Elderly residents waiting over a year for home adaptations, report finds
An elderly woman using automatic stairlift at her home. Image: Adobe
Hackney’s elderly residents are facing an average wait of over a year to have home adaptations put in, a report has revealed.
Councillors who met last night (Thursday 13 February) to scrutinise the Town Hall’s adult social care strategy were left shaking their heads in “shock” as they learned that adjustments like rails, ramps and non-slip flooring were taking, on average, 368 days to be installed.
Cllr Anna Lynch (Labour, Homerton) asked: “Does it take a year to put some bed rails in?”
Cllr Ben Lucas (Labour, Hoxton West) sought assurances from officials about how they were working to expedite home transformations.
“This is not about financial difficulties – it’s about how we’re practicing with our residents to live long and healthy lives,” Cllr Lynch said.
Cllr Claudia Turbet-Delof (Independent Socialist, Victoria) added that it was a “scary” situation for the borough that lack of resourcing meant that residents could be “in distress for so long”.
Hackney’s deputy head of transformation, Kat Buckley, said the council’s teams are investigating how simpler adaptations like stairlifts could be installed quicker, adding that the 368 day time average begins at “the point of referral” and often involves “significant construction work”.
While there was no “fixed timeline”, the department was meeting with other local authorities to learn about best practices for disabled facilities grant (DFG) adaptations.
Ms Buckley added that the extra £86 million promised for ASC for 2025/26 and coming financial years had allowed the department to “focus in” on its service improvement project.
The recent data reveals demand for adult social care has nearly doubled in the last five years, outpacing the service’s 25 per cent budget increase.
Staffing levels for delivering adult social care, such as social workers, occupational therapists and administrative employees, have also plateaued during this time – suggesting teams are under-resourced to deal with rising case loads.
Part of the Town Hall’s new strategy to bring down waiting times is reducing the “number of hand-offs” within the process by moving management from the council’s housing department to the adult social care team in April.
This move marks the first stage of creating a new ‘Disabled Facilities Grant (DFG) Home Adaptations Service’, which seeks to make sure adaptations are “better integrated” with social care assessments in Hackney.
When applying for adjustments, residents currently receive help from an external home improvement agency (HIA).
Among other responsibilities, the HIA works with therapists to assess needs, supports residents with funding applications for adaptations, and manages the hiring process for contractors.
The local authority plans to bring this service in-house, but the actual work to install rails, ramps, stairlifts and other adaptations will still be contracted out, though now a ‘dynamic purchasing system’ will be used to help make procurement and construction “more efficient”.
Fixtures such as grab rails for bathrooms, hallways and stairs are designed to provide stability to elderly residents with mobility issues, and help prevent falls in the home.
But while the adult social care department hopes the new improvement plan will help reduce the risk of falls and injury, the council has faced heavy criticism over its prevention efforts.
In November, campaigners condemned the “catastrophic” decision to scrap its falls prevention service, Staying Steady.
While health and social care chief Cllr Chris Kennedy assured residents at the time that a “comprehensive, clinical falls prevention service funded by the NHS will continue to provide the support that our residents at higher risk need”, others are less confident.
Cllr Turbet-Delof told the Citizen: “Hearing about all of these horrible cuts and limits of budgets, it would make sense to keep the falls prevention programme as a preventative measure.”