London Borough of Barnet Home Page

Background

Barnet is the fastest growing outer London borough, and is a borough of contrasts. There are areas of wealth and deprivation within a short walk of each other. We have areas of highly desirable suburban housing, with award winning parks and gardens, driving house prices higher. However, there are small pockets of deprivation where anti-social behaviour, graffiti, vandalism and petty crime, together with poor quality and dated housing makes life unpleasant for some of our most vulnerable residents.

High prices in the private housing market, combined with a shortage of affordable housing cause considerable difficulties for those who cannot compete in the market.

Barnet is one of nine London Boroughs which has a legal responsibility to house more homeless people than its total supply of social housing lets, and one of 13 London councils which accepts over a thousand homeless households each year. This has led to large-scale use of temporary accommodation. In March 2003 over 2000 households accepted as homeless by the borough were living in temporary accommodation.

Key Achievements

Choice-Based Lettings - Barnet acquired a choice-based lettings system in 2003, and has successfully used the system since then to provide a fair and transparent system to promote the Housing Register as a route to re-housing and encourage residents to make informed choices over their housing opportunities.

Homelessness Prevention - Barnet offers an impressive package of housing options for its residents. These include:

. Acclaimed Sanctuary scheme
. Family Mediation and home visits
. Tenancy Sustainment and floating support to help people retain their tenancies
. Private Sector Tenancies, including arrangements with local housing advice service to provide for single young people
. Homeless service targeting private tenancies to those in temporary accommodation
. In-house DHP service, allowing us to target and maximise the DHP budget
. Tenancy Relations service asserting tenancy rights in the private sector
. Housing Advice Outreach service
. Homelessness Education Packs for schools
. New Start providing choices for those willing to leave London and be accommodated in the north of England
. 'Options Days' aimed at promoting housing options to residents

Options-First - The department underwent a complete overhaul meaning the way in which homeless applicants fundamentally changed. The service introduced a new Housing Advice Team that was staffed completely with graduate trainees who undertook an intense training programme. The focus was geared towards promoting options first and asking 'what is your housing problem?' as opposed to the traditional approach. This also enabled the wholesale expansion of our options services and is key to the success we currently achieve.

London Resettlement Pilot - Barnet is involved in the London Resettlement scheme, aiming to accommodate prison leavers in the private sector. Through joined-up working with Probation and 7 other London Boroughs protocols and case conferences help in meeting prison leavers needs upon their release.

Supported Housing -We have units of supported housing across the borough for young people, providing accommodation-based support, funded by the Supporting People programme, and using floating support to assist people in move-on opportunities in the private sector.

Graduate Trainee Scheme - As previously mentioned, we have adopted a graduate trainee scheme for the recruitment of our housing advisers. This scheme is managed in conjunction with London Metropolitan University to help select the best applicants who are then subject to an intense training plan for two years. This has helped us employ keen advisers with a fresh attitude and is key to our provision of the options first service.

Institute of Leadership and Management course for Managers - Barnet has adopted a new management-training programme that has been endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management. The programme also has associated projects which help in both the training and the outcomes being adopted throughout the service. For example, the last cohort successfully produced training menus for each post in the service.

Performance - The measures taken above have enabled us to achieve a greater level of performance. For example, we have experienced a steady reduction in Acceptances to 474 for 2006/07 from 1106 in 2001/02 and achieve 90% customer satisfaction.

Regional Homelessness Champions Home Page