The government is preparing to launch a £3bn loan fund for housebuilding which will roll up existing schemes into a single pot.

According to Inside Housing:

2House builders have been briefed in recent weeks by the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) that existing funds will be combined to form one pot.

An announcement will take place after the 23 June EU referendum, due to pre-vote ‘purdah’ rules limiting government announcements.The government will remove many of the restrictions and limitations on who can bid and what sort of scheme is eligible for funding.The HCA runs several funding streams to support building, including the £525m Builders Finance Fund, the £1bn Large Sites Infrastructure Programme and Build to Rent.

It is not clear at this stage which funds will be combined, but it is understood the HCA has not suggested in briefings so far that there will be any new money available.

There has been limited appetite for funding to date. State aid rules require the government to charge commercial rates to borrowers.”

Here is an interesting summary from Service Matters:

EU Referendum Briefing- what could a Brexit mean for Housing-

The news emerged days after public spending watchdog the National Audit Office published a reportshowing that older patients are spending too long in hospital waiting to be discharged, costing the NHS £820m a year. It found 1.2 million bed days were lost to ‘delayed discharge’ in 2015, up 31% in two years.

First Choice Homes Oldham is funding its housing worker at Royal Oldham Hospital discharge service for an initial 18-month period and is paying for any work that needs to be done to patients’ homes before they return home.

Thanks to Cestria for hosting, we had another great discussion on a packed agenda:

Agenda S.Net Tues 26th April

We covered how tenants can give Board assurance on meeting the consumer standards, since the board is required to sign that it meets all standards and the law from September 2016 and annually when they sign the financial statements and accounts at their AGM.

Here is my presentation on IDAs and what the regulator might look for an how tenants can help:

In depth assessments 26.4.16

We also discussed communication with tenants and going digital. Steve at East Durham Homes, part of the new Counnty Durham Housing Group gave us a presentation on what they had acheived recently with the suppport of their scrutiny panel:

Changing Customer communication

During our discussions the following points of interest came up:

1. Newsletters and annual reports – most are doing away with these and placing them on line, wiht some hard copies in offices and sheltered schemes.
2. Community events calanders on line are seen to be useful for training and capacity building linked to employment inititiaves – offered to tenants voice and thoe who complete surveys
3. Everyone was mid a restructure of invovement with many having not quite finalised their structure
4. Residents groups – like scrutiny panels with closed facebook pages are more common now, in particular given the policing of social media by communications staff
5. Doing e bulletins on CI only to the team and involved customers to let them knwo what is going on
6. E mail panels are popular – EDH 1800 e mail addresses
7. Survey monkey is used to get results – feedback on a wide range of survices are used, some of this has reached out to some hard to reach groups, but this is still a challenge
8. Mailchimp is used to personalise e mails and to brand the survey, this has icreased inout from customers of their opinions
9. My Place – app is a portal used for customers
10. Live chat is used to supplement the call centre – with staff being on up to 3 queries at any one time
11. There is reduced face to face contact with customers which coudl lead to isoltaon, this is being monitored and somewhat dilutes face to face cusotmers engagement

Incommunities:

• 6 boards of local management
• moving to one community trust panel
• neighbourhoods have a Community resilience Officer – moving more to money and benefits than involvement
• they do walkabouts in neighbourhoods
• Central at the HA, is Scrutiny and Inspectors
• Need to revisit the local offer to clarify services

PlusDane

• Scrutiny panel being started for the group
• Housing plus offer of digital iclusion and emplyment advice
• Sustainability Manager does cusotmer insight and academic research, looking at appropriate technology to communicate with customers
• Trying to link the Housing management syatem to customer insight

Performance review

Having a performance panel of tenanat can work – for red areas scrutny is triggered, for amber a mystery shop an for green, no action

Equality Groups

Useful, can look at sensitive issues, like DV, demantia friendly services and safeguarding and sometime social value

Challenges for panels and training needs;

• regulatory standards to keep them focussed
• risk
• analysis
• probing questions
• building knowledge

