“There are 2,000 people in hospital, who don’t need to be in hospital, because there’s nowhere for them to live”
Ground breaking ceremony with Elim Housing Association at new site – The Haven, Ruthven Road in Knowle(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach Plc)
Scores of young adults with learning disabilities across Bristol face a future either in institutions miles away from home, or living with ageing parents who struggle to look after them.
And what’s even worse is many end up stuck in hospital – even though they don’t need to be there – because there is nowhere else for them to go. Nationally, there are more than 2,000 adults with learning disabilities who are in hospital – simply because there’s no suitable accommodation for them.
But now, in a corner of a South Bristol estate, on unused land round the back of some homes, work has begun on a groundbreaking new project that could change all that, and put Bristol at the forefront of a quiet revolution in the way we as a society look after people who need looking after, but like all of us are entitled to live independent lives.
It’s called The Haven, and at the moment it looks like any other building site, complete with diggers, builders and bosses in hard hats and high-vis waistcoats.
But when it’s all finished, The Haven will consist of specialist accommodation as self-contained bungalows for six young people with learning disabilities or autism, who have complex care needs, but who may currently be in hospital, or be at risk of hospital admission.
The scheme also includes separate staff units on site, to allow carers to support the residents round the clock, to provide a safe, stable and supportive place to live – but one which also gives them independence and their own place.
(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach Plc)
Places like this are few and far between. Too often the kind of young people who will eventually called The Haven home are either living with their parents, or end up in hospital or some kind of care home.
What’s new about this project is the way it’s being funded – and that could provide the blueprint for funding more of these much-needed places all over Bristol, and the rest of the country.
“They currently live at home with their parents – their parents are getting older, it’s much more difficult for them to cope and so instead of them moving into hospital, which would be the wrong thing for them and for the hospitals, (the plan) is to provide them with their own homes with secure tenancies,” explained the man behind the scheme, Elim Housing Association chief executive Paul Smith.
“It will be where they can live out the rest of their lives, where their families can come and visit them, their friends can come and visit them but where they’ve got the security and the care that’s on site,” he added.
Ground breaking ceremony with Elim Housing Association at new site – The Haven, Ruthven Road in Knowle(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach Plc)
“Nationally there are 2,000 people in hospital who don’t need to be in hospital, because there’s nowhere for them to live.
“Then there are many thousands more who are living with ageing parents. Those parents are really worried about what will happen to them as they get old, as they die. There’s a massive need for these sorts of specialist facilities.
“This one in Bristol is the first one that’s been funded this way and is now likely to be used as a model nationally to provide more and more of these facilities that are so greatly needed,” he added.
The way The Haven is being funded is the game-changer. Previously, getting places like The Haven built proved so prohibitively expensive that local councils or health authorities couldn’t do it.
The Haven, Ruthven Road in Knowle (Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach Plc)
Until now, anyone needing a home and a project like this would have either had to rely on a cash-strapped local council to fund all of it, or rely on a private developer to create it – and the need for a return in the form of rent would have made it unaffordable for anyone with learning disabilities to pay for.
What Elim Housing Association and Paul Smith have managed to do is to get the Government to change the definition of affordable housing, which will hopefully pave the way for what is now being called ‘The Bristol Model’ to create homes like these everywhere.
“The Bristol model allows us to use a mixture of grant subsidy and private borrowing to build these projects, which in the past wasn’t possible,” Mr Smith explained.
“But we’ve managed to get a new special definition of affordable housing for these schemes which means that we can move people into these projects and account them as affordable housing, and ensure that they can actually be funded.
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“Up until now projects like this have required 100 per cent state funding, which obviously runs out very quickly – this scheme will cost £4 million – or have relied solely on private finance, where the rents have been massively higher because of the returns that the private investors want. So this scheme of mixed funding is the first one in the country,” he explained.
With The Haven being the first of its kind, more can now follow. “We’re working with Bristol City Council on a number of schemes. We’re looking at converting an existing building in Horfield, building a new facility in East Bristol and we’re also looking at other locations – for instance we’ve got a scheme very similar to this currently in planning in Gloucestershire.
“We’re also building a scheme in Gloucestershire at the moment and we’re now talking to Homes England about how we can roll out these sorts of projects nationally, but Bristol is the big focus of where we’re delivering these schemes and we’ve had a fantastic partnership with Bristol City Council to be able to achieve that,” he explained.
An astonishing 402 slow worms have been found in a tiny area of garden next to a day centre in Knowle West. They are being moved to new habitats on the Western Slopes in South Bristol(Image: Elim Housing/Paul Smith)
It’s been a long road to get to the point of holding a photocall as work begins. The bungalows will be built on a site that used to be a day centre, in the space behind the homes on Ruthven Road, Chepstow Road, Wallingford Road and Morpeth Road in Knowle West.
The day centre’s grounds had been left quiet and overgrown – and the prospect of the peace being shattered by this development sparked quite a few objections to the plan from local residents of the four surrounding streets whose gardens back onto the site.
It also caused a great deal of disruption to the wildlife that had reclaimed the site. Two summers ago, Bristol Live revealed that the entire project had been held up, despite getting planning permission, because ecologists found the overgrown land was home to more than 400 endangered slow worms – not worms, or even snakes, but legless lizards – which was a discovery that astonished wildlife experts.
READ MORE: New homes delayed by remarkable discovery of more than 400 slow worms living in one small garden
It took almost a year to carefully rehome them, which involved catching them and gently transporting them to the edge of the Knowle West estate and to the Western Slopes – a council owned wildlife haven that local residents successfully persuaded the council not to build hundreds of homes on a few years ago.
Only when the ecologists were satisfied there were no more slow worms to be caught did they give the all-clear for work to begin to clear the site.
Now, with the slow worms moved on and the funding in place, the ground has officially been broken on The Haven, and six adults in desperate need of a home of their own will soon be moving in.