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Saturday 26 May 2012

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Professionals

Housing

Help with housing issues?

If your relationship or family has broken down you may need to find somewhere new to live. Your local housing department will be able to advise you on the options available to you.

District Housing Departments

Devon’s eight local authority housing departments are committed to helping victims of Domestic Violence and Abuse.

Local authorities across Devon work with a number of agencies to provide places of safety and support to victims and advice and guidance for those seeking alternative accommodation within or outside of the borough. They have signed up to a Domestic Abuse Code of Good Practice and take part in a county-wide Sanctuary Scheme which provides target hardening measures to make the home safer and more secure for those wishing to remain in their own home.

Sanctuary Schemes

A Sanctuary Scheme is a multi-agency victim centred initiative which aims to enable households at risk of violence to remain
safely in their own homes by installing a ‘Sanctuary’ in the home and through the provision of support to the household.

In 2009/10 a research team led by Anwen Jones from the Centre for Housing Policy, University of York carried out an evaluation of Sanctuary Schemes.

' The effectiveness of schemes to enable households at risk of domestic violence to stay in their own homes '. For a summary, full research report and also a good practice guide on Sanctuary Schemes see:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/housing/sancturyschemesguide

Some selected key points are as follows:-

The study shows that overall Sanctuary Schemes were thought to have been successful in their main aim of providing a safe alternative for households at risk of domestic violence, and preventing the disruption associated with homelessness.

It also highlights that there are different types of installation and security measures and also variation in the way schemes operate post installation. Nevertheless, respondents in all areas reported similar outcomes and, for the most part, service users reported positive experiences.

This guide highlights the transferable lessons from an evaluation of Sanctuary Schemes, and will be particularly useful for local level practitioners in developing strategies to prevent homelessness and support for households at risk of domestic violence.

At the same time the "Homelessness Prevention and Relief, England 2009/10" Experimental Statistics release was released on the CLG webpage:
http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/statistics/homelessnessprevention200910

Please find below summaries of the key points from the Homelessness Prevention and Relief release:

In 2009/10, a total of 165,200 cases of homelessness prevention or relief are estimated to have taken place outside the statutory homelessness framework in England. Of these cases 140,900 (85 per cent) were preventions and 24,300 (15 per cent) were cases of relief.

61 per cent of cases of homelessness prevention and relief involved the household being assisted to obtain alternative accommodation. The remaining 39 per cent involved the cases being assisted to remain in their existing home.

The most common action taken by authorities and partner organisations to assist households in obtaining alternative accommodation was the use of landlord incentive schemes to secure private rented sector accommodation (36 per cent of the cases assisted in obtaining alternative accommodation).

The most common action taken to enable households to remain in their own home was assistance to remain in the private or social rented sector, which comprised 21 per cent of the cases who remained in their own home.

There were 5,200 homelessness prevention cases who were helped to stay in their home thanks to the protection of a sanctuary scheme.

Homelessness prevention and relief activity varies across the regions. London had the highest rate of cases of preventions and relief with 10.3 cases per 1,000 households. The West Midlands had the lowest rate of 4.9.

The housing teams work with a number of partner agencies to try and reduce Domestic Violence and Abuse in Devon and have helped fund many projects and initiatives that tackle domestic abuse, support victims and perpetrators. The teams can be contacted in the following ways:

Devon Housing Associations

In November 2009 Devon’s Housing Associations joined forces and agreed a new Code of Practice ‘Domestic Abuse Code of Good Practice (1.28MB - pdf help)’ which was launched (24KB - pdf help) during domestic violence and abuse awareness week 2009.

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