Commonweal strikes seven partnerships for innovative feasibility studies
Commonweal Housing has partnered with seven front-line organisations as part of its 2021 Call for New Ideas, the charity’s partnership programme. It has agreed to support and fund the feasibility studies to test the suitability of new innovative models that seek housing-based solutions to social injustices. The new partners are: Homelessness organisation, C4WS Irish Methodist…
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Commonweal’s Call for New Ideas has CLOSED – new partners announced soon
The deadline for applications to Commonweal Housing’s Call for New Ideas 2021 has now passed. We want to say a massive thank you to all of you who applied and got in touch. We have been blown away by the number and quality of applications that we have received this year. We are currently in…
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SOLUTIONS TO EXEMPT ACCOMMODATION: Additional powers for councils to clamp down on high rents and poor service according to LGA
Local councils could hold the key to a better regulated, cost-controlled exempt accommodation sector, if offered greater powers according to Cllr James Jamieson, Chair of the Local Government Association. Cllr Jamieson told the audience at Commonweal Housing’s fifth and final Experts on Exempt webinar, So What Next? Solutions and Challenges, that additional powers will help…
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POSITIVE INVESTORS MODEL: Exempt accommodation needs “value-driven” approach to stem the “Wild West gold rush”
The exempt accommodation sector has been exploited by some investors, creating “corrupt structures” that allow providers to “maximise profits at the expense of people with additional needs”, exempt accommodation expert and author Michael Patterson said. Patterson spoke at Commonweal Housing’s fourth webinar in its Experts on Exempt series, making the case for a “values-driven approach”.…
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REGULATION AND CHARTER OF RIGHTS: exempt regulation “from another age” says RSH
Regulation covering exempt accommodation is not fit for purpose according to the Regulator for Social Housing (RSH), with Deputy Chief Executive Jonathan Walters believing it “from another age”. Walters told listeners of the third Commonweal Housing webinar on exempt accommodation as part of the Experts on Exempt series that, given much of the legal and…
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REFORM NOT ABOLITION: Vulnerable people are not getting the support that “they deserve for the money that is being paid” but we must “build on the good things” of exempt sector
The government is determined to “drive out the minority of landlords who provide poor-quality accommodation and insufficient support” in the exempt accommodation sector, but concedes that “there are no easy solutions” as Cathy Page, Head of Housing with Care and Support at the newly named Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), laid out…
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