London CLS Housing procurement figures, thoughts

From HERE.

The table below shows that unless more matter starts are granted than offered then the majority of procurement areas will see a cut in Housing NMS compared to Sep 08 – Aug 09.

In many areas the available Housing NMS to those who don’t provide Family NMS have been severely reduced. 

House isn’t sure what happens if Family providers don’t bid for Housing NMS will those NMS be reallocated? In some areas the Housing NMS available to Family providers are a large proportion of the total available. If they aren’t reallocated then the NMS available in an area would be drastically reduced in many areas.

What House doesn’t know is just how many NMS were originally allocated to providers between Sep 08 – Aug 09 that is because of the NMS clawback the NMS between sep 08 – aug 09 are likely to be less than the NMS which were originally tendered for and therefore the reductions in NMS AVAILABLE to be completed are even greater than the table suggests. House would be quite interested to know the difference in the pre-clawback NMS and the new NMS that being tendered for. House hopes that makes some sense!

House hasn’t done a table for other areas of social welfare law such as debt and benefits but House has noticed that there is quite a large increase in NMS in these areas (again subject to the qualification of the prior paragraph). For example BARNET sees debt and welfare NMS to 450 from 317 and 399 respectively.

House was interested to note the relative difference in Housing Certificated matters. For example in Bexley there were 17 certificates opened and 269 Housing NMS (6.4%). In Lambeth 499 certificates were issued and there were 1521 Housing NMS (32.9%). House would be interested to know the reasons behind such differences. There are many possible reasons, one might be – Could it be that some procurement areas lack advisers capable of identifying and taking matters to certificated work?

PROCUREMENT	SEP 08 -	NEW	NEW	TOTAL	%CHANGE	CERTIFICATED
AREA	AUG 09 NMS	HOUSING	F/H			MATTERS
Barking and Dagenham	CLAC	CLAC	CLAC	CLAC
Barnet	971	820	150	970	-0.01	138
Bexley	269	150	100	250	-7.1	17
Brent	1912	1520	200	1720	-10	137
Bromley	437	260	150	410	-6.2	55
Camden	1877	800	890	1690	-10	448
City of Westminister	1443	600	500	1100	-23.8	312
Croydon	454	350	200	550	21.1	92
Ealing	3041	2350	150	2500	-17.8	323
Enfield	291	190	100	290	-0.4	12
Greenwich	819	550	200	750	-8.5	88
Hackney	3481	2930	500	3430	-1.5	687
Hammersmith & Fulham	1048	550	200	750	-28.5	130
Haringey	1586	880	300	1180	-25.6	260
Harrow	791	540	100	640	-19.1	75
Havering	380	310	150	460	21	22
Hillingdon	784	600	100	700	-10.7	66
Kingston & Richmond	308	280	100	380	23.4	144
Lambeth	1521	850	500	1350	-11.2	499
Lewisham	594	260	200	460	-22.6	145
Merton & Sutton	396	390	100	490	23.7	49
Newham	2596	1940	400	2340	-9.9	304
Redbridge	703	540	100	640	-9	102
Southwark	1462	660	500	1160	-20.7	513
Tower Hamlets	2212	1790	200	1990	-10	189
Waltham Forest	515	380	150	530	2.9	85
Wandsworth	1944	1060	600	1660	-14.6	325

Updated LSC procurement plans

The LSC have today updated their procurement plans for London. More info HERE. Other regions can be found HERE, not all have been updated / published.

It would appear at least from HERE that cuts in New Matter Starts are quite serious.

Poor old Mr Fidler

Soo many things House could say about the name but it was nice to see that the High Court ruled against Mr Fidler who is it seems taking his case off to the Court of Appeal.

In a television interview Mr Fidler thought it was perfect normal for a hay bale dealer to have giant bales covering his entire residence and then remove them 4 years later, apparently.  

I bet he wishes he’d built it under a barn now and didn’t have to remove anything…

Praise, firebomb or something in the middle?

Sometimes House gets too frustrated and angry with things. THIS, reported HERE is one of them. Shoud Mr Beesley, the property developer, be given a slap on the back for cleverly exploiting a loophole in the Law or should his house be razed to the ground whilst he and his family are out developing?

The original refusal can be found here.

Links

House has added two more links, one to the disrepair preaction protocol and another for the excellent Housing Law updates found in LAG.

House doesn’t know if anyone uses the links on the right but there are quite a few and hopefully they are of some use. Any feedback on if they are useful or not would be appreciated.

Sunday night ponder

House has a question.

If you agree to become a tenant on a fixed date and then before that fixed date say you aren’t going to move in (as say you’ve found somewhere else) is the Landlord entitled to the loss of rent you would have paid until he finds another tenant?

SI 2009/3257, Housing Costs

A kindly adviser at Shelter reminded House that the rather thrilling above statutory instument came into effect on 5th January 2009. This Income based JSA claimants can claim support for housing costs for a maximum of two years with short breaks of non claiming not restarting the two years. It doesn’t apply to those in receipt of IB JSA claimants who were entitled to IS or ESA within the 13 week waiting period. The interest rate will remain at 6.08pct for 6 months.

Whilst House was googling the subject there was a link to THIS page which shows how everyone generally get’s confused by this sort of legislation as they aren’t robots.

Factory line advice

Over the last 18 months House has been given ever increasing New Matter Start targets for House’s team to meet.

Today House was doing some file reviews. House noticed that a new adviser wasn’t really tailoring advice that much to the client and could have done some more follow up work, the extra mile that House has been used to doing.

House didn’t really know what to do when faced with this file. House’s targets for the team are due to go up 40 pct in the next few months as the chronic lack of planning by the big bosses means doing the same with less staff. This meant that House thought hrm well at least the client has got passable advice, not bad, just a neat parcel, maybe a bit like a ready meal, fills you up but nothing more. House realised that ironically getting the adviser to do more for the client would sadly be counter-productive when it came to meeting targets.

All rather sad.

Does any other supervisor have any similar experiences?

Housing rough sleepers in the cold

House hopes everyone had a merry Christmas.

Just a quick reminder that if it’s predicated to be below zero for three nights running then in order to avoid the potentially politically damaging problem of people having to step over dead bodies on the way the work the Severe Weather Emergency Provisions mean that the Local Authority should give rough sleepers a place to, er, sleep.

More guidance can be found HERE, including a letter from the CLG to LA’s.

Bogged if House could find it on the CLG’s site.

Best not advertise such things helpful death preventing things House guesses.

Happy Christmas

House wishes everyone a Happy Christmas and New Year.

The LSC wishes the same and says so HERE