The overall Supporting People budget is to shrink from £1.816bn to £1.801bn in 2004/05. This lower figure will be given to local authorities which will then have to save a total of £45m – the equivalent of 2.5% of their Supporting People budgets for 2004/05.
No council is expected to have to save more than £800,000 in total, however.
More than half of the council savings are to be used by the ODPM to pay for schemes that were built in 2003/04 but did not receive full operational funding.
The review revealed that 30 councils have high unit costs. Several of these will have their inspections brought forward to find out if this contributed to pushing up Supported People spending. It also found that those councils' spending accounted for almost a third of the entire Supporting People fund and almost half of the most expensive units.
Local authorities contacted by Housing Today said they would not impose blanket cuts but would scale back on selected services.
There has been nervousness in the sector about these schemes so it is important we bring them into the fund
Terrie Alafat, Homelessness Directorate
Terrie Alafat, head of the Homelessness Directorate which runs Supporting People, said the diversion of funds was good news for those schemes that had not received sufficient operational back-up.
"There has been some nervousness in the sector about these schemes so it is important we bring them into the fund," she said.
The programme needed to achieve value for money, but change must be managed to protect service users and small organisations, she added.
The review was commissioned in October after the cost of Supporting People rocketed from £1.4bn to £1.8bn and it was suspected that the scheme was paying for expensive schemes providing a high level of care, normally funded by social services. The review was led by Eugene Sullivan, head of public sector services at accountant Robson Rhodes.
Source
Housing Today
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