The mythical world of exempt "supported" housing
Henry Smith of Aitch Group and his charitable endeavours helping the homeless in Deptford, Tottenham and beyond
There’s an article on the BBC News website this week (where I get all my news), about supported housing and its terrible conditions, due to the lack of regulation.
It’s a hard thing to perhaps get one’s head around; that housing for people that may need support is not actually regulated. But perhaps it is not so hard to understand, in the sense that Cameron/Osborne’s noble war on Quangos et al, (ie letting homes become infested with mould, notwithstanding Grenfell and everything else), has perhaps allowed our own internal standards to slip.
So yes perhaps not such a hard thing to get your head around. I remain struck by stories that seem increasingly commonplace these days. People who are institutionalised from a young age, and then mysteriously start to incur chronic health conditions, and subsequently lifelong institutionalisation. It’s almost as if we can sometimes predict human behaviour (but lucky for me I am no fan of revolutionary dialectics and seek comfort in the idea that most of the time, bad things happen to bad people.)
I mean if you’re going to self-medicate what do you expect? Some people just don’t want to be helped!
The myth and merry-go-round of property development
I have some experiences working with people in exempt “supported” housing. The above photo being one. Doing a search on Companies House, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the same names keep popping up in the merry-go-round mythical world, that is the exempt supported accommodation business.
I’m sure it is also just a coincidence that on a re-google of the company (today) that certainly used to own the above property, it is no longer clear whether they still own it.
This “Aitch Group”, however, do run somewhere else! Vive Living, where google informed me has 83 tenants, recently served with an eviction notice. This reddit sums some of it up, but it is very unfair to my mind, to imply that Henry Smith is involved in something sinister. He has devoted his life to housing the homeless and vulnerable!
Henry Smith, according to himself, is very “passionate” about East London. Moreover, when judging by his commitment to charitable endeavours (read on for more), I’m convinced that to help him sleep at night, he is balancing the awful burden of evicting 83 people from their homes, with his real passion (second to East London I suppose); helping the homeless.
My theory, and I could be wrong, is that Vive Living in Deptford is being converted to exempt supported housing. I mean why else would he own so much high yield property in places that so many London boroughs dump refer their “non-priority” homeless?
What is (exempt) supported housing?
There is some genuine “supported” housing still existing, but it is increasingly difficult to get. So one could argue that actually most people defined as “homeless” or with “support needs”, are these days put in exempt supported housing instead.
But the truth is, it is not tracked. So we don’t know. What I do know, is that usually the “non-priority homeless” get placed in it. I’m not too sure what “non-priority” means in practice, but in theory it usually means someone who is judged to be relatively “normal”, (which is never a slippery slope). In practice, I have often observed it is when someone manages to not fall over too soon during their “Move Around” assessment with the Department of Work and Pensions.
Much of supported housing, is actually tax-exempt housing. All of “exempt” is. It’s actually a winner if you’re a landlord, as Mr Henry Smith explains.
But that is not the reason he is doing it. To quote;
“Charity is something that I’ve always written cheques for”.
I’m glad that our free society allows for people like Henry Smith to acquire property that can be converted to social, sorry I mis-typed… “supported” housing. I’m also glad that these landlords are exempt from Housing Benefit regulations that limit local housing allowance levels.
Essentially the council pays these people to provide supported housing for people, via the very progressive housing benefit system.
“We have a responsibility with people’s money”. Smith says. It’s interesting because you would think that there might be at least some transparency to it, seeing as this is all subsidised by the taxpayer (and rightly so, seeing as Smith is literally housing the homeless - just perhaps not the people he is making homeless).
Strangely enough, there isn’t any transparency at all. And that is saying a lot, as those of you who have ever attempted an FOI to a local council, will know. I mean even the GLA don’t know how much they spend on subsidising private landlords, who are housing people with a variety of long-term issues.
Nor do London boroughs seem to track data on how many unhoused people are offered this kind of accomodation. It’s lucky I’m very patriotic about the Great British welfare state and trust them implicitly, I’m sure we don’t need to measure or track anything. (Everything bad is due to Tory cuts anyway, we just need to throw more money at it all.)
