Agenda item

(Assistant Director - Housing PSR) To consider the attached report (FPM-023-2016/17).

The Assistant Director (Private Sector Housing and Community Support), L Swan, presented a report on the funding for Caring and Repairing in Epping Forest (C.A.R.E).

The Disabled Facilities Grants (DFGs) were statutory, means-tested grants of up to £30,000 to provide adaptations in the homes of disabled owner-occupiers and private tenants to maintain independent living in the community. Expenditure on DFGs in 2016/17 was expected to be £630,000 and came from the General Fund, through the Government to Essex County Council (ECC) via the Better Care Fund (BCF) alongside a contribution from EFDC.  In 2016/17 the amounts allocated were £665,000 from the BCF and £120,000 from EFDC. These services were provided through the Council’s in-house Home Improvement Agency (HIA), C.A.R.E. (Caring and Repairing in Epping Forest). ECC currently provided funding of £51,000 a year for C.A.R.E. but had recently announced that this funding would stop in April 2017. Therefore, in order to continue to provide this service it was recommended that £51,000 of the BCF (which was likely to be in excess of £665,000 in 2017/18) was ‘top-sliced’ in 2017/18 to meet the funding shortfall.

The Cabinet Committee were in favour of enabling residents to stay within their own homes and therefore supported the recommendations.

Recommended: 

1.         That £51,000 be top-sliced from the Government’s Better Care Fund (BCF) contribution towards support for applicants of Disabled Facilities Grants (DFGs) from 2017/18; and

Resolved:

2.         That the capital allocation for Disabled Facilities Grants continues to be monitored by Members on a quarterly basis with specific reference to the viability of this arrangement from 2017/18 onwards.

Reasons for the Decision:

C.A.R.E. provides services to support older people and people with disabilities to maintain independent living in the community.  A large part of the team’s work was to help people with disabilities to apply for adaptations to their homes.  Historic evidence was that if people were not supported to apply for the help they needed, they would do without the adaptations and risk ending up in the care service or in hospital.

The BCF was set up in 2014 in order to provide ‘the most vulnerable people in our society with a fully integrated health and social care service, resulting in an improved experience and better quality of life’.  The funding that the Council expected to receive from ECC in April 2017, added to the £120,000 DFG funding that the Council had already agreed for 2017/18, was likely to be more than £785,000 which would be more than adequate to meet the need for DFGs and the £51,000 funding shortfall.  As the BCF allocation for future years was not known at present (although it was likely to be at least as much if not more than the current allocation), consideration would need to be given in the monitoring of Capital budgets as to whether this arrangement should continue in future years.

Options Considered and Rejected:

1.            The main alternative option to the one proposed would be to raise the fees charged to DFG applicants.  This was currently 15% of the cost of the building work and it had been estimated that if this was to be raised to 32% this would result in sufficient additional funds to meet the funding shortfall.  This option had been discounted on several grounds.

Firstly, it was generally accepted that fees for specialist services associated with building work were in the order of 12-15%.  If C.A.R.E. was to charge a fee of 32% service users would seek alternative providers that could do the work more cheaply and, as a result, the desired aim of increasing fee income would not be achieved.

Secondly, although in most cases the higher fee would come directly from the DFG budget and, therefore, would not impact DFG applicants, there were some circumstances in which applicants would be financially affected.  These were:

a)            Where the cost of work plus the increased agency fees added together come to more than the grant maximum of £30,000 as in these circumstances DFG applicants would have to pay the excess from their own resources.  At present this happens in a very small number of cases where the cost of the work is about £26,000.  If the fee was to be increased to 32% this would affect more cases a year where the cost of the work exceeded £22,700.  In addition these were likely to be larger schemes which were most often adaptations for disabled children.

Since DFGs were means-tested, in order to receive a grant, an applicant would have to be on a low income.  Experience showed that where applicants were likely to have a financial contribution to make towards the work, they would not apply and would suffer the consequences such as having inadequate washing and toileting facilities or falling at home.

b)            Where DFG work costs more than £5,000 the Council places a charge on the property so that when the property was eventually sold the Council can recoup some of its costs.  The charge remains on the property for 10 years and the maximum amount that can be recovered was £10,000.  With the current 15% fee the maximum cost of work that would result in a charge being placed on the property was £4,300.  This affected about 88% of DFGs a year.  If the fee was to be increased to 32%, based on 2016/17 figures, it would affect all DFGs.  Experience shows the charge does put off many applicants applying for DFGs. 

2.            The option of discontinuing the C.A.R.E. service was not being considered as the Council had a key objective in its Corporate Plan 2015-2020 to make appropriate plans and arrangements to respond to the effects of the District’s ageing population (Corporate Plan 2015-2020 key objective (iii)(c)).  The majority of residents that used C.A.R.E. to help them apply for DFGs had disabilities that were associated with age and it would be contrary to the aims of the Council’s Corporate Plan if it were not to continue to provide the service.

The option to seek the additional resources required from the General Fund had been discounted since the General Fund was under pressure and the funding could legitimately be made up from the BCF.