26/08/2025
We were delighted to welcome Hamish Falconer MP to Abbeyfield House in Lincoln to mark Starts at Home Day (August 29).
Starts at Home Day is a chance to highlight the value of sheltered housing services, the benefits they bring for residents and their families and the vital services they provide in local communities.
Beyond providing a safe and supportive home that allows residents to maintain their independence, sheltered housing is a crucial part of British society. It plays a key role in alleviating pressure on essential services, including the NHS, care services, and emergency services. It is estimated that there would be a need for 2,500 more residential care places, each costing £45,000-£50,000 per year, without sheltered housing provision; and that NHS hospital beds would face 110,000 more days of delayed discharge, and 41,000 more people would face homelessness.
As well as highlighting the ways in which we enhance our quality of life and support our staff to provide the best possible service at Abbeyfield House, Hamish’s visit was also a chance to underline the current crisis facing the sector, brought on by years of funding cuts. One in three sheltered housing providers had to close schemes last year because of funding pressures, and three in five are planning to close schemes in the future.
We are backing the NHF’s Save Our Supported Housing campaign, which calls on the government to urgently commit to long-term, sustainable funding for sheltered housing, to create an emergency fund for services that assist supported housing schemes in the Autumn Budget, and to allocate enough of the new Affordable Homes Programme funding to the building of new supported and older persons’ housing, and improve the conditions for bidding for small organisations.
Starts at Home Day is an important opportunity for Abbeyfield Living Society (ALS) to show MPs the tremendous value of, and the existential crisis facing, sheltered housing in this country. We also see our engagement as the perfect accompaniment to our role in supporting the work of the APPG on Housing and Care for Older People and helping to influence government policy to secure the future of sheltered housing.
