A Fawlty sense of rights

Aficionados of the comedy classic Fawlty Towers may recall an episode in which Basil Fawlty meets his match. No-nonsense Mrs Richards, the archetypal difficult customer, works up a small complaint into full-scale warfare. Whenever John Cleese’s harassed hotelier seems to be winning the battle, she shuts off her hearing aid.

Deliberately deaf Mrs Richards came to mind recently, when a colleague took a phone call from an applicant determined to take her grievance to the housing ombudsman, and beyond. She had been told she could not have the house she wanted.

Long gone are the days when the customer was treated as a supplicant whose needs might be met - if the housing officer happened to be having a good day. Nowadays we really do bend over backwards. Not far enough for some people, though. ‘I can’t hear you,’ they seem to say.

Listen up

With dozens of applicants for every house, it isn’t easy to meet people’s needs. So when a customer insists on a particular street in a specific village they are offered a reality check.

‘With your level of points you could wait 25 years,’ we have to tell them, ‘so please try widening your choice.’

Our very own ‘Mrs Richards’ was not to be deterred by the simple facts of housing life, though. For her, drug-crazed mafiosi from Eastern Europe are taking all the houses that she - not they - has a right to. Even though, as an owner-occupier, she was adequately housed, we had no business denying her wishes. The thousands of needier people waiting for a house were no concern of hers.

To some extent this awareness gap is our own fault. We do very little in the profession to counter the tabloids’ vision of housing queues being jumped by the undeserving. We find it hard to explain why our allocation polices seem to favour the feckless over the hard working. We don’t have answers when asked why it can no longer be taken for granted that a council house is a right.

This wouldn’t matter as much if our applicants had other options. But successive governments have contrived a policy black hole into which fall those who are too well off to be on benefits and too poor to rent a house privately. We are left explaining that the state can no longer be relied on to solve housing problems - we simply don’t have enough houses.

Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. In a neighbouring council the housing committee convenor contrived to buy her own council house, give it to her daughter and then get herself allocated another one - just across the street. It seems she played by the rules, but somehow those rules don’t seem to work so well for other applicants.

Changing perceptions

Assuming that we can avoid shooting ourselves so blithely in the foot, what can we do to get the message across that housing is a scarce resource? And how do we defend allocation policies which have to prioritise the vulnerable?

Thanks to recent scandals, such as MPs’ expenses, the public is becoming ever more cynical about government. It isn’t just that we don’t have adequate explanations for our customers; they won’t believe them even when we do.

A recent letter to our local newspaper insisted that the council had failed to investigate how a drug addict, previously evicted for anti-social behaviour, had been given a house that should have gone under succession rights to a widow.

Actually we had investigated this complaint, and it turned out there wasn’t a scrap of truth in it. The drug addict was the woman’s son and she, not he, was the tenant.

But that little fact didn’t stop a torrent of abusive follow-up letters to the local rag, complaining about council ‘numpties’.

In the current climate, council staff are as much whipping boys as any other public servants - and it seems we had better get used to it. Few applicants understand the complexities of allocation policies and fewer still care.

It is easier, and perhaps more satisfying, to rant against the ‘numpties’ than to appreciate that hundreds of other households trump your housing need.

Of course we make mistakes, but over the past decade there has been a sea change in customer-care attitudes and a huge improvement in service standards in local authorities. The reality, though, is that it isn’t what you get right that gets noticed, it is what you do wrong.

How can councils put a positive message across and improve their public image? First, we could be more proactive. Housing officers can’t write to the press to refute stories, but councillors and heads of service can.

There are plenty of good news housing stories too, which a switched-on PR department can publicise.

Meanwhile, front-line staff have to treat the Mrs Richards of the world with endless patience, even though she isn’t listening. We have to know our allocations policies inside out, to be able to explain - time and again if necessary - that protection of the vulnerable is for their benefit, and for society as a whole.

Most of all, stamina and spirit are what is required. Officers need to be able to handle the angry, the vexatious and the misinformed, without being dragged down by their negativity. Please turn your hearing aid up, Mrs Richards. Thank you.

Inside Housing’s anonymous columnist is a senior housing officer