ROOF Blog

The government is to offer cash rewards of up to £500 to people who report neighbours they suspect are unlawfully subletting their council home.

Ministers have been told that between 50,000 and 200,000 social rented homes in England are occupied by unauthorised tenants, at a time when waiting lists are full and housing projects have stalled.

They are expected to target 8,000 tenancy cheats in a first wave of investigations this week across 145 local authorities after a trawl of council records by the Audit Commission.

There is a growing crisis as demand for social housing has soared during the recession.

About 1.8m households are on waiting lists in England, while just 60,000 social homes have been built in the past two years.

John Healey, the housing minister, said: ‘We can’t allow cheats to hang on to the tenancies of council houses they don’t need and don’t live in.’

The crackdown will be difficult for subletters, who have no rights or protection if a social home is reclaimed, and who can be evicted in as few as seven days.

The number of council and housing association homes for rent is at its lowest in 50 years, a Shelter Scotland report has found. Building pressure warns of a ‘growing chasm between the number of homes needed and the number available’. It estimated there were 142,000 households on the waiting list for council homes, and said the right-to-buy scheme was partly to blame for the shortage as more than 135,000 homes had been sold under the scheme in the previous decade.

Gordon Brown is expected to announce a proposal that will require councils to take account of applicants’ connections to the area when allocating homes, as part of a multi-million pound plan to build more affordable homes. The prime minister hopes the move will increase stock in both council housing and affordable private homes in the coming two years, while creating thousands of new jobs in the process. Funds will be made available to the HomeBuy Direct scheme which helps first-time buyers into the market, while councils will be given discretion to provide social housing to local people even if they are not considered priority cases.

Thousands of developers’ surplus new-build homes are being rejected by housing associations because they aren’t of a high enough standard. The government set up a national clearing house to help housing associations buy some of the estimated 100,000 unsold new-build homes in the UK to take pressure of the 4.5 million people on council housing waiting lists. However, Gavin Smart of the National Housing Federation said that many of the homes they were being offered to purchase did not meet the high environmental standards and size specifications expected for social housing.

North London residents have reacted angrily over proposals to rent out council housing on the private market. Camden council, which has 17,000 people on the housing waiting list, says it wants to renovate up to 500 homes but locals warn that families could miss out on a flat if it is rented to people who have more money. Residents want all available homes to be used to help those who cannot afford to rent privately or buy.

Westminster city council has promised to rehouse all overcrowded households by 2014. More than 3,000 households are in priority need on the council’s waiting list, including people with medical needs, those living in temporary accommodation and more than 1,000 families in overcrowded households. The first 40 households living in the most severely overcrowded properties will be moved by the end of the year.

Waiting lists for social housing in England are set to reach a record level by 2011, the National Housing Federation has warned. An extra 200,000 families over the next two years – including 80,000 people who will lose their home due to repossession or unemployment – will push the total to around two million people. The waiting list has increased from one million in 2001. The NHF added that house building will fall by 50 per cent in 2010 to just 70,000, further increasing pressures.

The House of Lords has ruled that an allocation scheme for council housing which placed all applicants with priority needs into one group and allocated available property on a ‘first in line’ basis was neither unlawful nor irrational. Earlier court decisions for Regina (Ahmad) v Newham London BC had found that placing people who qualified for preference under section 167 (2) of the Housing Act 1996 into a single group and determining accommodation not by need, but by the length of time they had been registered, was an insufficient mechanism for identifying those in greatest need.

The government has been urged to build the country out of a recession with a major programme of house construction. The 2020 Group is made up of representatives from Shelter, National Housing Federation, the Local Government Association and Trades Union Congress and is chaired by Bank of England official and former Brown adviser Kate Barker. The group says there is an urgent need to build 100,000 affordable homes to rent and that the move would save construction jobs, and meet an ‘urgent’ demand to house the five million people expected on housing waiting lists in England by the end of next year.

Nearly a third of councils in the east of England have reported an increase in homelessness in the past year. Councils in Norfolk, Bedfordshire and the London commuter belt were likely to see an increased number of homeless people and a rise in enquiries about joining housing lists due to increasing repossessions because of mortgage arrears. However, 12 per cent of local authorities had seen homelessness numbers decreasing and 52 per cent has not seen a change in numbers.