We have knowledge and experience in many older and disabled peoples' housing areas including the following.
Home improvement agencies
Options appraisals
Business planning
Tender support
Commissioning support
Handyperson services
Disabled Facilities Grants
Older people
The personalisation agenda
Home improvement agencies
Options appraisals
Our options appraisals provide commissioners with recommendations on how to best deliver home improvement agency (HIA) services. We have undertaken many options appraisals, particularly in the home improvement agency sector in two-tier local authorities. We do not have a ‘one size fits all' approach - instead, we tailor our research to your individual requirements. Using tried and tested approaches, our reports provide incisive and important recommendations to inform future development.
Business planning
Our business planning approach for HIAs is simple.
Review where the HIA is at that point in time. This could potentially also include an HIA Quality Mark Assessment.
Undertake a policy and delivery profile for the area.
Research competition.
Outline opportunities for the service.
Produce an action plan.
Tender support
Our knowledge of the HIA sector is unrivalled, as is our knowledge of what commissioners are looking for in a HIA. We will only provide tender support where a bid supports the ethos of the Future HIA project, and will not support bids that will not drive forward the performance and quality of the HIA in the area. We are also thorough in making sure that there are no conflicts of interest with our work in Foundations before we start working on a project.
Commissioning support
We offer extensive support to commissioners around the commissioning of HIAs and HIA-related services. Our support in this area differs from project to project. Some projects may be small: perhaps five days of in-depth support as and when required, to 18-month projects effectively driving the whole commissioning process. This area is one of our core competencies and is a key area of specialism. Please get in touch if you are considering commissioning HIA services.
Handyperson services
For many years Handyperson services have been an important part of the work of an HIA. With the added focus on high-quality Handyperson services in the last few years, handyperson services have arguably become the key to the success of an HIA. Our consultancy service carries out reviews of handyperson services. Often, this is because there are several services operating within a local authority area doing similar types of work. We always aim to provide commissioners with recommendations on what future services need to look like to operate at high-efficiency levels whilst also providing high-quality services for handyperson customers.
Disabled Facilities Grants (DFGs)
Our work in this area ranges from reviews of demand for DFGs to a national evaluation of the authorities who have removed the ringfence from their DFGs. The HIA sector has grown up around DFGs, and the last research we undertook found that HIAs deal with over 50% of DFGs at some stage. This places us in an ideal position to produce quality reports around this hugely important grant.
Older people
HIAs work with 230,000 people a year, 80% of which are older people. Older people also indirectly benefit from 99% of our consultancy projects and we have developed expertise in estimating the needs and aspirations of older people. This occasionally links in with wider projects on DFGs, for example, estimating needs and aspirations is something we can also undertake as a seperate project.
The Personalisation Agenda
The Personalisation Agenda and, in particular, how this impacts on the housing sector is another of our key specialist areas. The CEL Public Services Policy Team has been providing policy implementation advice to the housing support sector for almost 10 years. Personalisation, now accompanied by localism, is the biggest cross-cutting government agenda item and seeks to transform the relationship between citizens and the services they want and need.
The language used by the agenda itself seeks to reframe people from passive service-users to active citizens, from consumers to co-producers of services. It underpins, and is embedded in, all the major national strategies that have driven the transformation of health, social care, housing and local authority structures in the past few years.
Give us a call on 08458 645210 to see how we could help.
