. To my question what plans are there to address that fundamental point, the answer I received was there are ‘no plans’!
My concerns were seemingly shared by the whole committee as nobody objected to my suggestion that we formally send our concerns to the council’s ruling Executive Committee about the continuing increase in homelessness and in particular the loss of the supported living accommodation following the closure of Wellington House and I look forward to this being part of the next Executive Committee’s agenda and their response. ��h�V��m