Best Practice: Bron Afon Housing Association

Service/Team: The Homes Engagement Project, Bron Afon Housing Association

The Homes Engagement Project is a pilot project set up by Bron Afon in October 2022 and is funded by Torfaen Council’s Housing Support Grant (HSG). Its aim is to support individuals and households that have been identified as needing help with hoarding. This differs from previous projects in that we aim to work with individuals and households holistically – to get to the root cause of why people hoard. Once we identify a potential cause of someone’s hoarding, we look to bring in and work with outside organisations to get them the support they may need.

We also operate on the ‘do with and not for’ basis so we won’t be going into a property to clear it for the individual. We encourage and empower the people we support to make informed choices about how to deal with their hoarding. The project is also not just limited to Bron Afon tenants but does extend to all social and private landlords and owner occupiers living in the Torfaen area.

We are a highly skilled team of three with many years of experience between us of working with vulnerable adults, particularly adults with complex mental health needs. We are very fortunate at this time to not have time limitations imposed upon us because of the complex cases we work with, because, as we all know, there is no quick fix.

When the project first started in 2022, I was the one and only Homes Conditions Officer and consequently most of my client base I have been supporting for the last 2 years. Some of my clients are now nearing the end of their journey having completely turned their lives around and with our support and encouragement have changed their mindset – just like Keith in the video you showed us today.

Bron Afon as an organisation have now introduced a Property Health Check, which is something that was initially created by the Homes Engagement Project . This is being undertaken by our housing officers to ‘RAG Rate’ all 8500 properties owned by Bron Afon. RAG Rating is where the Clutter Scale Rating has been adapted into three different bands depending on how cluttered their property is – 1 to 3 in Green , 4 to 6 is Amber and 7 to 9 is Red. Obviously, anything rated as being Red will need a referral to The Homes Engagement Project, anything rated as Amber will need to be monitored and anything rated as Green is OK.

The Homes Engagement Team have also just launched Hoarding Awareness Training Sessions following requests from other HSG partner organisations on how to support people experiencing hoarding. There are three different versions of the training sessions – the first one is approximately 4 hours long and is fully interactive and run from our Head Office in Cwmbran, the second is a 1 hour version of the full session designed to take to meetings to raise awareness of what we do and the third and final session is 20 minutes long designed to fit into the ‘Toolbox Talks’ for our trades staff. This is something that we are extremely pleased with and have had a lot of interest in.

Find out more about Bron Afon HERE