My Supporting People nightmare

I tend to agree with Gill Brown (11 June, page 28). The original, simple principle of Supporting People – to separate housing money from care and support in benefit payments – was a very good idea. Sadly, by the time it reached the coalface, it had turned into the bureaucratic nightmare I wrote about (4 June, page 23).

As a small housing association, we have to jump through a row of unpaid hoops to collect just some 5% of our income from two different local authorities. We have a contract in which the local authority can pay us what it wants, irrespective of our costs. If we don't sign, we get nothing. We were already economical to benefit our tenants and now we are being penalised for that.

Unlike full supported housing, our funding streams are more of a dribble.

I said in my letter "from sheltered housing's perspective" – and that is the nub of the problem. One size does not fit all.

Our elderly tenants get no benefits from Supporting People, just more administration costs and ever more returns for head office. Does the ODPM really believe that tenants with an average age of 80 want to sit on a health and safety committee to boost our Supporting People review scores?

If I've got "the wrong end of the stick", it is the big administrative one and it is beating small sheltered housing associations to death with blunt paperwork.