London and beyond

The front end of this tour has been intensive and not exactly helped by the tube strike in London.

On Monday, we met and discussed housing issues with James Berrington, Senior Policy Manager for the Government's Homes and Communities Agency. In addition, we visited two sites in London. An aged persons' housing project attached to a community centre in a poorer part of London and a boutique "sheltered housing" complex close to the City of London.

Today, we left London and visited a huge 332 unit housing and aged care services facility in Buckinghamshire, close to London and then the equivalent of one of our hostels in Bristol.

I think it's become apparent that you can't just look at social housing without looking at the total housing-care continuum and also that the care systems in the UK and Australia are radically different.

The UK is much further down the track of providing aged care services in the home or at least outside of what we call residential care and, very significantly, invests huge sums of money into funding the capital development of facilities and into providing the level of care people actually need. Perhaps this is why the country is in such trouble with its budget deficits and is about to engage in a serious austerity program.

In relation to the housing developments we've seen, it's significant that capital funding has been provided either by massive charitable trusts or by central or local government. This means that the housing operators don't have to recover the capital cost of building the apartments. In addition, the government provides people with minimal assets with significant housing assistance to pay their rent which has the effect of enabling them to pay a reasonable rent to housing providers.

I think the other significant difference we've noted is in the concept of sheltered housing. This form of independent living provides the support of a "warden" who lives on site to respond in an emergency and provide advice and support. It is apparent that in Australia we don't provide sufficient support to people living in retirement villages to provide peace of mind and to facilitate service delivery.

Finally, it is clear that aged care operators in Australia carry a much greater level of responsibility for their customers than they do in the UK. While we in Australia are the ultimate gatekeeper at least in relation to residential care and community care clients, in the UK the local authority plays that role and ultimately the buck stops with them rather than the aged care provider when problems arise and suitable care is not being provided to promote the customer's welfare.

So, it's all very interesting and we are getting a lot of value out of bouncing our reflections of each other. To some extent, it is quite validating in that we haven't yet found an organisation that has been able to provide a high standard of social housing relying on the limited capital and operating funding base that we have. But we'll keep looking.

I'm writing this in the "withdrawing room" at our little hotel in Bath. It was once the Duke of Wellington's residence so for me it is typecasting.

Ray