Purpose

1.0BACKGROUND
1.1West Lancashire Borough Council was awarded £4.25m UK SPF
funding in 2023, to be spent on a variety of schemes across the
Borough over 2023/24 and 2024/15.
1.2The West Lancashire Health and Wellbeing Partnership (WLHWP),
which comprises a range of local and wider partners and is chaired
by the WLBC Deputy Chief Executive (currently Acting Chief
Executive), has chosen three priority workstreams, one of which is
health and housing.
1.3Under the health and housing priority workstream, there are
three sub-workstreams, namely damp and mould; frailty; and
homelessness and mental health support.
1.4The frailty sub-workstream seeks to help frail people to be able
to live longer in their homes, in order to reduce pressure on
hospital beds and the need for care home accommodation. One project
within this sub-workstream is to offer healthy homes assessments
(HHAs) to eligible people, whereby suitably qualified and trusted
assessors visit people at home to look at the home environment and
discuss / recommend what improvements could be made to the home to
benefit the health, wellbeing and safety of the home occupier(s),
to make minor adaptations where appropriate and consented, and to
signpost the occupier(s) to relevant services available, should
they wish to take up any of these services.
1.5Carrying out HHAs will need to be carried out by an external
body, and will require funding to pay for the expertise, labour and
materials involved.
1.6It is intended to use UKSPF money to fund the proposed HHA
project, subject to authorisation by the Acting Chief Executive
(formerly the Corporate Director of Transformation, Housing and
Resources) as per the WLBC Constitution.
1.7The project will also tie in with work being coordinated across
West Lancashire that seeks to reduce unnecessary calls to
Lancashire County Council's Adult Social Care service. By improving
the homes, health and wellbeing of frail people, and by signposting
them to relevant services, this should reduce these people's need
to seek 'general help' from Adult Social Care, and should result in
them contacting the most relevant or 'targeted' organisations and
services for assistance. The HHA project will initially concentrate
on four wards within West Lancashire where there are currently
particularly high volumes of calls to LCC Adult Social Care.

Content

Granted