Council set to keep lifetime tenancies

Waltham Forest Council’s cabinet will next Tuesday agree proposed tenure and allocations policies.

Unlike many other boroughs, the Labour-controlled authority will not take advantage of flexibilities in the Localism Act to offer fixed term tenancies. The council, in the vast majority of cases, will continue to offer lifetime tenancies for new council tenants.

Marie Pye, cabinet member for housing at Waltham Forest Council, said implementing fixed-term tenancies would lead to more administrative costs and uncertainty for tenants.

‘Why put them through all that anxiety and grief when the chances are at the end of it they will just get another tenancy?

‘We would have to set up a whole bureaucracy to run it and we’d be putting people through a lot of anxiety.’  Under the council’s proposed policy, five-year tenancies will only be used for a small number of ‘hard to let’ one-bedroom homes, which will be let to working people.

The decision to retain lifetime tenancies will however be kept under review, Ms Pye said.

The authority will also continue to allocate housing based largely on need. Unlike some other boroughs, including Hammersmith & Fulham and nearby Labour-controlled Newham Council, the borough will not prioritise people in work or members of the armed forces. It will however, restrict access to the waiting list to people who have lived in the borough for two years or more.

Ms Pye said: ‘We all want to keep people who are working in the borough, but when someone comes into your surgery who has got six kids in a one bedroom flat on the top floor, with a husband who’s a wheelchair user, what are you supposed to say? You haven’t got a job so we can’t rehouse you?’

The council will also limit tenancy successions to partners or disabled family members only. It estimates in 2011/12 this would have freed up 19 social homes.

Labour-controlled Camden Council last month also voted to retain lifetime tenancies.