NIHE Complex Needs Awareness Seminar
Housing association personnel from Apex, Clanmil, Habinteg, Radius & Ark attended the NIHE’s Complex Needs Awareness Seminar held in Twickenham House, Ballymena on 5th June.
The overall objectives of the day were to:
- to increase mutual understanding of the roles & responsibilities of the various stakeholders involved in the delivery of appropriate housing solutions for complex needs cases
- to highlight the need for consistency of approach in the preparation and sign-off of Options Appraisals (OA)
- stress the importance of identifying solutions that meet housing need rather than the housing preferences of the clients
- highlight the potential for investigating housing solutions available within existing (NIHE and housing association) social housing stock
- in cases where this is not possible the next consideration should be to utilise one of the generic Wheelchair-Standard house-types in planned new build schemes. Siobhan Porter of Apex spoke about these generic design templates, highlighting that they should offer sufficient flexibility to address the vast majority of complex needs requirements. These design templates can be viewed by clicking on this link.
- small focus group to review the Options Appraisal template, with the aim of producing a standardised document which can be utilised across the sector
- highlight that the DfC has a target in 2018/19 of 7% of new build units being designed to Wheelchair Standard and that this target will increase incrementally, to the point where (from 2020/21 onwards) there will be an annual requirement for at least 10% of all new build units to be designed to Wheelchair Standard.
Please click here to download the presentations given at the seminar.