Homelessness prevention by South Yorkshire Housing Association

Person-centred housing management, minimising evictions and abandonments

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The context

Plans to end social housing evictions into homelessness are gaining traction. In 2019, the Welsh Government agreed social landlords could raise annual rent by CPI+1% for five years, provided they meet extra conditions. One of those was to deliver on a new agreement not to ‘evict into homelessness’. In 2016, a group of English Housing Associations pledged to do more to end homelessness by signing up to nine commitments. One of those is not to ‘evict into homelessness’. The group, known as Homes for Cathy (HfC), now has 116 member landlords.

Whilst eviction rightly attracts attention, there is perhaps less focus on abandonments, which often also lead to homelessness. The number of social homes abandoned annually in Scotland far exceeds that of evictions (3,380 against 1,866, in 2019-20). Focusing on eviction in isolation risks neglecting trends of increased abandonment in some landlords, and the interaction between these forms of tenancy failure. SYHA (a founding member of HfC) bucks the trend through its ambition to end both.

The intervention

SYHA manages over 5,200 general needs homes in the Sheffield area. Their longstanding approach to tenancy sustainment twins close data monitoring and review with creating a culture where staff are empowered to get to know their tenants as people, and do the best for them. SYHA examines all evictions and abandonments to establish learning points. They ask if they could have intervened earlier, or differently. From this, they found many abandonments, like evictions, were driven by rent arrears.

To reduce arrears-related problems, SYHA gave staff the ability to apply rent procedures more flexibly, to respond to tenant circumstances. They introduced (optional) furnished tenancies with floor coverings (added to service charge, and eligible for Housing Benefit), recognising the role furniture plays in creating a sustainable home as well as the furniture poverty trap some tenants find themselves in.

SYHA highlights the impact of the ‘first contact’: when people get in touch for help and don’t get a good first response, they often won’t come forward again. As tenants may interact with different parts of the landlord at different points in a tenancy, any member of staff may be their ‘first contact’ about a problem. Staff training prioritises the building of relationships over completing transactions with tenants, who fundamentally need to know of their landlord: can I trust you? do you care? are you committed?

The outcome

SYHA has reduced evictions and abandonments year on year from 50 in 2014-15, to just 12 in 2019-20. In the pandemic year, only three tenancies failed. This hasn’t come at the expense of rent performance: SYHA’s arrears % shows a trend of decline from 6.3% in 2007 to 2.2% today. Their pre-pandemic tenancy failure rate was 0.2%. To put this in a Scottish context, the average tenancy failure rate for landlords with over 1,000 homes was 0.9% in 2019-20, with just one general needs landlord under 0.2%.

Since 2015, SYHA has also monitored average tenancy length, reviewing tenancy ‘ends’ to establish if these represent ‘natural turnover’ (including positive moves due to a change in circumstances, or a tenant passing away), or a scenario where SYHA might have done more to support the tenancy. Average tenancy length in 2015 was 4.5 years, and is now above 6 years.

Key insights

• consider abandonment as well as evictions for a broader picture of sustainment
• a person-centred approach to reducing tenancy failure is cost effective for landlords
• ‘the Board need to be on board’: top down interest is crucial in framing the right questions and metrics - not ‘where are we on arrears?’ but ‘how many people have we evicted?’

Find out more…

Simon Young, Head of Landlord Services
s.young2@syha.co.uk