Adults

The overarching aim of the Supporting People strategy is to ensure that the Supporting People 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.

Identified priorities for Supporting People

The following have been identified as priorities in Medway to ensure that the programme meets those in greatest need of housing-related support in the area:

• Change in emphasis from high needs to medium to low needs services.
• Need to develop a greater range of more flexible services to meet local demands, particularly floating and outreach support services for a range of client groups and for those who would otherwise be at risk of losing their tenancy.
• Gaps have been identified in the area of provision for young people with challenging behaviour. Our aim will be to provide adequate support to this client group at an early stage.
• Drugs and alcohol are a problem in Medway affecting several client groups, but particularly young people. Our aim will be to develop and implement effective ways of dealing with this issue.
• Need to ensure that services are appropriately funded and joint funding initiatives and partnerships put in place to ensure effective and holistic service delivery.
• Developing robust, evidence based needs, information and contract monitoring tools will be priority in order to ensure effective delivery of the programme.

Actions arising from these priorities are all included in the Key strategic objectives and outcomes. (appendix 3)

Intended spend and unit provision per client group

The focus of the strategy is to enable more people to live independently with or without support. In order to facilitate this, a change in emphasis of Supporting People funding from the high levels of support to medium and low will be needed. The Supporting People Grant from central government will reduce year on year. It is therefore essential that we use our resources to the greatest effect.

Strategic objectives 1 and 2 describe how Supporting People with work in partnership with health, social services and other statutory agencies to ensure that individuals needs are accurately assessed and appropriately funded. This may include top up funding to pay for services where there is currently support of over 16 hours per person per week which is not SP eligible.

In addition these agencies will consider injecting further funds on an accumulating basis to 2009/10. This will be directed at medium and low support services. The intention will be to increase the number of people supported in the community thereby lessening the dependency on residential and other institutional care.

Apart from the strategic and philosophical relevance to this decision, the financial basis has been invest to save. We anticipate that benefits deriving from this strategy will encourage these agencies and others to invest further.

We would hope to see further increases in funding through the five-year period as the benefits of our programme become clear.

We cannot accurately predict the level of increased funds we will attract from this invest to save policy. In addition work on service reviews and value for money is still at an early stage and increased income from these initiatives is unknown. For these reasons we have not yet fully predicted how we will meet our overall priorities. However, Table 2 below is based on our current knowledge of the programme. This table does not take into account the year on year cuts by the ODPM and is purely based on the contracts currently in place. The effective implementation of this strategy will therefore influence this table considerably.

                                                                                                                                Intended annual expenditure (£)

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