Large numbers waiting for sheltered accommodation

More than 1,500 people are waiting for sheltered accommodation in the north of the county

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

By Sarah Ward

Almost a quarter of people waiting for council homes in North Northamptonshire are waiting for sheltered accommodation.

Of the current 6,395 households waiting to be accommodated in a council property, 1509 were people who were in need of sheltered accommodation.

And the extent of the homeless situation was made clear at a meeting of the North Northants unitary last week, as it was revealed that of the 1,875 properties offered by the authority in the year to this April, 702 homes were provided to the households who were homeless.

At a meeting of the authority’s executive advisory panel for prosperous communities, assistant director of strategic housing Evonne Coleman-Thomas said in reality many will never be offered a council property despite sitting on the waiting list.

The officer said:

“In an ideal world we’d have just shy of 7,000 properties for everybody that is on the housing waiting list, but we know that is not a reality. We know that government funding and affordability and other things all play a part.

“We also know that a lot of people who are on band d and e, if we are absolutely honest, are not going to be offered a council property and we need to be able to support them into the private sector, into shared ownership.

“Seventy years ago you could walk into your council and very likely get a property - that’s not the reality we have now and we need to ensure that we are saying to everyone that we are supporting that part of our support is ‘we will support you to get affordable accommodation that’s safe, but that does not mean that it will be a council property.’”

She continued:

“We are regulated by considerable primary and secondary legislation and that requires us to support people in their housing needs and often the approaches we have are about people’s housing wants.

“So they would want to be a in a particular geographical area, or they would want to have a property of a particular size, and that is often something that is difficult for us because we would want to give everybody the property they want, but we don’t have all the property and we don’t have the budget.”

Since the former boroughs joined to form the larger unitary three years ago, the housing allocation system has changed, so whereas people would before be able to wait on a list for the area in which they currently lived, now people are being offered homes in neighbouring towns where they may not have connections or existing services, such as dentists and doctors. 

Evonne Coleman-Thomas said the authority was now working with its registered providers to provide a range of homes, as well as talking to developers about how they can include social housing in their schemes.

But she made an appeal to the councillors to lobby the government to change the current policy, which means that half of the money an authority receives from right to buy sales, returns to the government, instead of staying with the authority to be used to purchase another property.

She said some councils had taken the radical decision to remove all people waiting who were rated as being in band d and e categories - those judged to meet less of the criteria for housing than others on the band a- c lists. But she said that was not something she would propose.

At the meeting Labour’s Cllr Lynne Buckingham paid tribute to the housing officers who she said were doing a difficult job and ‘bombarded’ with questions by those waiting about when they would be offered a property. She said the allocation system, which since unitary reorganisation means people are being offered housing miles from where their family and support are, is a ‘difficult’ issue. She also said the authority did not currently have any medical expertise to draw on when making decisions about housing people with health concerns. 

The authority is about to start a review of its housing allocation policy. It can be read in full here.

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The West unitary had a waiting list of 4,828 in March 2021, with 60 per cent of those on the list from the Northampton area. Until this April it had operated separate housing allocation policies for the former borough council areas of Daventry, South Northants and Northampton, but there is now one policy for the entire area.

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Apologies today’s newsletter is later than usual. (Had to check a couple of details before publishing).