to prominence once more at the start of the new millen- nium, due to the identification of a shortage of essential pub- lic sector workers (now known as ‘key workers’) in London and the South East and the effects on the viability and sus- tainability of social infrastructure provision, such as health care and education. Various policies have been enacted, including the Starter Homes Initiative involving housing associations in acquiring properties for low-cost sale to cer- tain categories of key worker, and the more widely scoped Key Worker Initiative, again enabled through RSLs and stressing low cost home ownership as the main way of pro- viding affordable housing for certain public sector employ- ees already living in or intending to take up work in areas where employment demand exceeded supply.
The discussion above illustrates the point that housing need and demand is often related to factors other than purely the availability or otherwise of housing, but that housing shortage can nonetheless be the cause of problems which go beyond just housing supply–demand imbalances. The central lesson here is that housing issues are rarely just housing issues, and should be seen in a holistic way to appreciate their true significance.
and services such as health provision through the National Health Service, state pensions, social security, education and public transport personal subsidies such as concession- ary fares for pensioners. The common feature of all of these forms of provision is that eligibility depends on individuals or households having to satisfy a range of criteria, either on the basis of having contributed towards a fund without a further means test, as is the case with National Insurance – related benefits such as the state pension, where eligibility depends upon NI contribution level and age, or through having a recognised need which cannot be met from the subject’s own resources, which may not be contribution- based, such as ‘free’ school meals for the children of those claiming social security.
State benefits which are contribution-dependent but avail- able to all who have paid in, regardless of current income or other resources, are known as universal – non-means-tested – benefits, and those which are not contribution-dependent but depend on assessed need only or mainly are some- times known as selective – means-tested – benefits. Social housing is in the latter camp. From the early days, only those who satisfy certain housing needs criteria have been able to obtain social housing, although a feature of this benefit which is not generally true of state financial assist- ance is that beneficiaries are able to retain the gain even if they become able to satisfy their needs in the marketplace, as tenancies cannot be terminated on the basis of having breached a given affordable income level.
Social housing is rationed as a state-enabled commodity designed to meet housing shortages. Legislation prescribes the form of this rationing, principally the 1996 Housing Act, which lays down the criteria which schemes devised to select tenants on the basis of need have to satisfy. RSLs have their own many and various means of selecting tenants, some based on the objects of their charitable status, others more directly on guidance issued from time to time from their regulator, the Housing Corporation. The severity of the gatekeeping depends upon the relative shortage of social housing of a given type in a geographical area: in some areas of the UK, it is hard even to give tenancies away even after extensive nationwide advertising.
Most social housing organisations have adopted a ‘points system’ or ‘banding system’ method of needs assessment to inform selection at some time. Crudely, points systems involve numerically scoring each applicant household for a given type of property against what are regarded as a set of key housing needs, informed by a combination of national and locally decided policy, and granting the tenancy to the household with the most points. The chances of selection are based on the relative position of households in the points league table, and change with every new application for a property of that category, usually defined by number of bedrooms or equivalent. Different selection criteria and weightings may apply when allocating properties with spe- cialised features for clients with particular housing require- ments, such as housing with care facilities. Household characteristics commonly assessed in this rationing process include:
● Medical aspects – is the present accommodation (if any) unsuitable because it makes a medical condition worse?
(For example, the medical condition of someone with a heart condition living in a flat which can only be reached by steep steps may be worsened by having to climb the stairs on a regular basis.)
● Environmental health factors – does the condition of the existing accommodation fail certain public health stand- ards? (For example, it may lack a kitchen or bathroom for the sole use of the household, or it may be damp, struc- turally unsound, or harbour vermin or other pests.)
● Overcrowding factors – is the accommodation statutor- ily overcrowded, so that the household does not have sufficient rooms to live a normal life; do children of dif- ferent sexes and of a given age have to share a bedroom, are the rooms too small for their purpose in relation to the household’s needs, etc.
