More choice; worse choices
Is Choice Based Letting another attack on council housing?
In line with government policy, Oxford City Council is introducing a Choice Based Letting scheme for social housing tenants and those applying for housing. As with other New Labour initiatives this could be bad news for council tenants across the city.
According to the report produced by the council’s ruling Executive Board the scheme will allow ‘far greater choice to applicants, to enable them to make informed decisions about where they want to live.’
The Choice Based Lettings (CBL) system will operate as follows:
Vacant properties are advertised and applicants on the housing register are able to express an interest in a property by ‘bidding’ for it within a specified time period.
Bids will be prioritised according to set criteria (housing need, waiting time etc.) and the property is offered to the bidder that is ranked highest.
Feedback on the results of this allocation is communicated when the next cycle of properties are advertised, ‘to help applicants make informed choices about future bids.’
The reality behind the rhetoric
Of course greater transparency is needed in the housing allocations process. And in theory, giving tenants the opportunity to select homes in accordance with their preferences is wonderful. But with a very limited supply of social housing choice is a misnomer.
Who exactly will get a choice and what sort of choice will it be? The precise mechanism for deciding between competing bidders hasn’t been outlined by the Executive Board. But we know that choice Based Letting won’t provide any extra housing.
Looking at other areas of high housing demand and high homelessness that have adopted CBL, the indications are that for all but the most undesirable properties any preference for time spent waiting will be almost entirely dispensed with, if not formally then certainly in practice.
Homeless families with priority need will be the only ones in a position to bid for the desirable homes. But this may exclude even those with temporary accommodation leaving just those in the most desperate situations with any realistic chance of obtaining an advertised property. In such circumstances who can afford to wait for a better vacancy to come up?
So what choice will even those with the highest priority get? There is no evidence that with the present housing situation in Oxford a choice based lettings system will actually provide any additional choices to significant numbers of people.
But if it doesn’t actually provide real choice then what is CBL for?
Why introduce a scheme with setup costs of £386,000 and estimated ongoing additional expenditure of £45,000 per year, albeit with unspecified projected savings?
As in other fields the dominant political agenda-which is adhered to by all the mainstream parties-is to shift responsibility from the collective to the individual. In this case the object is to shift the responsibility for finding housing from the local authority to the tenant or housing-seeker, notwithstanding remaining statutory obligations to house certain categories such as the homeless.
In this way local government, and by implication national government, is gradually relieved of yet another of its powers and the provision of housing can no longer be organised according to a rational policy.
Under Choice Based Letting the thousands of ordinary people on the waiting list will be given a 'realistic' picture of their chances of getting council housing-nil. But as well as an assessment this is also an admission: don't expect to be housed by us, social housing is no longer for people like you, go to the private market instead.
Traditionally allocations were supposed to operate on the basis of 1/3 transfer, 1/3 waiting list and 1/3 homeless, even if lately the practice has differed from this considerably. A CBL scheme will allow even the principle to be more-or-less torn up.
Most council housing is already only available to those with specific priority needs. A common perception now is that the only way to get council housing is to go off the rails, make yourself homeless and become addicted to alcohol or drugs.
The perception isn’t always correct. There are many who end up homeless simply because of the dire shortage of affordable housing and through no fault of their own. Those with drug and alcohol problems may be genuinely trying to make a new start and need help doing this. But where the perception is undoubtedly correct is that the housing allocation system is providing perverse incentives.
Rather than improving this situation Choice Based Letting is likely to make it worse.
Divide and rule
Those with the interests of the working class at heart could be forgiven for suspecting that Choice Based Letting will enact in principle a system already operating in practice. A system for dividing the working class into the deserving poor-now classified as victims regardless of their own motivations; and the undeserving poor-those who hold down a job and struggle to look after their families.
In the same way that multicultural policies are used by the mainstream parties to set working class people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds against one another, policies directed towards an underclass are also used to set working class people against one another.
Whenever New Labour uses the word choice it entails opening up yet another area of collective responsibility to the market. Where the market enters, privatisation follows. There is no question that CBL introduces market disciplines to local authority housing allocations.
Extending privatisation
As with other government initiatives, such as the attempt to force councils to offload housing to housing associations, Choice Based Letting will further erase the distinction between council and other types of social housing, by introducing a common register for the two. Alongside this New Labour is also insisting that all social housing providers calculate rents in accordance with the private market.
Now, with Choice Based Letting, the government is explicitly requiring local authorities’ allocations to mimic the operation of the private rented housing market.
The Executive Board’s recommendation even suggests that a CBL scheme ‘could also extend to the private sector ...’
In the light of this it is reasonable to suspect that the endpoint envisaged by New Labour is to extend the private housing market to the vast majority of tenants that currently rent off the council or a housing association, with a residual private or voluntary social housing sector for vulnerable people with priority needs.
This is some way in the future, but if Blair’s government manages to pull this off then there is no doubt that millions of working class people will be much worse off.
4 January 2006
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