More information below on:
● Employer Supported Volunteering – 23 May
● Register to vote
● Understanding mission-led businesses – Call for Evidence
● Social Investment: a force for social change – UK strategy 2016
● 2016 Social Investment Award winners
● Government Outcomes Lab and Life Chances Fund
● Social Enterprise – Buy Social Corporate Challenge
● Social Enterprise – Market Trends 2014
● Commissioning Academy
● VCSE Strength Checker
● UK Civil Society Almanac 2016
● Fundraising Week
● GoodFinance.org.uk
● Celebrations across the nation for the Queen’s 90th Birthday
● Future of Doing Good
● Power to Change
● Volunteer Week – The Big Celebration 2016
● Community Organisers 2016 (CO16): Sustaining the Energy — 21st-22nd June

1. Employer Supported Volunteering – On Monday 23rd May the University of Central Lancashire is hosting an event on Employer Supported Volunteering in Preston supported by Cabinet Office. This follows a successful event in Manchester on 21st April attended by 65 people from the voluntary, public and private sector. The Preston event is a chance to meet others interested in building stronger partnerships between businesses and charities in the NW. The findings from both events will be fed into the national Business Skills Exchange project and research being undertaken by Sheffield and Hull Universities. If you would like to attend then further details and a booking form can be found here.
2. Register to vote – There’s only 1 month left to #RegisterToVote for the #EUreferendum. Don’t lose your vote – register to vote by 7 June 2016 – please share this link with your stakeholders, users and contacts.
3. Mission-led business review – The Minister for Civil Society has launched a review to increase the economic and social impact of mission-led businesses in the UK economy.
Do you run or advise a mission-led business? If so, we want to hear your views via the Cabinet Office’s Call for Evidence. Launched this week, the call for evidence is open until 8 July 2016.
Mission-led businesses are profit-driven businesses that make a powerful commitment to social impact. These businesses attract entrepreneurs and investors who want to harness the power of business to make a difference. We want to know more about why businesses might adopt this model, how these businesses will grow over time, the challenges they might face and how these could be addressed. Your evidence and ideas will feed into the Cabinet Office’s review of mission-led businesses, which aims to identify ways to double the social and economic impact of mission-led businesses over the next decade. It will report back in autumn 2016. The terms of reference outline the government’s review on mission-led businesses and their role in the UK’s growing social economy.
4. Social Investment: a force for social change – UK strategy 2016 – published by the Cabinet
Office in March, this strategy outlines how the government will continue to support and encourage the social investment sector in the UK. At the launch of the report, Minister for Civil Society, Rob Wilson, spoke about why the investment market should help connect its customers with causes they care about.
5. 2016 Social Investment Award winners announced – The Social Investment Awards reward people and organisations that have contributed to growing the UK social investment market.
Celebrating another year of success, the Social Investment Awards showcase areas where investment supports social businesses to succeed and grow, making a real difference to people’s lives. Fifteen social enterprises and investors were shortlisted for the Social Investment Awards
6. Government Outcomes Lab – Cabinet Office will work with the University of Oxford to create a new centre for excellence for Social Impact Bonds.
Cabinet Office and the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford have announced a partnership to create a new centre of excellence for Social Impact Bonds and innovative government commissioning, the ‘Government Outcomes Lab’. The new centre will provide practical, in-person support to local commissioners and create a world-leading research team in this field.
There are now 32 Social Impact Bonds across the UK, supporting tens of thousands of people in areas like youth unemployment, mental health and homelessness. The Centre for Social Impact Bonds website has lots of information and Bridges Ventures, which manages the world’s first fund dedicated to investing into Social Impact Bonds, has recently published a paper on the evolution of this model in the UK. It shows that these contracts have huge potential in helping local and central government drive better outcomes in existing services, as well as experiment with new services.
The formal launch of this new partnership will take place in the summer, alongside the launch of the £80M Life Chances Fund. This new Fund is specifically designed to support the development of locally commissioned Social Impact Bonds. You can register your interest here if you are interested in finding out more.
7. Social Enterprise – Buy Social Corporate Challenge – Launched in Downing Street in April, the Buy Social Corporate Challenge is about connecting larger businesses to the ingenuity and innovation in the UK’s vibrant social enterprise sector. It isn’t asking businesses to spend more. But to spend in smarter ways that can improve their core business.
The Cabinet Office has worked with Social Enterprise UK to create this campaign and we will support SEUK to bring on board many more businesses to join the founding partners. The ambition is high and the Buy Social Corporate Challenge aims to see businesses spend £1 billion with social enterprises by 2020.
8. Social Enterprise – Market Trends 2014 – The Cabinet Office has produced this report based on 2014 Small Business Survey, gathered through a telephone survey of business owners and managers in the UK, commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
The report draws comparisons between social enterprises and other small and medium-sized enterprises from the same sample. It looks at a range of characteristics and experiences of social enterprises including:
· the number of social enterprises and their contribution to the economy
· their profiles and current business performance
· their perceptions on potential obstacles to success
· the types of business support they receive
· their main types of customer
Further exploration of the social enterprise sector is also provided in the Cabinet Office Analysis and Insight Team blog: Social Enterprise: market trends and in Social Enterprise UK’s State of the Sector Report 2015.
9. Commissioning Academy – The social enterprise the Public Service Transformation Academy has been awarded a concession contract to run the Cabinet Office Commissioning Academy, a leadership programme for public sector commissioners.
The Commissioning Academy aims to help those who work on defining policy, shaping public service provision or allocating resources for services to citizens, to get the best outcome. Programmes take place over 3 to 6 days. They involve some of the country’s leading experts as speakers to stimulate debates and help participants develop the skills and confidence to address the challenge of public service transformation.
The next programme starts on 9 June with tailored regional programmes available from 1 May 2016. Read the new 2016 brochure and find out more about the Commissioning Academy.
10. VCSE Strength Checker – The VCSE Strength Checker is a free diagnostic tool now available to help organisations develop and improve their resilience. It has been developed by Big Lottery Fund with the Cabinet Office. It will produce a personalised report highlighting an organisation’s key strengths and areas where they could be more effective
11. UK Civil Society Almanac 2016 NCVO Almanac – Published in April 2016, the UK Civil Society Almanac is the definitive reference publication for anybody interested in the voluntary sector, and its role in civil society. First published in 1996, it draws together trends, facts and information from our own research programme, plus the latest available data from government surveys, academic research, and research by voluntary organisations.

