Supporting People salaries

The “inflation-busting” salary increases make interesting reading (5 March, page 26). I have not yet noticed any comment about the National Housing Federation’s suggestion that Supporting People service providers inform staff that their organisations will not be able to keep salaries in line with inflation for the foreseeable future (The Independent Review of the Supporting People Programme part 1, page 3).

This would largely affect those such as sheltered housing wardens who are already among the lowest paid in the sector, and is ironic as Supporting People is supposed to be about such staff becoming “more professional”. Perhaps some of the (no doubt highly paid) people who dreamed up Supporting People in the first place might like to take a salary cut, not to mention the consultants who recently recommended these “efficiency savings”.

Significant “efficiency savings” could be made simply by taking sheltered housing out of Supporting People and paying “service users” their support charge as part of housing benefit, as was done previously. The amount of benefit paid would be the same, but the saving on admin could be considerable.