Social housing tenants to face eviction if they get a well paid job or their children leave home? This is pretty revolutionary for the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIOH) although not wholly unexpected.Inside Housing web site (see here) reports that an institute paper has been published which calls for all new social housing tenancies to be “regularly reviewed” on need. This apparently includes even vulnerable and elderly tenants.
If a tenant no longer “needs” social housing then the logical conclusion of this review is that they should face eviction. Traditionally assured or secure tenants have enjoyed life long tenancies provided that they pay their rent and keep to their tenancy conditions.
Ending this "Right" will (and has – look at the comments on the web site) quite rightly caused an enormous row.
This proposal is also just bonkers. A madness no doubt born out of desperation by housing providers about meeting demand for homes for desperate families. However, in the future will I have to stand bye while bailiffs bash in doors of elderly tenants whose kids have left home, because they are deemed to be “under occupying” bedrooms?
Will this encourage the long term unemployed to enter training courses and learn new skills if they fear that the end result will be a Certificate together with an eviction warrant from the County Court?
Do we really, really want social housing estates to be only populated with young unemployed or disabled families with no-one in work nor any Grannies, Grand-dads or grown up sons and daughters living in the locality?
Is this future a recipe for disaster or what? Why is it completely normal in most European countries to rent secure high quality homes from public or private providers regardless of whether you pay your rent with the help of benefits or not?
There is plenty that could be done to reduce under occupation of family sized homes that is just not done. We still don’t have a workable national mutual exchange scheme, the payments and encouragement for elderly tenants to move to smaller dwellings is woefully inadequate. Successful communities are mixed tenured communities, socially and economically. We should not ghettoise our so-called “Undeserving Poor”.
This idea needs to be knocked on the head.
It is as daft as when I first got really involved in housing issues when I lived in Edinburgh in the 1980’s. I remember being at a meeting of a housing campaign group when the Labour Party Convenor of the City Council Housing committee came late into the meeting really excited and pleased. She proudly announced to the meeting that for the first time in the Council’s history as a landlord the previous year they had evicted NO tenants – this was as a matter of Council policy.
Now as a local Welfare Rights advisor at the time, I was very pleased that the Council was not “eviction happy” however, I knew that the Convenor was aware of some pretty bloody awful “problem tenants” that were causing an absolute misery to their estates, who frankly should have been evicted. Believe me comrades, despite the insistence of the Daily Hate, anti-social behaviour is not a modern phenomenon.
We’ve now gone full circle. Enough is enough. Time to pull back and realise that the “talibanisation” of the housing profession has just got to stop.