What is (exempt) supported housing?
I’ll try again to explain because I feel my first attempt may have failed.
It is;
housing provided for people who are “in the system”, ie have some kind of support need, may be homeless, recently out of hospital/prison. to summarise “in the shit” so to speak
most of, if not all of the rent/service charges are covered by housing benefit
these charges are ALL invested back into the services which provide highly trained and highly paid support workers to sit at a desk, usually in a converted police station/elder people’s home/sometimes prison probably
people lucky enough to get housed there, can get up to one hour a week of support! wow thank you henry
there is obviously zero data on this but I can predict attendance at these support meetings is near to 0% (some people just don’t want to be helped)
food is often provided communally. oven chips is one common delicacy. complain about the food at your peril, as henry’s mates usually run the food
it is always (in principle) a last resort within the homelessness pathway, as obviously local authorities would rather house people in places that are regulated and have at least some essence of beauty (it’s almost as if people having tough lives deserve at least nice surroundings, which i can only assume is why mr smith is renovating in Deptford)
buildings are usually renovated into separate units (sometimes just plasterboard) which allows for more £ to be reinvested back to helping the homeless
bodies remain in rooms sometimes for days. often residents themselves notice the bodies first, but then I suppose when the walls are often plasterboard, smells can travel
if you go on Companies House, you’ll often see that these properties are all run by either a property developer and their mates, or by the same family (obviously the last thing I’d want is to be accused of racism, so I will happily delete this one if it will potentially cancel me).
So what are the benefits?
a) If you’re “non-priority” homeless
I can’t really answer this. I’m not sure how I would feel if my local authority called me “non-priority”. As someone that suffers with diagnosed “imposter syndrome”, I guess it might cause me to question the inner depths of my being. I’d probably revert to Keats or Shelley who would tell me it doesn’t matter what labels the state tries to put on me, just as long as I can revel in the beauty of the smell of freshly cut grass. (But for that, I would need the windows to open without freezing to death, which can be a game of pot luck in the exempt housing game).
b) If you’re a Landlord
You can basically buy some property, convert it, or not convert it but let it accrue in value by doing next to nothing, and then when you feel like you have the energy, agree a deal with the local authority to provide housing for those deemed “non-priority”. (Usually they’ll bite your hand off, tldr: housing crisis).
It’s a great way for Landlords to really give something back, aside from to quote Henry Smith, simply writing a cheque. In choosing not to write a cheque, but to instead invest in property, he really outdid himself. I hope this serves as a reminder that landlords are not all bad people. And this was how I first came to know Mr Smith, via some of his tenants in this place.
There is an odd thing about this public discourse though. The BBC covered exempt accommodation two years ago, but it didn’t name any of the landlords directly. How are they meant to inspire if we don’t know their names?
Henry Smith is only one of many, and his 112 appointments is very reassuring. I’m glad my tax money is going directly to him! I’d rather that, then to an inefficient local authority.
One name does keep coming up however! Vicky McDermott, in a new position at Newcastle. McDermott has been busy over the past years doing FOIs to local authorities on the practice and getting little back. So perhaps that can serve as some encouragement, Lord knows we need it, especially at this time of year.
I suspect we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of the horrors in this kind of housing. Tenants stuck in the homelessness system fear eviction if they speak out, seeing as groups like Aitch Group are a core component of homelessness pathways. Whichever way you look at it, people like Henry Smith are laughing all the way home from HM Treasury.
You may think a streetlink referral is a step in the right direction in helping someone off the streets, and sometimes it may well be. But in the dysfunctional homelessness system, someone can go from being relatively carefree on the streets of London to being tied to a rock, forced to eat their own liver.1 Promethean ambition comes at a cost, especially when you are without a home.
http://www.change.org/haltsection21
I can only assume Aeschylus had experience of ancient Greek homelessness pathways and that is why he specialised in tragedy.