Supported exempt accommodation (SEA) is, according to Birmingham City Council, “housing where vulnerable adults are supported to live independently”. However, private landlords in North Edgbaston, Birmingham, are exploiting the benefits system for profit while providing inadequate accommodation.
Alex (not their real name) is 42 years old but looks 72, and is one of many residents in the North Edgbaston area of Birmingham who lives in property categorised as exempt accommodation. Chatting to them, I discovered they were suffering from accelerated aging brought on by poverty, and they are not optimistic about the future. “I doubt I’ll see 50,” they say. Their best friend died at 50.
Supported exempt accommodation provides the bare minimum
The key word is ‘support’. Residents have complex needs which cannot be fixed immediately and in the interim require a place to live. SEA providers are meant to deliver this social support to “enable the resident to live or adjust to living independently within the community”. Alex refers to this as “a sick joke”.
In reality, it seems, there is little to no support, with one provider on Hagley Road telling a claimant: “We don’t look after you, we do not need to do anything but provide a room for you.” The tenant reported: “It is safer to live in a park than in the provider’s rooms.” They said the room offered was damp, profoundly cold and the door didn’t lock properly, placing them in danger from other residents who were violent.
How does SEA work?
SEA providers gain revenue by claiming from the benefit system. It works like this: a resident is deemed as needing exempt accommodation and therefore the upper limit on how much that person can claim in terms of benefits is massively increased. This means that the housing provider, once in receipt of this person, can claim an uncapped amount of benefit, on the grounds that it is more costly to support these people.
According to Birmingham City Council: “SEAs are exempt from the usual Housing Benefit rules, which place an upper limit (cap) on the amount of benefit people can claim.
“The reason for the exemption is that SEAs can be more expensive to run. Insurance, repairs and maintenance can all cost more for SEAs than for general needs tenancies.
“EA providers do face a limit on how much they can claim from the benefit system, however, this limit is far higher than traditional housing benefit.”
This makes sense. Housing people who have complex social needs may indeed cost more. However, if the support is not forthcoming, as is claimed by many EA residents, just where is the additional money going?
Birmingham’s Skid Row?
The current regulatory framework for exempt accommodation is weak. The government has not provided sufficient regulatory agencies to monitor the situation and Birmingham City Council is known, according to Inside Housing, to provide easier access to SEA benefits than its neighbours such as Sandwell and Dudley. This may be one reason why Birmingham has such a high number of SEA claimants, with over 22,000 and rising.
Is this light touch the reason so many SEA properties exist in North Edgbaston? The council seems to have concentrated SEA properties in Hagley Road and the top end has become Birmingham’s Skid Row. It is common to see sex workers on the corner of Hagley and Stanmore Roads. Sex work takes place openly, even in front of an MP who once visited the area, while desperate people beg for food outside Tesco. The Harborne walkway is littered with sex waste and human faecal matter and local residents often come across SEA residents who have slept in the small, wooded areas, to avoid the dangers of SEA social housing, such as mouldy rooms and violent residents.
A weak response stunting growth
As a response many local residents have turned to their MP, councillors and police for help. Unfortunately, the police cannot provide the resources required to manage an increasing problem. However, the police have increased their patrols in the area and assigned a PCSO to Hagley Road. In addition, the local MP is hampered by a lack of regulation and the local councillors are constrained by the complexity of organising various agencies with little time and resource. For example, two local councillors did work to bring several agencies together to tackle the sex working problem, however, but not one agency has appeared in the area since the residents’ action group met, and that was over two years ago.
North Edgbaston will find it hard to develop economically whilst this concentration of SEA properties exists. For example, there is an embryonic high street, with the potential to become a prosperous social space. There is already a restaurant, shops and nail boutiques. However, the prevalence of anti-social behaviour creates a tension on the high street, which is off-putting to shoppers. Private business is unable to develop because some of the buildings they wish to develop are next to SEA properties; no one wants to move into flats or buy houses attached to a building which looks severely neglected or buy a flat where other residents spend their time suffering from untreated mental and social problems.
The privatisation of pain
The current government has managed to privatise poverty, handing its management to a set of housing providers who are exempt from effective managed regulation. The contract offered by the government allows a provider to deliver a minimal amount of support (if any at all) and gain access to the benefit system with few regulations on how much they can take from it.
In return, the private sector offers nothing more than a roof over people’s heads, even if it leaks. The privatisation of poverty makes a benefit commodity out of each homeless person. Thus, they cease to be human and as long as they are dependent on exempt accommodation, they are profitable to the housing provider. Why, then, would any provider want to reform such a commodity? For them, big money is on offer – an uncapped amount of continuous money. This is a business plan which, according to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities parliamentary committee report 2022-2023, has allowed “unscrupulous landlords” to enter the market.
Where next – no one knows
The future is not all bleak, although it is mixed. Birmingham City Council has helped drive forward increased regulation and monitoring with its own scheme. However, Inside Housing reports they “found nearly half the units of the controversial housing type in the city fall below its own minimum standards”.
A new government is coming, or so we hope, one that places people at the heart of housing policy and not deregulation, neo-liberalism and money. Labour may well introduce a regulated approach, one that outlines set criteria which actually ensure independent living and where the provider must adhere to strict rules of human empowerment, not human emaciation. Until then, Alex may well be right, they probably won’t see their 50th.
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