Experiences of moving due to closures of Housing with Care schemes
17 people from 4 local Housing with Care schemes shared their experiences of moving home due to the closure of these schemes.
In 2014, as part of a larger exercise of reviewing services to consider methods of delivery and work within reducing budgets, Coventry City Council’s Cabinet passed a plan for four Housing with Care schemes to be closed.
There were 78 residents in these facilities that would therefore need to move to new homes which met their needs. We tracked the experiences of residents over the course of the process of finding and moving to a new home.
We found that most tenants felt they had enough choice and control generally, in terms of pace the move was going at and feeling able to say ‘no’ if they needed to, but some felt they didn’t have access to enough information to base their choices on.
Our recommendations include:
- Information should be available both face-to-face and in writing to people
- The timeframe for carrying out all assessments/reassessments of all affected tenants/service users in any similar service change should be as short as possible.
- In order to minimise anxiety levels for tenants who are waiting for impending moving dates, it is recommended that no date is issued prior to the new accommodation being signed off as ‘ready to move into’.
- At the beginning of a process such as the closure of a Housing with Care scheme or other service change, service users should be provided with simple written information about the whole process to ensure that they have a good understanding of the journey, including timelines.
Downloads
Read our report and the response from the Council
Tenants’ experiences of changing accommodation due to closures of Housing with Care Schemes
