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Spotlight on our service

The City of Edinburgh Household Support Service

The Household Support service within City of Edinburgh Council brings together a range of services formerly organised through housing support and community safety provision. The team is busy with referrals from Housing, social care services and others as well as providing direct access to those in need. 

The service provides holistic and practical support to the city’s diverse and growing communities, helping residents with support to sustain their home and to address issues of antisocial behaviour and neighbour disputes. There are also projects working with families on parenting skills and school attendance.

The Household Support service aims to make communities safer by promoting and developing methods of dispute resolution, utilising mediation as an important and useful tool. Its principles and techniques have also been used in approaches to offering support and help to our clients and have proved to be invaluable not only in conflict resolution but in other areas of intervention such as family relations.

Community mediation is a well-established tool for dispute resolution for a wide range of neighbour issues, including noise, clash of lifestyles, children’s behaviour, use of common areas, abusive behaviour, vehicles, rubbish, pets and all sorts of other matters that can arise when people are living in close proximity to each other. 

Household Support utilises mediation “as a tool for intervention in situations of conflict, mediation can present practical solutions, it can offer more positive forms of communication, reframe contentious issues into shared problems, and sometimes give disputants a different perspective on the actions of themselves and others”.

The team has a growing number of certified mediators who have been promoting and delivering mediation in the 4 localities across Edinburgh. Moreover, the wider team is also well trained in providing information about the mediation process and its benefits in a clear and positive manner. 

The service has its promotional material and leaflets distributed in public places, making it easy for the general public to get information about the service, the process itself and the ways of accessing it.

Mediation referrals come from various professionals, mostly the Council’s Housing teams, housing associations and Police Scotland. Recently, the service has been seeing an increase in self-referrals, often following initial contact and discussion through local service contact numbers or one of the drop-ins that Household Support runs across the city. 

Household Support undertakes annual surveys with service users and these clearly show that mediation is a preferred method of conflict resolution which helps both parties reach a mutually agreed solution. It’s a process that gives our clients the opportunity to be fully heard, and to hear what the other side of the story is. Without judgements being made or solutions imposed while searching for solution, mediation remains a private process in which agreements reached by two parties are more likely to lead to long term solutions than decisions ‘imposed’ by authorities such as Housing.

Our mediation services are free to all, though a small fee is charged to housing associations to cover some of our costs. Our referrals and further information can be accessed through our local duty teams, details of which are available on Edinburgh City Council website at Community mediation – The City of Edinburgh Council