The Story of the (Bankside Hostel) Project

The learning disability White Paper Valuing People (DH, 2001) set out to improve services for people with learning difficulties. At the same time, the Care Standards Act (2000) and the Supporting People programme have changed the way in which 'vulnerable people' are housed and supported in the community (DH, 2002).

This has caused big changes for many people living in local authority hostels and elderly people's homes (Means et al, 2003) and many local authority homes in England and Wales have closed down. In some areas, people have tried to stop the closure of residential homes (The Guardian, 2002).

As part of these changes, some Supporting People teams now spend more time talking to service users with learning difficulties. They want to know where the service users would like to live and what they think about the changes. They also want to know if they are happy with the support they receive at home (ODPM 2003).

The Bankside Hostel project grew out of a link between one Supporting People team and Kathy Boxall and Steve Murphy (a pseudonym). In early 2002, Kathy Boxall was asked to talk to learning disabled council tenants. Later in 2002, Kathy was asked to talk to people who were living in three different learning disability hostels, two of which were going to close. This second group were people with severe learning difficulties. Many of this group could not communicate as easily as the first group she spoke to. This meant she had to find new ways of trying to find out their views.

The following year Kathy was asked by the Supporting People team to talk again to all these different groups. This piece of work aimed to find out how much people with learning difficulties were being asked about and included in planning services. This was a large project and Steve Murphy helped Kathy with this work.

Because Kathy and Steve had done this work they were known to service managers as well as staff and residents at Bankside Hostel. Their relationship with these people meant that it was not too difficult to get permission from the social services department to carry out the research that is described on this website.

References
DH (2001) Valuing People: A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21 st Century , London , Department of Health.

DH (2002) Housing and Support Options for People with Learning Disabilities , London, Department of Health / Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Means, R., Richards, S. and Smith, R. (2003) Community Care: Policy and Practice (Third Edition) Basingstoke , Palgrave Macmillan.

ODPM (2003) Supporting People: A guide to user involvement for organisations providing housing related support services , London , Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

The Guardian (2002) Homes dispute 'threatens wellbeing of elderly' , Society Guardian, August 7 th , p7.