Flintshire Council homelessness team under increasing pressure as cases rise

Flintshire County Council is still spending an estimated £7.7 million on emergency accommodation for homeless residents.

Latest figures presented to the council’s Community & Housing Overview & Scrutiny Committee also show that the authority’s homelessness officers are each working on twice as many cases as they should be as demand for support continues to rise.

There are 698 homelessness cases being managed by a team of 10 homelessness officers – meaning each officer has around 69 cases.

Last year the council commissioned an independent review of homelessness support by housing consultants Neil Morland and Co, which stated that each officer should only manage between 30 and 35 cases.

But cases are still rising. On average 158 people present to the county’s homelessness team each month. Not all end up needing support, but an increasing number do and it is putting the service under severe pressure.

Committee member and Shotton West Councillor Sean Bibby expressed concern at the pressure the county’s 10 homelessness officers were under:

“When you look at the average caseload per officer, 69 is an enormous amount of people for one person to be looking after.

“Particularly as they are dealing with people who are going through a very traumatic, distressing, stressful experience.

“How are we looking to make the caseload more manageable for officers?”

“The caseload is a risk,” said Martin Cooil, Flintshire’s Housing and Prevention Service manager told the committee.

“We do have a growth strategy in place but we anticipate that our officers will have to deal with this level of caseload for the next four to six months.

“We are recruiting 12 new homelessness officers by the end of the calendar year. The first seven are going through the recruitment process now and should be taking on cases by the end of April.

“Recruiting all 12 in one go would have been too disruptive so we plan to recruit the additional five later in the year. Once they are all in post, based on  our projections for homelessness over the coming year, we anticipate each officer will have a caseload of 35.”

The same independent report found that Flintshire County Council was spending, on average, £35,000 per room, per year on hotels, B and Bs, holiday lets and caravans to use as emergency accommodation for the homeless.

Currently there are 220 homeless households in emergency accommodation, equating to an estimated bill of £7.7million. Of those 16 are families.

“At the end of April we had 217 homeless households in emergency accommodation,” said Martin. “For our budget forecasting we analysed the previous two  years of placements and trends and estimated that there would be 277 households in emergency accommodation.

“What we’ve seen is through our prevention work, when we get the time and opportunity to work with people to prevent homelessness, and thanks to an increase in our temporary accommodation portfolio from 52 to 91 homes we have been able to avoid that escalation.

“It’s still 220 too many and is a significant cost. But while we are over our budget we are below our projected budget pressure because of better prevention. That will only improve when we have more officers and more housing solutions.”

One new tool the homelessness team will have to use in the coming months is D2 Propco. The specialist temporary accommodation provider is now working with Flintshire County Council to offer temporary housing in the county for households of all sizes.

It is designed to be a more cost-effective alternative to emergency accommodation and out-of-county housing.

The authority also offers a pathway out of homelessness through its policy of nominating 50% of homeless households for social housing allocations, helping people get back into the rental market quickly.

By Alec Doyle – Local Democracy Reporter