Issue - meetings

[Report of the Director for Housing &Growth . To be introduced by the Cabinet Member for Housing and Estate Renewal.]

To carry out the conversion of the now vacant Adult Day Care Centre and Kurdish Community Centre at Birkbeck Lodge into temporary accommodation units.

The Cabinet Member for Housing and Estate Renewal introduced the report, which sought approval for the Council to carry out the conversion of the now vacant Adult Day Care Centre and Kurdish Community Centre at Birkbeck Lodge into emergency accommodation units.

In introducing the report, the Cabinet Member highlighted the following issues:

·         The Council had a duty to house homeless families where they found themselves in situations where they required emergency accommodation.

·         Emergency accommodation was the most expensive form of temporary accommodation provided by the Council and often-involved expensive nightly rates being paid by the Council.

·         Historically, there had been a heavy reliance on use of B&B accommodation, which was often of poor quality.

·         The Council was seeking to provide all emergency accommodation within the borough in-house. There already existed two converted properties for use as emergency accommodation (Broadwater lodge, Whitehall lodge).

·         This would be the third conversion of premises to provide emergency accommodation to families in the borough and an important new design feature was that all bedrooms would have an en -suite bathroom. There would be no shared bathroom facilities at the premises. All forms of future emergency accommodation would take into account this new requirement. There would still be communal areas, such as the kitchens to allow as many units of accommodation as possible.

• Homeless families should only be in emergency accommodation for up to 12 weeks but the Cabinet Member recognised in certain circumstances, this was longer. This period allowed the Council to assess whether it had an obligation to provide housing duty for them.
• A lot of emergency accommodation providers were not to a high standard and could continue in this low quality model due a demand in their services.

The Cabinet Member closed her introduction by stating the impact on children who found themselves in emergency accommodation could be immensely damaging and Cabinet should do all it can to improve the quality of emergency accommodation.

Following questions from Cllr Brabazon, Cllr Hearn, Cllr Mark Blake and Cllr Cawley-Harrison, it was noted that:

• There would be a member of staff on site 24/7. This was important as homeless families might be vulnerable and support was necessary.

• The purpose of the report was for a decision to be made to approve the capital investment required for work on the conversion of Birkbeck Lodge into emergency accommodation, not to release the revenue budget for managing it. The running cost budget would be met from the housing benefit income of families at the emergency accommodation and, because of the 24/7 support, extra cover to the costs might be provided from some of the larger lodges that have a better economy of scale. Savings on emergency accommodation were highlighted at point 8.4 of the report.
• Regarding accessibility, all rooms were on the ground floor and would be step free and wheelchair accessible.
• The creation of Birkbeck Lodge will increase the Haringey’s capacity to keep households within the borough during the critical first few weeks.
• It was  ...  view the full minutes text for item 99