ERoSH’s comment to Inside Housing in response to Sheltered Housing UK’s survey, which was published in Inside Housing on Friday, February 5.
In response to Sheltered Housing UK's survey, director of policy for ERoSH, the national consortium for sheltered and retirement housing, said: "ERoSH recognises the importance of providing the right level of support to older people in a way that meets their individual needs.
"There are several ways of ensuring that people who live in sheltered housing have the support that they need. The most common way for many years has been the resident warden but this approach has changed recently for many reasons, but primarily due to the European Working Time Directive.
"The European Working Time Directive prevents wardens and others from working very long hours, which is safer for tenants and fairer for staff. The resident warden model can be wasteful of public resources and unfair to other older people living in the community who would benefit from the services of a visiting warden, or floating support.
"Our experience shows that between a quarter and a third of tenants move into sheltered housing with no support needs at all, they just want to be near family or to downsize or to have better accommodation. Many of these tenants therefore find the daily call from a resident warden intrusive and wasteful of either their own money or the government's money.
"People living in sheltered housing who need and want a support service should be able to access this via floating support or hub and spoke models, perhaps by being offered a menu of services, high, medium and low, with related charging levels."