● Social factors – is the household suffering harassment in the present accommodation which could be relieved by relocation; are essential facilities (e.g. schools, hospitals) too far away to be reached in a reasonable time; does the household need specialist support which can best be delivered in a scheme context, etc.
In the 1980s, quite a significant computer-based industry grew up which provided points-schemes advice to councils as supply shortages grew and the need for rationing increased. Before that time, largely due to higher levels of social housing production than at present, rationing of this complexity was less common, and in some areas, council housing was as much a tenure choice as any other form, including owner-occupation, and did not have any stigma of neediness. At that time, selection was more likely to be on the basis of time on a waiting list, and acceptable refer- ences from landlords on rent payment and abidance with tenancy terms than on the basis of need as such, although medical or social circumstances might have helped decide between people who have been on the list for a similar time.
Another approach is ‘banding’, where households judged to have similar levels of housing need due to a variety of factors (such as overcrowding, medical problems, mobility problems and insecurity of tenure) are placed in priority needs bands often designated A, B, C and so forth. Housing takes place according to the priority of the band and pos- ition, often related to date of registration. It would be par- ticularly advantageous to be the applicant of longest standing in Band A – if a suitable vacancy comes up.
More recently, since the mid-1990s, there have been devel- opments in the rationing of council and other social housing away from the standard points-system approach, to include an element of applicant choice, although need is rarely excluded from consideration, except in comparatively low- demand areas. One such development is that of choice- based lettings (CBL), loosely based on a model developed in the Dutch city of Delft in the late 1990s, where applicants with similar needs levels are often given a choice of properties advertised in local papers and on the provider’s website, and encouraged to bid for them, with the household with the most points (as a from of cash) winning, replicating some features of competing for housing in the marketplace.
Many councils have got together with RSLs in their area – sometimes on a regional or sub-regional basis – and operate a shared choice-based lettings system ranging across the entire social housing stock. This frequently involves providers adopting a common allocations policy, where the criteria
for selection based on housing needs are more or less har- monised. Such schemes have met with some success, and customers appear to welcome this trend. However, in these cases there is no ‘free for all’ – the ultimate determinant of who gets the property is assessed housing need.
The ODPM has published a readable summary of CBL schemes, and applicant perceptions of them, in an attempt to get councils and housing associations to consider CBL seriously by 2005, and to adopt it by 2010 (ODPM, 2004a and b).
Since the mid-1980s, due largely to externally imposed financial restriction, local authority house building in the UK has been of negligible proportions. Government policy, directed towards maximising the input of private finance into the social housing development sector, expressed in the 1988 Housing Actgrant regime, has meant that the major producers of new social housing for rent and for sale are housing associations. This, combined with the effect of trans- ferring homes mainly to custom-made housing associa- tions under Large Scale Voluntary Transfer, since 1989, has increased the importance of nominations to local authori- ties in attempting to satisfy housing need. It is especially vital in areas of high demand and low turnover in the council rented sector, such as London and the South East.
Most councils have negotiated nomination rights to hous- ing associations operating in their area.
In this context, ‘nomination rights’ means rights to house a social housing applicant in a housing association property, be it a household which is already in council housing seeking a transfer to another more suitable property, or a house- hold awaiting social housing and living in another form of tenure, or a household accepted as homeless. This can be contrasted with ‘referrals’, where a council informs a hous- ing association that an applicant would prefer to live in a housing association property, but with no rehousing rights attached. The notion of nominations has been weakened, but not completely eroded, by the growing importance of common allocations policies and common waiting lists;
and choice-based lettings schemes have reduced the need for nominations arrangements even further, as applicants
are effectively able to choose suitable properties within the entire social housing pool in which the system operates.
The level of nominations rights varies between councils and type of scheme. In some cases, where the council has supplied land at less than market value, where it has gifted the land, or where the housing association has received grant assistance to build the homes from the council under the now-abolished Local Authority Social Housing Grant (LASHG) system, or via other routes, it has been possible to negotiate 75–100% nomination rights on first lets to schemes. Very high nomination rights have also been secured where the land and/or property has been secured through Section 106arrangements (so-called ‘planning gain’) through a profit-sharing deal with a developer in return for the grant of planning permission on a piece of land not classed for housing use. The same is true for schemes built specifically to house homeless households, at least on first lets: and some councils have, in the past, negotiated very high nomination rights in perpetuity.
