Most of the things you spend your money on come with an element of choice. Everything from your car, to your shoes, from your utility supply to your yoghurt. If you decide you don’t like what you’ve bought, you can make the decision to avoid that company in future. There are even competition laws in place to ensure our right to choose remains intact.
Although there are a myriad of housing and support providers across the country, choosing these services is much more tricky. For starters, you need housing provision that meets your needs. If you’re a single person, someone with disabilities or a large family, your choices are already limited. Depending on your local authority, your choice may be further limited by allocations agreements, or a Section 106 that is in place restricting access to housing to people from a certain area. You’ll also have to have the right priority level to even be considered. In these challenging financial times, you may desperately want to move house but feel unable to cover the cost of a moving van and all the stuff that goes with a change of house.
It’s difficult to overcome most of these barriers, especially policies and procedures which are actually intended to make things fair. And that is why it is so important to understand the importance of choice.
When choice is limited, engagement becomes critical.
Having a home, with or without support, is a basic human right. We know it’s the foundation from which we build every other part of our lives; jobs, families, health, security. When the choice people have around such an integral issue in their lives is so restricted, it needs to be the responsibility of housing and support providers to ensure people have as much control over their homes as possible.
Engagement with people making homes in services is the only way to achieve this. While it may not change that primary choice, there are a multitude of other choices people can make. Choices that have the potential to improve the quality of their homes, and therefore, lives.
In this digital age, it’s easy to rely on survey results to get a feel for what people want, but I think we need to do more. We need to be supporting smaller communities to make their own choices, encouraging a new autonomy rather than sticking with the parental models we currently perpetuate.
For example, if you live in a block of flats, chances are that you are paying service charges to cover things like cleaning, gardening, fire safety checks, maintenance, refuse collection etc. If you have a progressive housing provider, it’s likely you’ll have been given the opportunity to be involved in choosing the provider of each service (however your provider might not have the structures in place to do this), but even then, it’s likely your choosing for a whole area, not just your locality. If the service you receive is poor, you can complain but that’s usually as much as you can do. I’ve seen people in these situations and it has been noticeable how quickly rage turns to despondency. That block of flats soon becomes unkempt and uncared for because why should the residents bother if no one else is? One resident I worked with described this type of situation as ‘learned helplessness’. There is no control and no choice.
How to foster engagement in social and supported housing communities
We need to start looking at our communities differently. Applications should focus more on what someone brings to their community; what are their skills, their time constraints, what are they willing to contribute? Rather than enforcing service charges for caring for that community, why not see what the people who live there can offer?
There are some real opportunities for strengths-based service delivery. Could someone take responsibility for checking the fire alarm once per week? Would someone be willing to clean communal areas in exchange for a rent reduction? Could the money currently spend on landscaping services be used to fund a community gardening project. Not only would people have choices and be more involved, but they are much more invested in their community than a company paid by the hour.
I’m not naïve, I know that doing something like this comes with risks and costs. Money saved on procurement and managing services would likely need to be invested into more neighbourhood management to support communities. But if satisfaction and care improves, isn’t that the best reward?
