Shelter warns office closures could leave 'housing advice deserts'

Published by Jon Land for 24dash.com in Housing

Shelter chief executive Campbell Robb has warned that the housing and homelessness charity faces a turbulent year due to funding cuts, just when its presence is needed most.

Robb estimates that the charity faces a 40% to 50% cut in its income as a result of changes to legal services funding, which could lead to office closures across the country.

“Our job at times is to represent the realities of people’s lives in the housing sector and for many, many people at the moment it’s terrible,” Robb said in an interview with 24housing magazine at Shelter’s Old Street HQ in London.

“We’re talking about a 40, 50 percent cut in our income as a result of those cuts so we are in the middle of talking to our staff about potential closure of offices and redundancies,” Robb said. “I suspect we’ll end up potentially having to close whole offices because the money that we get from the legal services commission is the money that keeps those offices open.”

And it’s not just Shelter being hit, with some towns ending up devoid of any professional group giving advice.

Robb gives this stark warning: “What it might mean is that there will be towns without any housing advice - I suspect there will be advice deserts across the country.”

Commeting on the wider housing crisis, Robb said: "(It's) a cross-party failure. Our issue is not so much who's doing it, it's the consequences of what they are doing. Like many other charities at the moment, we're very concerned that some of the benefit cuts will impact very hard on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people.

"We have been one of the most prominent critics of some of the housing benefit reforms and 70 percent of the population support those reforms. The truths that we lay bare are uncomfortable sometimes and we do it in an entirely non-political way."