Protecting the elderly

Alan Bullion, Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for Sevenoaks and Swanley, is promising to do everything possible to support warden coverage for Sheltered Housing and uphold the rights of elderly and vulnerable tenants.

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights says that the elderly should live in security, not fear. Last year, Conservative-controlled Barnet Council's plan to model its sheltered housing services on budget airlines was grounded by a legal challenge. The local authority had planned to replace wardens in some of its sheltered housing schemes with visiting staff, as well as charge for so called 'additional' services.

There is a growing trend for local authorities to withdraw onsite wardens from sheltered housing schemes and replace them floating support teams which are able to deliver services to a larger number of older people in the community, rather than being attached to a single scheme. Age Concern and Help the Aged have stated that "in three years time 38% of sheltered housing will have floating support (as opposed to warden services) from a base of 5% five years ago."

A good argument against replacing wardens with floating support has been raised by John Belcher of the Anchor Trust, who said: "People move into sheltered housing to seek security. They look to the scheme manager to provide that and suddenly they are finding that the scheme manager service in some parts of the country is being withdrawn, it is moving to floating support."

Kent County Council took a decision to withdraw scheme manager funding from all of its sheltered housing schemes and move to floating support across the county. However, they engaged in a wide consultation with the tenants living in the sheltered housing schemes and the reaction from the tenants was that they actually did not want to see a change in the funding arrangements and the support arrangements which operated for sheltered housing. They lobbied and campaigned their county councillors and as a consequence of that Kent changed its decision and maintained an in-house scheme manager service.

After being contacted by a number of concerned residents, Alan Bullion has given his firm commitment to campaign for wardens to be kept for Kent's sheltered housing schemes.