Issue - meetings

(Assistant Director - Housing PSR) To consider the attached report (FPM-023-2016/17).

The Assistant Director (Private Sector Housing and Community Support), L Swan, presented a report on the funding for Caring and Repairing in Epping Forest (C.A.R.E).

The Disabled Facilities Grants (DFGs) were statutory, means-tested grants of up to £30,000 to provide adaptations in the homes of disabled owner-occupiers and private tenants to maintain independent living in the community. Expenditure on DFGs in 2016/17 was expected to be £630,000 and came from the General Fund, through the Government to Essex County Council (ECC) via the Better Care Fund (BCF) alongside a contribution from EFDC.  In 2016/17 the amounts allocated were £665,000 from the BCF and £120,000 from EFDC. These services were provided through the Council’s in-house Home Improvement Agency (HIA), C.A.R.E. (Caring and Repairing in Epping Forest). ECC currently provided funding of £51,000 a year for C.A.R.E. but had recently announced that this funding would stop in April 2017. Therefore, in order to continue to provide this service it was recommended that £51,000 of the BCF (which was likely to be in excess of £665,000 in 2017/18) was ‘top-sliced’ in 2017/18 to meet the funding shortfall.

The Cabinet Committee were in favour of enabling residents to stay within their own homes and therefore supported the recommendations.

Recommended: 

1.         That £51,000 be top-sliced from the Government’s Better Care Fund (BCF) contribution towards support for applicants of Disabled Facilities Grants (DFGs) from 2017/18; and

Resolved:

2.         That the capital allocation for Disabled Facilities Grants continues to be monitored by Members on a quarterly basis with specific reference to the viability of this arrangement from 2017/18 onwards.

Reasons for the Decision:

C.A.R.E. provides services to support older people and people with disabilities to maintain independent living in the community.  A large part of the team’s work was to help people with disabilities to apply for adaptations to their homes.  Historic evidence was that if people were not supported to apply for the help they needed, they would do without the adaptations and risk ending up in the care service or in hospital.

The BCF was set up in 2014 in order to provide ‘the most vulnerable people in our society with a fully integrated health and social care service, resulting in an improved experience and better quality of life’.  The funding that the Council expected to receive from ECC in April 2017, added to the £120,000 DFG funding that the Council had already agreed for 2017/18, was likely to be more than £785,000 which would be more than adequate to meet the need for DFGs and the £51,000 funding shortfall.  As the BCF allocation for future years was not known at present (although it was likely to be at least as much if not more than the current allocation), consideration would need to be given in the monitoring of Capital budgets as to whether this arrangement should continue in future years.

Options Considered and Rejected:

1.            The main alternative option to the one proposed would be to raise the fees charged to DFG applicants.  ...  view the full minutes text for item 41