It is increasingly recognised that housing has a vital role to play in safeguarding and picking up on signs of abuse, neglect, exploitation, self-harm, and the Covid-19 pandemic has focussed the significance of this.
Safeguarding is about protecting children, young people and vulnerable adults from abuse and neglect. At LiveWest everybody has the right to be safe no matter who they are or what their circumstance.
Mel Thomson, LiveWest’s Safeguarding Lead, has been attending events to outline how housing associations have even more of a valuable role to play in safeguarding where domestic abuse is identified and will be leading the work for LiveWest to achieve Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance (DAHA) accreditation, which is nationally recognised and will help improve further on LiveWest’s approach to keeping families and victims of abuse safe.
Mel Thomson Head of Safeguarding at LiveWest said: “We look at safeguarding as everybody’s business, we employ 1,400 people and it is their responsibility to be aware of potential safeguarding situations, we take safeguarding seriously and have policies and procedures that help to identify and take action where we think a vulnerable person might be at risk.”
“There are vulnerable people living across all of our homes. Working in partnership to safeguard vulnerable adults starts from within. Colleagues need to be able to identify safeguarding signs, including domestic abuse when they come across it in communities and households.
“We have a Safeguarding Leads group, it is chaired by our Director of Supported Housing and includes leads from across our services including in-house maintenance teams. Often it is the tradespeople that have access to our households that are the eyes and ears of our organisation. They can pick up on signs that things are not quite right and flag to the safeguarding team.
Our approach to Domestic Abuse is a fundamental part of safeguarding all household members.
“For our customers we have lots of safeguarding resources available to them. Particularly during lockdown things got worse for some people.”
https://www.livewest.co.uk/my-community/support-for-domestic-abuse-in-lockdown
At the end of November Mel will be sharing her experience at a Westminster Insights for the Digital National Safeguarding Conference. The Multi Agency Panel Session: Harnessing Cross Sector Working to Improve Safeguarding Practice.