Adults

What is a Supporting People Strategy?

The Supporting People (SP) programme has introduced a new strategic planning framework for housing-related support services. For the first time the link between support and tenure has been broken enabling a flexible approach to the delivery of support. Medway Council is now able to identify the cost of provision and plan and monitor support services to vulnerable people.

Our strategy will focus on the following vulnerable client groups in Medway:

• older people;
• people with learning disabilities;
• people with physical and sensory disability including those leaving hospital;
• teenage parents;
• young Offenders;
• families with support needs;
• young people leaving care;
• sex workers;
• travellers;
• asylum seekers;
• people at risk of homelessness;
• people with drug and alcohol dependency;
• people with mental health problems;
• women fleeing domestic violence;
• people previously imprisoned or at risk of offending.

This strategy takes account of the arrangements that we have in place to support these groups and sets out our five-year programme to develop services which meet their needs and aspirations.

The overarching aim of the SP strategy will be to ensure that the SP Grant in Medway is used to provide housing-related support services that are sustainable, co-ordinated and cost effective. The core aim of such services should be help service users to successfully maintain independent living, to enable growing independence and to “move on”.

Why are we producing a strategy?

We recognise that services have developed in an ad-hoc manner in the past, but that we now need to co-ordinate our work with voluntary sector partners to tailor local services to meet local need with greater precision than in the past. We can no longer rely on anecdotal evidence and services based on perceived need and must support our strategy with hard data to ensure that our budget is spent effectively.

Our strategy will involve a wide range of voluntary and private sector organisations, council departments, and an assessment of a broad range of need. This will require careful planning, co-ordination and clarity in terms of what we are setting out to achieve and how we will achieve it.

Our strategy will establish a long-term, effective, needs-driven plan.

Wider strategic context

There are a number of national strategic aims in the provision of services to vulnerable people and these are addressed in a range of policy documents and legislation. SP aims to develop these themes as the foundations for the programme over the next five years at national and local level. Key national themes include:

• the “preventative” agenda;
• promoting and sustaining independence;
• developing effective partnerships;
• planned approaches to involving and consulting service users;
• continuously improving services via assessment and monitoring;
• gaps in provision are addressed via effective commissioning;
• value for money and cost effective use of resources.

The full range of national aims from key government documents and their linkage with the SP strategy are summarised in appendix 5.

The local strategic agenda

The council has a clear strategic vision for Medway and has set out to create an urban renaissance. The council’s intention is that urban renaissance will not be achieved at the expense of the existing community, e.g. by ensuring that local people benefit from educational and employment opportunities and improvements in the local economy.  

These aims focus around the Thames Gateway development and the development of the University of East Kent. It is anticipated that the population in Medway will increase from 250,000 to 300,000 over a 10 to 20-year period and Medway must be able to support the more vulnerable members of this growing community.

Medway Council has adopted six core values and several of these integrate with the SP mission:

• promoting physical, social and economic regeneration;
• improving the environment;
• realising everyone’s potential;
• equal opportunities and access;
• fostering citizenship;
• giving value for money.

Medway’s SP Strategy is linked to a number of existing strategies prepared by the Council and its partner organisations. Appendix 5 sets out the strategic links between existing strategies and the SP strategy.

Key local themes include:

• providing choice in housing and accommodation packages;
• making fair and effective use of social housing;
• meeting support needs;
• better access to health care;
• prevention.

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