Meeting the needs of homeless young people in Gloucestershire

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Meeting the needs of homeless young people in
Gloucestershire

• Moira Pratt
• Commissioning Manager
• (Strategic Information)
• Children and Young Peoples Directorate
• Gloucestershire County Council

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• Focus
• To understand the position in Gloucestershire
  with regard to homelessness among children and
  young people (CYP) and youth housing provision.
• To establish if, and how well, we are meeting the
  needs of homeless YP in the county

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Why homelessness?

• Difficulty in obtaining consistent data for the
  2007 Needs Analysis
• Recent JAR inspection stated
• The range and quality of accommodation for care
  leavers is adequate although the availability of
  sheltered and supported housing in some parts of
  the county is insufficient to meet all needs.
  There is very little emergency accommodation
  available and in some rare cases, bed and
  breakfast accommodation is used, which is
  inappropriate.

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Challenges

• Two-tier authority - six district councils
• Politics
• Partnership working
• Locating and understanding the data

What are the questions? Do we have what we need
to find the answers?
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• Initial meetings/interviews
• Identify one or two key officers
• Early exploratory discussions
• Design a semi-structured interview

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• Background reading
• Legislation
• Reviews
• Strategies
• Published data
• Comparison with other authorities
• Research papers

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• Findings interviews

• Main causes of homelessness among young people
• Family breakdown
• Financial problems end of statutory benefit
  entitlement
• Violence

• Main problems faced by homeless young people
• Overall shortage of supported housing across the
  county
• CYP have to move in order to access support
• Transport in rural areas

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• Housing Assessment Data
• Districts have a statutory duty to report
  homelessness figures.
• Local homelessness strategies identified the need
  for more consistent data across the all
  districts.
• Cheltenham District has given a strong lead on
  this with varying levels of engagement from the
  other districts.
• New software introduced for use across all
  districts based on a single initial assessment
  form designed by Cheltenham.
• Obtained a download of a whole years data from
  Cheltenham District for 2007/08 to carry out an
  initial data analysis.

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• Findings data review
• New software is a simple survey tool Keypoint,
  made available on the web.
• Data quality issues arising from design and poor
  data inputting practices.
• Monitoring is carried out quarterly for ALL
  applications, regardless of age.
• Better than nothing!

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Initial headlines

• In 2007/08, 490 housing assessments were
  completed for young people below the age of 20 in
  Cheltenham District. This was 27 of all
  assessments in this district.
• 85 were single and 97 were White British
• 34 were living with friends or relatives, 16
  with parents, 10 in supported housing.
• 32 were considered to be homeless, while 11
  were in acceptable accommodation.
• CCP carried out the largest number of
  assessments, followed by Connexions.
• 33 of referrals were self referrals and 28 were
  referred through the Connexions service.

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56 of young people requested further support

• The most frequent areas requested were
• Debt/money problems (22)
• Tenancy support (15)
• Training/Job (11)
• Education (7)

3 were fleeing violence and 5 young people asked
for family mediation.
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Still to do .

• Investigate outcome data and identify gaps.
• Visit the other district council key leads.
• Map current provision.
• Propose further improvements to the current
  housing assessment form.
• Look at 2008/09 data for the county as a whole.

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If I could start again .?