Homelessness
If you believe you are at risk of homelessness, for example your landlord has served you with a notice or you have been asked to leave and have nowhere to stay, you should ask for an initial assessment of your situation. Do this by filling out the following form.
See Help with homelessness – Are you at risk of becoming homeless in Kent?
This will let us know about your situation. Once we receive your form, one of our triage officers will contact you. They will assess you to decide what happens next. You may not be contacted immediately if you are not at risk of homelessness imminently.
When we make contact with you, it is important that you answer your telephone and speak to us. If you don’t we will close your case as we have been unable to speak to you. Calls from us usually appear as TMBC on mobile phones.
If we do speak to you, it may be that at this time your application is closed, as the triage officers have already offered advice and support and this allowed you to resolve your own situation. In these cases a homeless application is not triggered.
Some applications will be passed to an officer to look at what duties we may owe you.
If you are threatened with homelessness
Your case will be passed to a homelessness prevention officer. They will make an appointment with you to assess your situation. You will be asked about your current situation and why you are losing your home. If we accept a prevention duty to you then a prevention officer will work with you to try and stop you from losing your current home if this is possible, or maybe help you with finding an alternative home. We have 56 days in which to try and prevent you from losing your home or find you an alternative. This can go on longer, for example, if on day 55 of a prevention duty you find a suitable home and you are working with the homeless prevention officer on securing this using funds provided by us then it can be extended if it is believed this will prevent you from becoming homeless.
If we cannot prevent you from losing your home or you are homeless on the day
We cannot prevent some cases of homelessness. If this happens your case will be referred from the homelessness prevention officer to a housing solutions officer.
If you come to us and you are homeless on the day, and this is the first time you have asked us for help, you will be asked about your situation and why you cannot return to your home or where you were staying.
We may then accept a relief duty to you and your household, which means we have to help you to find alternative accommodation. We have 56 days to do this. If we are not able to prevent or relieve your homelessness, we then have 15 days once the relief duty ends in which to make a decision.
You will be issued with a Personal Housing Plan (PHP). This will contain a list of actions for you to take. You should check this to see if there is anything on there that you can do to try to find yourself alternative accommodation. This also contains useful information about benefit rates, and incentives we may offer to landlords to help households into the private rented sector.
Temporary accommodation
Before we provide temporary accommodation (TA) we will ask you for details of any family or friends, and will make contact to see if you can stay with them.
We do not provide TA to everyone. When you approach us, if your homelessness cannot be prevented or if you are homeless on the day, we will complete an assessment to determine what accommodation may be suitable and if you have any vulnerabilities that may give you a priority need for accommodation. If you do not have a priority need, we will not provide accommodation.
If we do have to provide TA, we must make sure that any accommodation offered to you is suitable. Suitability in this instance has a specific definition:
- the cost of the accommodation and if it is affordable to you
- the location and where it is in relation to any caring responsibilities you may have, your children’s schools and work
- any additional needs you may have, such as a need for accommodation to help with any limitations you may have. For example, accommodation would be unsuitable if we offered you a home on a tenth floor of a block of flats, there were no lifts and you had an issue with climbing stairs. However, the same accommodation might be suitable if there are lifts
Any accommodation offered on the day you need it may not immediately be suitable accommodation. What will be offered on the day will be what is available, but we will then work with you and the organisations who own and manage TA to find you an alternative home that is suitable. If you are out of district, we will do what we can to bring you back into the district. However, TA provision in Tonbridge and Malling is limited and has to be prioritised for those who meet the criteria in our TA policy.
When you go into TA, you are issued with Terms of Occupation. If you breach these, we will warn you about the breach. Persistent breaches will lead to you losing your accommodation and we may have no further need to offer you any further accommodation. If you are asked to leave TA and you have children, we will make a referral to social services.
Households in TA can also be requested to move at short notice, and this is at our discretion. We do not take such decisions lightly and will work with households to make sure that any moves cause as little disruption as possible.
If you are in TA and we have accepted a housing duty to you, you will be made only one offer of accommodation. You can be made a permanent offer of accommodation in either the private rented sector or an offer of social housing. This offer must be suitable. If you refuse the offer then we will end your TA and you will be required to move out. We will then not be required to offer you any alternative accommodation and you will need to make your own arrangements. We always advise that you accept any offer and then request a review of the suitability of the accommodation. This means you will have somewhere to live while the review is ongoing.
We do not routinely help with moving costs or furnish homes. If you are in TA then you know that you will be moving on, so we advise households to try and save a little money to help with these housing costs when they arise.