12. Fundraising Week – during April, Minister for Civil Society, Rob Wilson, spoke at the launch of Fundraising Week on the government’s support for charity fundraising and reform and Sarah Atkinson from The Charity Commission spoke about the Commission’s work to support the sector including revised fundraising and Trustee Guidance. The April Charity Commission blog – Why the Charity Commission is going digital provides an overview changes as they move more of their services online.
13. GoodFinance.org.uk is a collaboration between Access and Big Society Capital, with a working group of key sector partners including the Cabinet Office, NCVO, Locality, SEUK and others. Their objective is to improve access to information on investment and finance for charities and social enterprises.
The first ‘beta’ version of the site now up and running, providing signposting services for ‘new entrants’ to the world of social investment. The project team are working through a process of user-testing. Please follow the blog for the latest news, and get in touch to provide feedback.
The first phase of this project will run for the first half of 2016. During this time Good Finance will:
· Develop this beta website which pulls together existing information for charities and social enterprises
· Run user focused design workshops across the UK with a wide range of charities and social enterprises
· Aim to identify the need and the potential options for meeting this need
14. Celebrations across the nation for the Queen’s 90th Birthday – Communities Minister Marcus Jones has called on people across the nation to get together with their neighbours and celebrate all that’s great about their local areas and the country, by hosting street parties to mark the Queen’s official birthday in June.
To help the nation celebrate the government has revised its street party guidance, busting popular myths on the red-tape challenges needed to be overcome by providing a handy checklist for what is really needed and offering practical advice to anyone planning their own street party.
This includes a simple form people can use to let their local council know about their plans and information on how to apply for a road closure as well as information on playing music, insurance and fund raising.
15. Future of Doing Good – How do we create social value in the future ? – The Big Lottery Fund hope to facilitate a debate across the whole of society – communities, charities, social enterprises, businesses and the state – about how ‘doing good’ should evolve in the future. What does it mean for how we support people to build better communities, and improve their own lives and the lives of those who live around them? What’s the role of charities, businesses, government and communities – and how should we all be working together?
The Future of Doing Good website provides blogs, the report, discussion feeds and provides more information on how to get involved.
16. Power to Change – are an independent charitable trust set up in January 2015 to grow community business across England. Over ten years, with a £150 million endowment from Big Lottery Fund, Power to Change is supporting community businesses to create better places across England.
Power to Change are now taking applications for their £10 million Community Business Fund until 1 June 2016. They will also have application windows in July and October this year. Find out if you are eligible. Through the fund, Power to Change will award grants between £50,000- £300,000 to community businesses in England.
In addition to funding, Power to Change provides support and resources to assist community businesses grow and develop.
17. Volunteer Week – The Big Celebration 2016 – Over 21 million people volunteer in the UK at least once a year and this contributes an estimated £23.9bn to the UK economy. Behind these big numbers is a big contribution.
Events are being planned across the country to mark Volunteers’ Week 2016, taking place 1-12 June. Charities across the UK will hold events to thank their volunteers and celebrate the power of volunteering to bring communities together. Last year more than 750 events took place, from awards ceremonies to tea parties and barbecues.
The end of Volunteers’ Week will coincide with The Patron’s Lunch on Sunday 12 June, a celebration of Her Majesty the Queen’s lifetime of service to more than 600 charities and organisations to which The Queen acts as a Patron, on the occasion of her 90th birthday.
NCVO will be providing all the information, guidance and resources you need to make your big celebration this Volunteers’ Week a success. They are preparing a pack full of ideas and tips for making the most of Volunteers’ Week this year and to help you run your own Big Celebration. Keep up to date with plans and hear first when NCVO’s resource pack is available by signing up to their Volunteers’ Week mailing list or enter your event on the Volunteers’ Week events map.
18. Community Organisers 2016 (CO16): Sustaining the Energy – 21st-22nd June, Yarnfield Park, Staffordshire – Following on from the success of the Community Organisers programme over the last few years, CO16 is a ‘experiential learning’ event on a grand scale for community organisers and those interested in finding out more about what community organising might involve.
This is an open event and the Company of Community Organisers (COLtd) will be running a number of workshops, including an introduction to community organising and what it might means for organisations interested in the community organising model. Local authorities who are interested in organising are particularly welcome. Find out more about Community Organising on the COLtd website.