In other cases, councils have been able to negotiate lower levels of nomination rights, and it is very rare to find schemes where none exist. There are arguments for and against high levels of nomination rights. Arguments for include the fact that very many of those applying for social housing through local authority housing registers also appear on housing association lists, and therefore in many cases the household would have been accommodated in the same way had it applied only to the association, depend- ing on the allocation criteria adopted by the association.
Another would be that the association, having received a substantial grant to provide the housing, owes a public duty to house those most in need, and that councils, as statutory housing enablers who are publicly accountable bodies, whose allocations policies are prescribed largely by legisla- tion (1996 Housing Act) are the correct conduits for such housing. Yet others include the view that, having received land or housing directly from a council, or indirectly through council negotiations, owe a reciprocal duty to that council to provide housing for its nominees. The pragmatic argu- ment is simply that councils cannot cost-effectively develop their own housing, and can only satisfy housing need where
there is low turnover and high demand by recourse to housing associations.
Arguments against high levels of nomination rights include the position that housing associations have their own con- stitutions with distinct aims and objectives, and should therefore be able to decide themselves who they house.
Many associations pre-date council housing functions – for example, the charitable housing associations and trusts such as the Peabody and Guinness trusts, which were estab- lished in the nineteenth century, and have been housing people in need for far longer than councils according to their charitable aims. Very high nomination levels, unless all nominees’ circumstances fall within the objects of the charity, would erode the independence of the associations in question, and could even mean a conflict with their con- stitutions. Another argument is that some associations deal with niche markets which are inadequately served by coun- cils, such as young single homeless people, or households with specific needs who are not recognised as in priority by councils, and who otherwise find great difficulty in finding somewhere suitable to live.
The truth is that it should be possible for councils to nom- inate sensitively, taking account of the housing associations’
many and varied aims and objectives, working in partner- ship; and it should be possible for housing associations to accept high levels of nominations where there is no good reason to differentiate between own-list and nominee can- didates in terms of housing need. There will, however, always be dispute between councils and associations, unless some day a common allocations policy is imposed on both sets of bodies by legislation. Some associations have accused councils of dumping ‘problem cases’ on them, giving rise to higher than desired levels of arrears and anti-social behaviour, and some councils have accused housing asso- ciations of being far too restrictive on who they will house, and of ‘cherry-picking’ the most desirable cases, leaving councils with a rump of the most difficult households.
Associations have been accused of simply not playing the game – of not abiding by established agreements – and it has in many cases proved difficult to monitor nominations rights, especially on relets. The National Housing Federation
published an influential review of nominations policies, called Changing Places, in 2003 (National Housing Federation, 2003) which gives a clear account of the problems experi- enced in this area, and outlines some good practice approaches.
More recently, the emergence of regional-only Housing Corporation grant funding, replacing the allocation of SHG by council area, and the abolition of Local Authority Social Housing Grant (LASHG), has led to the establishment of protocols aimed at regularising nomination arrangements to new-build properties and subsequent relets between groups of councils and associations on a sub-regional or even a regional basis. Such schemes have in many cases been hard-fought, but there is evidence that this approach is working.
It may be that in the future, regional working will make smaller-scale nomination arrangements obsolete, which would be excellent for those seeking social housing, for whom suitable, affordable housing often ranks above pre- cise location, especially in the context of continuous urban areas like Greater London, Merseyside and the West Midlands conurbation.
It could also be argued that it would help deliver the objec- tives of the Sustainable Communities Planin ensuring take- up of homes in development areas such as the Thames Gateway, which might be shunned as a location by some social housing applicants, especially if there were to be some compulsion in restricting the number of offers which could be turned down before the applicant is removed from the register, although this is bound to be controver- sial, and may smack of social and spatial engineering.