Sheltered Housing for the Elderly by Alan Butler Christine Oldman John Greve

Author:Alan Butler, Christine Oldman, John Greve [Alan Butler, Christine Oldman, John Greve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Work
ISBN: 9781000438468
Google: KHBEEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-07T05:28:26+00:00

THE FINANCE OF SHELTERED HOUSING: THE LOCAL APPROACH

During the course of our interviews with providers we discussed the financial aspects of sheltered housing. The only other financial study of sheltered housing which we were able to locate was conducted by Susan Clayton (1978) in the County of Durham. Although Clayton’s analysis is now some five years old, her analytical models of the current and capital costs of different types of sheltered housing, and also of the cost of sheltered housing relative to both ordinary housing and residential care, provided a useful preliminary basis for our inquiry. However, as we indicated in the first section of this chapter, work such as Clayton’s did not deal with the cost-effectiveness of sheltered housing. It was primarily concerned to identify the direct costs incurred by the provider. Thus, it was not an economic analysis, in that nothing was said about the consequences or efficiency of resource allocation.

We attempted to secure data on a systematic basis to permit an economic analysis to be made – one which was capable of identifying all significant costs, both direct and indirect. We did not succeed in our efforts. In part, no doubt, this was due to deficiencies in our method and the instruments we used, but to a greater degree it was attributable to factors such as the lack of uniformity in costing criteria among local authorities, the variety of accounting practices employed, the incompleteness of available data, and marked unevenness in the reliability of data. Formidable as they were, these difficulties were compounded by the pressures and uncertainties which beset local authorities and housing associations at the time of our study.

Identifying the people who could supply financial authority was a very time-consuming task. Typically, in a local authority, we were obliged to trace officers in the Housing Department, Architect’s Department, Finance or Treasurer’s Department and the Technical Services Department. Generally, senior housing officers were unable to tell us the cost of sheltered housing. They were sometimes able to provide us with information about aggregate costs, but were usually unable to identify the capital and current costs of individual schemes. We also failed to elicit information because some of our questions were not sufficiently precise or informed. We encountered the paradox frequently met by social investigators – although they may not always be aware of it – that a deep knowledge of the subject under examination may be a pre-condition to asking the most fruitful questions about it.

The task of assembling data on costs from local authorities is, in general, harder than gathering comparable information from housing associations. In the case of local authorities, sheltered housing was frequently not accounted for separately. In consequence, a detailed cost analysis of the capital and revenue costs specifically in respect of sheltered housing would entail a complex procedure of disaggregation of information – and might still leave some items for which separation of elements was not possible with confidence. Moreover, costs are often shared between departments in the authority. But the

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