Making housing advice accessible for older people

features of accessible advice for older people

To be effective, advice services need to take a different approach to older people. They need to reach out to them, to have time to encourage and build a relationship and to be holistic in their approach. Poverty and debt and housing issues are so intertwined for many older people that it is important to offer money advice in conjunction with housing advice.

Enhanced housing options

Enhanced Housing Option is the name given to the approach the government is encouraging in local authorities to take to the prevention of homelessness in a more holistic way and with a broader outlook about what can be offered instead of social housing. Homeless Links pages on rough sleeping  have details of some of the local authorities promoting best practice in preventing and tackling rough sleeping through housing options services. The publication Expanding Choice, Addressing Need  promotes local authories that have put this approach in place and expands on the principles behind the approach:

• Innovation
• Personalisation
• Empowerment
• Inclusiveness
• Holism
• Partnership working
• Working with the grain of the Local Area Agreement
• Capturing wider resources
• Cross-boundary working

These principles fit with the features discussed of making housing advice accessible to older people and if put in place can ensure that people approaching the housing department for advice will be listened to and not put off at the first hurdle.

It appears that some local authorities though still operate unacceptable gate-keeping. This approach to homelessness prevention has been confirmed as still in operation by a mystery shopping exercise carried out by Crisis looking at what happens to single people who become homeless and approach their local authority for help. The approach of screening people out as not eligible rather than looking at all the options for offering assistance is  likely to be particularly off putting for older people who are often less assertive and less aware of their rights and need more encouragement to seek help.  

The Help the Aged report Housing Advice and Older People had a number of findings relevant to making housing advice accessible for the older generation which are confirmed by findings from other projects reaching out to older people.

Targeted service

Evidence from benefit take-up campaigns and housing advice is that advice services specifically targeted at older people are much more likely to reach them. A service in a London borough with a 10% older population had 1% of it's cleint group being older people before a specialist service was established, three years later 8% of it's clients were older.

Location of advice

Older people have limited awareness of advice agencies and usually think of all-age services such as Shelter, Citizens Advice Bureaux and law centres as being for younger people. This is particularly so in the case of housing issues, due to the emphasis placed by the media on young homeless people. Older people are less likely to attend office appointments or use telephone help lines or web based servcies, preferring home visits or face to face contact through existing links such as community groups. This is backed up by the Legal Services Commission research 'Putting Advice Where the Need Is' which found that the most disadvantaged people welcome money advice in locations they are familiar with, such as housing offices, community centres and prisons. Older people are more likely to turn for advice to people with whom they already have a trusting relationship e.g. health professionals.

An extensive evaluation for the DWP of the Partnership fund  stresses the importance of locating the advice in the right place. This fund formed part of the Government’s strategy to ensure that pensioners claim the benefits they are entitled to and access the services they require and aimed to give particular attention to the ‘hard-to-reach’, such as older people with disabilities, carers, people from ethnic minorities and those who live in rural areas. 

Community outreach was an important aspect of how the projects operated in a whole range of places, community centre, lunch clubs, health centres, places of worship, supermarkets, sheltered schemes, libraries and leisure centres. The environment is familiar and non-threatening meaning information and support could be provided immediately with later follow up if necessary. This element is particularly important for more marginalised people who are likely to be out of touch with services.

One stop service

It is generally accepted that people seeking advice are lost in the signposting process and more people are lost the greater the number of steps a person has to take between asking for advice and getting to the place that can give them the right advice. This is likely to be particularly true of older people who will have less mobility and therefore less capacity to pound the streets seeking the advice they need.

Being on the side of the older person

Unlike many younger people older people can be reluctant to assert their rights, so a gate-keeping approach that puts up barriers and stresses eligibility criteria can alienate older people. The evaluation of the Partnership fund found that the key barrier seen as important by staff was overcoming shame about claiming benefits and social care assistance. There were two key methods that project staff utilised in order to assess the older person’s circumstances and requirements. Underpinning both was that they gave customers the message that the staff, and the Partnership Fund project were on their side.

The Help the Aged report states that there is a reluctance to use local authority-based services, particularly where people have already experienced problems (e.g. with Housing Benefit claims). People from vulnerable or minority groups are especially likely to fear prejudice and misconceptions from mainstream services.

AIMS (Advice‚ Information and Mediation Service) is an impartial service for people living or working in private retirement or sheltered housing run by Age UK. The case studies show how mediation can help to prevent the break down of a relationship between a housing provider and a tenant.

Time and a trusting relationship

There is a widespread need for emotional support and sometimes advocacy, and for older people to develop a trusting relationship with advisers.This requires time and sensitivity. Gate-keeping staff  often lack the time, skill or knowledge to tease out the true nature of the problem. It is likely to take some time to get to the bottom of the problem; the more vulnerable or marginalised the older person, the more time and skill is needed to develop their confidence and build a relationship. A referral for something simple can uncover multiple problems. Older people may also need to take things more slowly, have brought in the wrong paperwork  and need a patient approach to uncovering the issues. This does not fit easily with a culture where services are contracted to provide a very limited number of minutes of advice per client or where the first port of call is via a call centre.

Flexibility and a person-centred approach  

One of the conclusions of the evaluation of the Partnership fund  is that there is no one right way of working with older people. So many of the ways of targeting and engaging customers uncovered by the evaluation stress the importance of a flexible responsive approach that meets the unique needs of each individual older person. They highlight the importance of having a ‘tool-kit’ of resources for reaching out to and helping older people.

'These ways of working are resource intensive, again underpinning the importance of adequate levels of funding and the effective deployment of resources. The time taken to implement them effectively should not be underestimated. But there is evidence to suggest that the outlay of resources in the short term could off-set the need to expend other resources in the future. If a project worker can develop trust and a rapport with an older person, they may overcome barriers that might takea range of other services far greater resources to overcome on multiple occasions if at all.'

 The page on 'harder to reach' groups included some of appproaches that might help in reaching LGBT older people, the importance of  culturally appropriate services for different BME groups and awareness of issues like literacy difficulties and learning dificulties. This underpins the need for a range of approaches.

Putting these principles in place will help to make housing advice accessible to the range of groups that may potentially become homeless.

 The next page explores housing support services for older people