England and Wales’s prison system could do better at reducing crime and rehabilitating offenders: it is currently a hugely expensive and highly inefficient arm of the public sector. As the number of prisoners continues to rise, and as the Ministry of Justice budget is faces further cuts, this is clearly unsustainable.

This paper argues that reform is needed to address the inherent flaw in our criminal justice system: that the bodies that could take action to reduce offending have neither the financial power nor the incentive to do so. This is because many of the services and agencies that could act to reduce offending are organised and controlled at the local level, whereas the budget for prison places is held by central government.

The challenge, therefore, is to ‘unfreeze’ the resources that are locked up in the prison system, and ensure that local services and agencies are enabled and incentivised to use those resources to both prevent crime and develop alternatives to custody. At the moment, incentives work in precisely the wrong direction: if a local authority invests in high-quality services that keep people out of prison, the financial benefits accrue to the Ministry of Justice (as it spends less on prisons as a result) rather than the local authority, which ends up meeting the costs of ever more people using their community services

The recent drive to devolve power and resources to groups of local authorities and city mayors could hold the answer to this problem. The government has already successfully experimented with devolving elements of the youth justice system to local authorities, as well as granting greater powers over transport, skills and health services to some of England’s major cities and counties. In this report We propose that this approach be extended to the management of low-level adult offenders, who make up the bulk of ‘churn’ within the prison system. This would involve giving city mayors or combined authorities a budget to cover the costs of these offenders, but charging them for each night that an offender from their area is held in prison. This would give local authorities resources to invest in preventative services and alternatives to custody, and give them a strong financial incentive to ensure that these investments deliver results, while also ensuring that money and responsibility for the reduction of reoffending is located where it can best be exercised.

