The Housing Needs Team will try to identify housing problems at the earliest opportunity to hopefully prevent you from becoming homeless. This will be achieved through partnership and multi-agency working via the necessary support intervention you may require.
If you are a council tenant and are threatened with homelessness, your case will be discussed at a pre-eviction panel where we will consider factors including the impact of your condition on maintaining your tenancy, whether you require additional support and whether a planned move to supported accommodation would benefit you. We work closely with colleagues in mental health services to identify people living in the private sector or who are homeless and need assistance with housing issues.
We have a duty to assess the circumstances of your homelessness, identify what your housing and support needs are, and to work with you to try to prevent your homelessness or support you to find you somewhere to live. We will provide you with a ‘personal housing plan’ which will tell you what we can do to help you and what you can do to help yourself. This might include actions such as attending appointments with our Housing Pathway providers or engaging with organisations that can assist individuals with mental illness or impairment.
For Haringey Council to be legally obliged to provide you with accommodation, we would need to be satisfied that you are eligible, homeless, in priority need and that you have not made yourself intentionally homeless.
On the basis that you are suffering from a mental illness or impairment we may accept that you are vulnerable and therefore in “priority need” for accommodation. This will be determined by your personal circumstances and will take into account information we gather from various sources including any medical professionals involved in your care.
We will continuously review the advice and advocacy services available to you, and develop outreach support services according to your needs through the personal housing plan that will be completed in partnership with you and potentially your advocate.
Front-line workers within the housing needs team have received mental health training, and will support you to access advice and guidance from specialist services, who will provide a more in-depth support to you. In the majority of cases we will be exploring whether supported housing is the best solution to your housing need. There are a number of supported housing schemes in Haringey and these are managed under the Housing Pathway. Most of the accommodation is shared and has varying levels of on-site support.