CIH proposes a ‘fundamental shift’ away from tenancy for life
Housing profession calls for end to tenancy for life
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The right to a social housing tenancy for life should be axed for all new tenants, the housing professionals’ body has urged.
The Chartered Institute of Housing has called for all new tenants to be subject to regular reviews of their status – including vulnerable groups and older people. The idea is one of a number of suggestions in an institute paper released this week.
The paper suggests that tenants should move out of their homes or face rent increases if their circumstances improve. Sticking to the current terms and conditions of their tenancy should not be an option, it adds. Instead, the CIH suggests that tenants should be given a menu of four options.
These would be advice on moving into low cost homeownership, moving into the private rented sector or homeownership. The final option would be a change of conditions in their existing home, which could see their ‘rent increase towards a more market level (which could be reinvested in better services or more homes) if the individual does not want to move or pursue other options’.
‘A person’s individual circumstances are their own and nothing to do with any outside agency.’
Milan Radulovic, Broxtowe Council
The paper states that the proposals would ‘represent a fundamental shift away from the majority of current lets that provide a largely static tenancy for life’.
Milan Radulovic, portfolio holder for housing at Broxtowe Council, said the proposal was ‘deeply disturbing’.
‘Once they have run out of ideas, which it appears they have, about how to build new houses they come out with this nonsense. [Landlords] are there as a social housing provider not as judge and jury,’ he said.
Richard Capie, director of policy and practice at the CIH, said: ‘In the context of the whole paper what we are saying is we need to take an overall look at the whole way our housing system operates. Looking at flexible tenure in the social system is part of that.’
He added: ‘If you’re on a good income is it fair that you’re on a level of subsidised rent?’
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Readers' comments (42)
michael barratt | 08/10/2008 11:09 am
The Chartered Institute of Housing underline Bernard Shaw’s observation that professional bodies have a tendency to conspire against the laity or as Adam Smith's also observed 150 years earlier:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion without the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
In my opinion CIH is merely attempting to ‘sing from the same hymn sheet’ as New labour and advance their own professional/financial interests by promoting the shredding of council tenants’ secure tenancy rights.
A plague on their tricks
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Christopher Pope | 08/10/2008 12:02 pm
I agree with the comments from the CIOH.
Whilst I agree that people should and must feel secure in their home I also feel that when a tenant's circumstances change their housing should adapt to their circumstances.
When I was a housing officer I had a tenant who lived on her own in a ground floor three bedroom maisonette. She became unable to walk up the stairs to her bedroom so the council spent £9000 adapting her home for her individual needs. I feel that this clearly was a waste of money and the property should have been given to a family.
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Ged Quayle | 08/10/2008 3:53 pm
Is Housing the only industry that openly resents its customers doing well? Are we really going to be putting an impediment to self development on, and uniquely on, social tenants? On the one hand we demand that they find work (where they don't already have it), on the other we put their rent up if they do. Bewildering.
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Mr. Sharabi | 08/10/2008 6:22 pm
I do not know if it is me or the whiskey talking, but I do know this - status reviews on their own are as stable as a one legged horse. Unless we have a hard lined allocations policy at a National Level, there is no point flogging such a horse.
In my view, all 2, 3, 4, 5-bedroom housing should be allocated to families only. These houses should have a right to buy clause attached to them or some other form of equity stake. This will enable families who live in these houses to take ownership of their properties and not let the neighbourhood fall into ruins. All houses over 5 bedrooms should only be allocated to buyers / potential buyers - period. All flats should be allocated to single people with the elderly / disabled having preference for ground floors. The younger you are, the higher you live (after all, this is the stark reality of our youth today - as high as kites!). Single parent families with children under 16 should be housed near schools in houses or flats dependent upon availability. All housing areas should have communal greens for sports and leisure - period. No ifs, no buts. We need to move away from the rented accommodation model, and embrace home ownership, only then can we take pride in our properties and call them our own.
All orphans up to the age of 18 (21 in special cases) should be housed in orphanages built in the most affluent areas so that they can at least be compensated in some way for going through life with a parent. They should then be given free university grants if they decide to continue studying. Kids with parents should still pay.
All alcohol and cigarette retailers should have CCTVs installed outside their premises by the government to monitor whom they sell to. Better still, upgrade the age of cigarette and alcohol consumption to 21, and anyone caught using these items under that age group should be fined £60 plus 3 points if driving too. Bring back corporal punishment for school kids. Bring back capital punishment for convicted murderers - preferably by lethal injection. Anyone caught fighting, as part of a gang should be sent to a hole for three days to get used to a form of solitude and rid themselves of a pack mentality.
We need to drop the human rights act - just like the US, so that we can apply the above changes to our governing system. Let us bring back a little hell, to save some more heaven.
God bless.
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michael barratt | 08/10/2008 8:44 pm
I would not mind a pound for every time I have heard the story of the selfish little old lady living alone in a massive three bed roomed home. In Crawley where I live, many elderly people have lived in the same council homes for over fifty years. Those elderly tenants have paid in rents several times the value of the bricks and mortar they live in and would like many of their homeowner counterparts wish to remain living in familiar surroundings until the end of their lives.
Attempts to undermine secure tenancies by Caroline Flint, CIH and others has more to do with introducing into homes the same insecurity that low-income earners have experienced in the workplace. The successful eroding of secure tenure would ensure: a compliant and continuing source of cheap labour, the future of social housing as a privatised profit centre activity and tenants easily evicted from their homes in the event of commercial expediency i.e. housing associations and property developments going bust or banks clamping down.
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Rosa Hooses | 09/10/2008 9:25 am
Mr. Sharabi: It’s the whiskey talking. But that’s the stark reality of our old people these days – high as kites! Yes, let’s follow the US example of capital punishment and copy their governing system. After all, there’s no crime or housing crisis over there is there?
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john souray | 09/10/2008 10:12 am
What a dismal failure of vision and ambition this mean-spirited proposal represents. Social housing professionals and workers of my generation and a generation younger have had the privilege of living in post war western Europe through three or four decades of almost unparalleled prosperity and stability, yet have signally failed to deliver anything like simple basic civilising aim that there should be decent secure affordable housing for all.
As the economic and political wisdom of the last quarter century collapses to rubble around our ears, what hope or vision for the future do we have to offer? Just this; that actually housing justice was never our aim after all. It was just the simpler more begrudging aim that only the poorest, most vulnerable, and – let it not be overlooked - deserving should be allowed to benefit from our labours. Any fat smug Dickensian poor law commissioner could say as much. It makes me thoroughly ashamed.
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Barbara Iqbal | 09/10/2008 10:24 am
If ever I was looking for a reason to resign from the CIH this is it. I am in favour of security of tenure.
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Liam Kelly | 09/10/2008 10:31 am
RIP Security of Tenure- this would be the final nail in the coffin of social housing. The "EXPERTS" know best- presumabbly there is an economic benefit behind thier rationale? But who benefits? Why not keep things simple and broaden the currently restricted cash incentive offer for residents to leave the sector-but "experts" would probrally prefer something more bureaucratic and expensive to monitor and administer-thus providing more work for CIH chaps and chapesess. What's next bring back the Workhouse?
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Liam Kelly | 09/10/2008 11:34 am
RIP Security of Tenure-
The usual suspects- shameless middle class "Experts" putting the final nail in the coffin of social housing and continue to line thier pockets en route.
Whats Next? -Bringing back the Workhouse
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