Clause 25 - Abolition of duty to maintain housing register
Homes Bill
5:00 pm
Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton, Labour/Co-operative)
These amendments would strengthen the Bill by ensuring that local authorities cannot exclude eligible households from social housing at the point at which an application is made. In some ways, they are attached to amendment No. 83, which we shall be dealing with when we consider clause 27.
Opposition Members have talked in glowing terms of the Housing Act 1996, section 161 of which has a number of stipulations. The first is that authorities have to draw a single housing register, on which only qualifying persons can be placed. Qualification can be related to statute—for example, it can include asylum seekers and those subject to immigration control. The Act also has an explicit power, which allows authorities, under their allocation scheme, to specify whole classes of persons that do not qualify to be put on the register. Local authorities have used this type of exclusion for many years. Since the introduction of that Act, there has been a significant expansion of the number of excluded persons, as a Shelter survey in 1998 confirmed. A favourite form of exclusion—used widely by local authorities in the case of people whom they already house seeking a transfer—is to exclude those in rent arrears. A recent Shelter survey showed that 89 per cent. of authorities exclude anyone seeking a transfer who is in arrears.
Of course there are other mechanisms to exclude people, including criminal conviction, anti-social behaviour—let me come back to that—and even those who have refused offers of accommodation from the local authority itself. Often, these restrictions are not justified by the individual circumstances in which people find themselves. Rent arrears are often caused by the inefficiencies of the housing benefit system.
RSLs concerned about the growing backlog of housing benefit payments are serving notices of possession on their tenants, not in order to scare their tenants but to push their local authority along to provide housing benefit. A consequence of that will be that many authorities will not allow their tenants or an RSL tenant to be re-housed because of the notice seeking possession.
We are also aware that local authorities sometimes use motoring offences as a reason to stop people being placed in housing. Of course, ``antisocial behaviour'' has a whole Pandora's box of interpretations, many of which are unjustified and unproven allegations.