Home » About Us » Sheffield Homes News » November & December 2006 » GladMag for special needs tenants
GladMag for Sheffield Homes' special needs tenants
A Sheffield Homes initiative to help special needs tenants find a new home has proved a huge success. A survey has revealed that the number of tenants needing extra assistance with finding housing has almost halved, thanks to new partnerships with property newspaper AdMag and the national Accessible Properties Register website.
Before the initiatives, finding adapted property could prove time consuming and expensive for disabled and elderly tenants and buyers. Virtually no UK housing providers in both the public and private sectors identified such properties, rendering them almost `invisible’.
The review was carried out by Sheffield Homes, and the Choices Not Barriers Scrutiny Group, a group of disabled people who meet regularly with Sheffield Homes and Sheffield City Council to raise awareness of issues affecting disabled tenants and advise on accessibility and equal opportunities strategies. They found that within a month of persuading AdMag to run dedicated adapted properties pages, teaming up with the national Sheffield-based Accessible Properties Register, (APR) and linking them both to the Sheffield Homes’ Property Shop, the number of people needing help to find a suitable property fell by 40 per cent.
“These initiatives have brought huge benefits to our customers as well as our staff and bear out our view that there was a real demand for this service,” said Sheffield Homes’ Property Shop Manager, Jill Wallis. “Our own staff are now more aware of what is classed as accessible property and our support team is now also routinely logging and classifying all adaptations, so we have very detailed and accurate information to feed into AdMag and the APR. It means we can spend less time on finding suitable properties from scratch on an individual basis and more on gathering the information which enables people to do it themselves.”
“Our members had to do things like paying to go round to properties in taxis to check them out for themselves,” said Sue Stones, a wheelchair user and Chair of the Choices Not Barriers Scrutiny Group.
“Pushing for housing providers in general to take this issue on board has been a long and frustrating process and Sheffield Homes has proved to be one of the few, if not the only, ALMO which is moving in this direction. We are continuing to work with them to improve the systems, but there’s no doubt that the difference this has made is already significant and can only get better.”
The new, dedicated AdMag pages, plus the Property Shop link to the APR, were launched in spring 2006. From nil, the number of adapted properties identified and regularly advertised now averages around 20 per week. For more information go to: www.sheffieldpropertyshop.org.uk or visit: www.accessible-property.org.uk