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Home Refurbishment Programme

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Spain

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Efficiency of the state organisation and service deliveryState governance and better policy making

Organisation name Municipality of Barcelona, Social Welfare department

Contact person: Gemma Parera Alvarez

pareraam@diba.cat

Barcelona Provincial Council is an intermediate local authority. Its objectives are to ensure the provision of municipal services and to support the work of local government. It has competences to coordinate municipal services, manage technical and economic assistance, and provide supra-municipal services in the province of Barcelona.

Through its Area of Service for Citizens, Barcelona Provincial Council helps ensure welfare, quality of life and social cohesion regardless of place of residence in all the municipalities of Barcelona province through services covering people’s whole lives.

Among the services for older people, priority is given to those that help people live with greater independence in their own homes, since these are locally run services.

The purpose of the Home Refurbishment Programme in the Barcelona province (except for the city of Barcelona itself) is to guarantee minimum levels of accessibility, safety, hygiene, habitability and energy efficiency by carrying out refurbishment work in the homes of the most vulnerable older people. The aim is to meet the challenge of an ageing population and increasing situations of dependency through a programme that enables people to live for longer in their own homes. This improves their well-being by maintaining their own spaces and networks of relationships, while delaying the need for institutionalisation.

Through a network of local agents involved in the programme, non-structural work and home repairs are carried out and technical aids installed so beneficiaries can enjoy greater functional autonomy and quality of life at home. This work is divided into five basic types of intervention:

  • bathroom refurbishment
  • kitchen refurbishment
  • general refurbishment
  • additional actions to improve home energy efficiency
  • technical aids.

The programme targets local authorities in the Barcelona area. Currently, 174 local councils participate in the programme (66% of all councils in the Barcelona area), which carry out 2000 refurbishments a year. Municipal social services are responsible for identifying homes and people eligible for participation in the programme.

With regard to the target group, the programme distinguishes between applicants and beneficiaries. The applicants are people aged over 65, proposed by the municipal social services, who are in situations of fragility. This may be due to age, health, lack of personal autonomy, disability, dependence, vulnerability due to living alone or with another older person, or financial difficulties. The beneficiaries are all those living in the home. They include people aged under 65 with special needs in terms of physical or mental ability to carry out activities of daily living (ADL) in the home.

The Home Refurbishment Programme is complex due to the number of agents involved and the interrelations between them, and the procedures used in the different phases. For this reason, an operational governance model has been created to manage relations between the different actors and thus identify their needs more closely. It improves the design and adaptation of the types of actions to the needs of vulnerable older people living at home, or people with a disability. This model has helped scale interventions to improve accessibility and personal autonomy throughout the municipalities in the Barcelona province, reaching a large number of small and medium-sized municipalities.

In this operational governance model, Barcelona Provincial Council is the institution that promotes, coordinates, manages and finances the programme, by contracting a company specialising in functional adaptation of homes, which is responsible for managing the intervention projects. The interventions are executed by building companies contracted by this organisation. For their part, local authorities – as the authorities closest to the public – participate by identifying target beneficiaries and homes for the programme, and by co-funding the work. Beneficiaries participate by assessing the programme, which has helped to adapt and improve the interventions. Third-sector social organisations specialising in care for vulnerable older people and those with disabilities also work with Barcelona Provincial Council by designing and publicising the programme among their users, and referring potential beneficiaries to participating local councils.

The factors favouring the sustainability and durability of the Home Refurbishment Programme are:

  • Simple procedures for joining the programme. Local councils, through an online platform, only have to apply to participate, earmarking a part of their budget to co-fund the interventions. Furthermore, the fact that outsourced companies are contracted through the provincial council helps enormously in lessening the already significant workload for municipalities.
  • The cost of the interventions: the cost of the work is shared between Barcelona Provincial Council and the local councils at a ratio of 80:20 respectively. This means that the average cost of each intervention to local authorities is around €235, which is easily affordable for all councils, regardless of size. Furthermore, at their own discretion, local councils can establish mechanisms for co-payment by users on whatever criteria of fairness they consider pertinent, thus the cost to councils can be lowered much further.
  • The high level of satisfaction among all agents participating in the programme (especially users and local councils) guarantees local commitment to continue investing in the programme.
  • The provincial council’s commitment to continued political support for the initiative, in the context of the goals of the Area of Service for Citizens, promotes social policies for cohesion and reduces inequality.
  • The social need that the programme aims to alleviate is one that will increase over the years due to the progressive ageing of the population and increased life expectancy. This fact, in the light of the results to date, makes it necessary to continue investing in the future of the programme.

The challenges that ageing poses to social and demographic structures and welfare systems are felt throughout Europe. The population over the age of 65 in the Barcelona province has steadily increased in recent years, as in most European countries. According to the Statistical Institute of Catalonia (Idescat), 18.6% of the population in the area is aged over 65, a rise of 2% in the last 20 years. This phenomenon has been accompanied by an increase in the number of over 75s, who now represent 31.9% of this group, as life expectancy among older people increases. The population of over 65s will continue to grow in the future and could reach 23.9% in Catalonia in 2031. Hence, we are facing a present and future challenge.

Life expectancy among the Catalan population is one of the highest in Europe, at 83.2 years. The fact that women have a longer life expectancy (almost six more years) means there is a larger number of widows, who often live alone with small pensions and are one of the most vulnerable groups of the population.

Among the over 65s, 12.1% are at risk of poverty in Catalonia (Idescat, 2015), with incomes of less than €9667.30 a year and 58% live on less than €1000 a month. Furthermore, since the economic crisis, older people have become essential to many families to pay for basic expenses such as housing or food. This means that many older people cannot afford home improvements for accessibility or autonomy.

Older women are at greater risk of poverty than older men (14.4% compared to 9.1%, respectively). This is mainly because they receive lower pensions due to not having paid social insurance contributions or having worked fewer years or have had intermittent careers, or been paid lower salaries.

Older people are also affected by energy poverty, with 6% of the over 65s having problems keeping their homes at a suitable temperature, a percentage which, although lower than among the total population, has doubled since 2013.

A total of 22.4% of the over 65s live alone (75.5% of whom are women) and 48.1% live with an older partner (Idescat, 2015), which places them in a situation of greater vulnerability.

At the same time, it is among older people that housing conditions are most precarious, mainly due to the age of the housing stock. Most older people – some 88% – live in their own homes, while 9.5% are in rented accommodation. Many homes have physical barriers that impede ADLs, such as baths instead of showers, and hinder mobility, frequently making the help of another person necessary, or utilities that are a safety risk, such as gas rings in kitchens.

In this context, it must be remembered that most older people want to live in their own home and thus maintain their network of relationships. Therefore, the state of the home is essential to being able to live there in decent conditions.

Thus, the Barcelona Provincial Council Home Refurbishment Programme aims to meet these social needs and intervene among a group with a high social risk, a high rate of poverty, higher levels of dependence and loneliness, and poorly adapted homes with architectural barriers that hinder or impede personal autonomy. The programme aims to foster personal autonomy among vulnerable older people and thus promote social inclusion.

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