Minister for Social Accommodation Roderick Galdes, together with the Dean of the Faculty for Social Wellbeing Professor Andrew Azzopardi, launched a study on the establishment of a care plan for people in need of social accommodation.
Minister Roderick Galdes explained that the approach for housing applicants and social housing beneficiaries is to be offered through a comprehensive plan that provides peace of mind, attention and access to services, which shall address the key challenges that have led them to requiring alternative accommodation.
Minister Galdes explained that housing difficulties rarely arise on their own and are often the culmination of a sequence of different challenges such as addictions, illness, and family breakdown.
“At this stage, along with the provision of adequate accommodation which is the basic and crucial need for applicants and their family who turn towards the Housing Authority for help, we want to offer all possible tools to the individual to help strengthen their position and move forwards. This study will give us a varied but specialised framework to address the various challenges leading families to resort to social housing”, concluded Minister Galdes.
The study, entitled ‘The next step in Housing Profiling’, will be using the profiling exercise published earlier this year to come up with a number of plans designed to assist applicants with different needs who have pending applications for alternative accommodation. These plans will help applicants improve their quality of life and standard of living, since providing alternative accommodation alone is usually not enough.
From his end, Dean of the Faculty for Social Wellbeing Professor Andrew Azzopardi stressed that, “Housing is a basic and essential need for man and as the Faculty for Social Wellbeing it is a privilege that we are taking part in this aspect of social policy, because as a faculty we must contribute to the empowerment of our communities ”.
The care plan study is being funded by the Housing Development Fund, which is being administered by the Housing Authority and will involve a number of experts in education and social sciences.