This report presents case studies of a number of youth justice programmes in the US and England that have proven effective at reducing pressure on prisons and reoffending, drawing from them eight principles that should underpin the reform and devolution of the adult offenders budget. Bearing these principles in mind, it sets out detailed recommendations for the timings and mechanisms by which the government should pursue these reforms – which bodies should be allowed to bid for control of the custody budget, how targets should be set and oversight and accountability ensured, how funding and savings should be managed and how, in time, funding for probation services for low-level offenders should also be devolved.

The chair of the  regulation committee at the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) today revealed the first indications of findings from a ‘regression analysis’ project looking at landlords’ costs.

Mr Ashby said: “There are still huge variations in housing association costs and that’s part of what we are going to be using to provide additional challenge in the context of IDAs [in-depth assessments].” He also warned the sector still has a poor reputation on efficiency.

The HCA will look at value for money in all future IDAs of landlords, using the data from the HCA’s regression analysis. A regression analysis is a statistical tool that involves isolating factors that might influence costs – such as managing a large portfolio of supported housing – in order to attain a better picture of a landlord’s costs compared to the rest of the sector.

Following his speech, Mr Ashby explained that even when taking into account particular pressures on housing associations’ costs – such as social care – there were still large, unexplained variations in costs.

Mr Ashby also said the Value for Money (VFM) standard would be included in the HCA’s review of standards later this year. He added that there was scope for “deregulation” in certain consumer standards, but did not expand on which ones.

Mr Ashby added that the renewed appetite for mergers in the housing sector could mean that half of housing association stock could be owned by “a dozen” organisations in the future.

However, he warned that larger housing associations were not automatically more efficient than smaller ones.

The government has pledged to improve Universal Credit procedures this summer, following concerns from social landlords that they are frequently not informed that their tenants are claiming the benefit.

According to Inside Housing:

“Social landlords have raised concerns about problems with the system, including letters arriving late or going missing in the post.

One housing association senior employee said the problems made it hard to establish which tenants are claiming Universal Credit and therefore receiving direct payment of benefit.

She added this led to difficulties supporting tenants with the transition to help prevent arrears. The changes, due to be introduced in the summer, include enabling landlords to be informed via email, rather than post.

The government last year introduced a statutory instrument to allow the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to share claimants’ Universal Credit data with housing associations, councils, credit unions and charities. This was intended to allow organisations to more easily identify households that need support.

A spokesperson from the DWP said: “We have worked closely with social landlords and will be introducing an improved system in the summer to address their concerns.”

Stephen Crabb, work and pensions secretary, last week insisted to MPs that Universal Credit, which combines six benefits into one payment direct to households, still ensures people are better off in work than on benefits.

More than 225,000 households were claiming Universal Credit in March, according to the latest government statistics, with eight million people expected to be claiming the benefit by 2021.”

New Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) research has found that tenants face an increasingly widening gap between the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) they receive to help with their housing costs and the actual rent they pay.

According to CIH:

“Analysis conducted by CIH – focusing on LHA rates since 2012 – found that in some areas of the UK, people are only able to afford to rent in the bottom five or 10 per cent of the private rented sector (PRS) market. However, the LHA rates were originally intended to ensure that people could access 30 per cent of the market. The situation is set to worsen as LHA rates freeze for four years from April 2016.

The cash shortfall affects tenants across the UK, the study has found. In Aberdeen, Scotland, there are very severe cash shortfalls in every LHA category, and in Northern Ireland, 80 per cent of LHA rates have already fallen bellow the bottom 30 per cent of the market – second only to England. In Newport, South Wales, the LHA shared accommodation rate would need to be set at £29 per week more for people under 35 to be able to afford the whole of the lowest 30 per cent of the market. In England, the LHA rate for Chesterfield’s broad rental market area is even lower than the lowest rent that the rent officer could find in their market evidence data – in other words, there’s no shared accommodation available at the LHA rate.”