Mental Health in social housing needs addressing

Deborah Stainforth, Community Engagement Officer at Abode Living writes about Mental Health in Social Housing:

Social housing across the UK provides accommodation for some of the country's most vulnerable tenants. Whether based in accommodation provided by Housing Associations, Private Landlords or Institutional Investors, it is this segment of the population that are most at risk. 

Yet all too often, once off the waiting list and placed in accommodation, these people get forgotten about. Ongoing social work is sometimes not a priority and these people find themselves in a new place - and sometimes location too - to live, often without a support system around them. 

Many have children but no support or respite, particularly before school and caring full time for a child in social housing can be tough, particularly without nursery or Early Years support. (In an earlier column for Inside Housing I spoke about how we are addressing the latter).

At Abode Living we see how overwhelming and daunting it can be for new (and existing) tenants and we provide an engagement programme to integrate people into their new community. This won't be the case for the majority of other forms of accommodation and the 'check ins' provided by Local Authorities will also vary, that's the nature of the strain on resources within the LAs across the country. 

Thus we believe much more needs to be done both to integrate tenants in their accommodation and to provide ongoing mental healthcare for this vulnerable group of people to ensure their welfare is being looked at.

We have just embarked on an investment programme into exactly this across our communities in Bristol and Crawley, partnering with local providers to ensure that there are regular touchpoints with mental health professionals. We are also training our community engagement officers in mental health so that there is on the ground support available too. It will be long-term investment and will take time to make a difference but to date early feedback has been good.

It's important that this is available on site - a large proportion of our tenants cannot drive and find it difficult to access public transport for various reasons. And many don’t ask for help, even when they need it most. If we bring mental health services to our communities, the take up is much greater and thus difficult to miss, which means regular, high quality one to one, group sessions and workshops to cater for a variety of people. It also means our professionals can be better informed and provide crucial support in between sessions and helps those struggling to know where to seek help outside of the arranged times and, perhaps most importantly, have more confidence to do so as they are more familiar with talking.

According to the charity Mind in research conducted in 2018, approximately 1 in 3 people in social housing have a mental health condition and that 43% of those reporting a mental health condition in social hosing felt their condition was deteriorating where they currently live. Assuming these figures haven’t risen which, combined with the global pandemic, affordability crisis and increase in social housing demand vs lack of quality accommodation I think it’s safe to assume they will have, then that could mean over 230 of our 700 tenants are affected. Our ultimate aim as a provider of social housing is to provide better lives for people in need. While many of our services include physical, educational and community support to adults and families in our developments, mental health is a crucial part of the programme and simply cannot be overlooked.

We recognise that we are in a fortunate position to be able to offer services like this ourselves because we are a private investor and have taken this decision ourselves to place our own funding for the good of our tenants. Many others won't have the finances to do this. But it's something that needs looking at large scale from a public funding point of view too - mental health is in crisis in the UK and this is an obvious and crucial place to start.