Simon Williams, Director of Community and Housing, outlined the contents of the report. He emphasised that the council continues to work closely with partner organisations in delivering both the welfare reform action plan and the complementary financial resilience action plan to support residents facing financial pressures.

Simon Williams made a number of points in response to questions:

·         housing options advisers visit families who, for whatever reason, face a gap between their income and expenditure due to the benefits cap or under occupancy rules. The aim is to help them to assess options to maintain their current tenancy. Options include finding work, letting the spare room, obtaining discretionary housing benefit if certain criteria are met, and finding suitable alternative accommodation.

·         the criteria for accessing the social fund are set out on the council’s website. The drop in applications and spend since this function was transferred to the council may be due to the experience that council officers have in assessing applications and cross checking against other sources of information to ensure that the applicant is in genuine need.

·         The council is working closely with private sector landlords and is using a number of measures to try to prevent private sector tenants becoming homeless due to eviction and the ending of assured shorthold tenancy agreements.

LylaAdwan-Kamara, CEO of Merton Centre for Independent Living (CIL) was invited to address the Commission. She explained that CIL is a user-led disabled people’s organisation that provides specialist advice and advocacy services. She welcomed the work of Merton’s Welfare Reform and Financial Resilience Group and said that CIL committed to working with the group to mitigate the impact on disabled people. She expressed some concern about the future of the independent living fund and was pleased to hear from Simon Williams that the Cabinet will be discussing this in January

LylaAdwan-Kamara highlighted the impact that welfare reforms were having on disabled people and the difficulties that were being experienced in relation to the medical assessment process, in some instances leading to people becoming homeless as a result of the withdrawal of benefit. She suggested that the provision of face to face support before and during the assessment would be helpful as would advice to help GPs to address pertinent points in their letters in support of their patients.

In response, Simon Williams welcomed Lyla Adwan-Kamara’s suggestions and said he would discuss these issues further with her and with health partners.

The Commission welcomed the work that is being undertaken by council officers and partner organisations to protect the most vulnerable people and RESOLVED:

·         That the financial resilience action plan should be amended to include the role of the Credit Union in relation to objectives 3 and 4.

·         That officers should consider the best way of adding a “traffic light” monitoring system to the action plans, including data to measure the use of food banks

·         That the working group consider the best way to work with the voluntary sector to provide advocacy and other support for disabled people to help them with medical assessment interviews.

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