Supporter Blog – Big officer audience for homelessness update

Homelessness and housing officers from across the country tuned in to Locata’s National Users Group (NUG) meeting last month.

More than 350 officers registered for the webinar to hear Andy Gale, one of the country’s top housing experts, set out the challenges facing homelessness teams in 2022. He highlighted and discussed four key issues:

1. The need for a new model for recruiting and training staff.
2. The need to adopt a new approach to casework in order to manage rising applications and the risk of unsustainable caseloads and case backlogs, caused by rising rents, rising fuel costs and “pent up” demand post Covid.
3. The need to “reboot” prevention models to respond to the reality of rising applications and limited resources
4. Deciding how to deliver Housing Options Services post Covid

He also set out a series of caselaw updates that homelessness officers need to be aware of and highlighted several potential areas for legal challenge.

He announced at the meeting that he had developed a free Affordability Assessment Toolkit based on the Samuels and Paley court judgments.

Locata helped convert this into Microsoft Excel software and has distributed it widely. So far, it has been downloaded more than 400 times by homelessness officers.

The toolkit has been designed so that it can be used for:

• Assessing whether an applicant is homeless where the claim is the applicant cannot afford their rent
• Assessing whether any offer of Temporary Accommodation or an offer of private rented accommodation made to end a prevention, relief or main duty is suitable based on being affordable
• Assessing whether an applicant is intentionally homeless or not, where the question to be assessed is could afford to pay their rent and other reasonable expenditure

The Affordability Assessment Toolkit can still be downloaded for free from the Locata website. Follow this link.

A full recording of the webinar is also available at this link.

Additional resources from the webinar, such as downloadable pdfs of the presentations and written responses to the Questions & Answers sessions, can be found at this link.