Examination of Witnesses (Questions 108
- 119)
THURSDAY 25 NOVEMBER 2004
DR TIM
BROWN, MR
ALAN WALTER
AND MR
CHRIS WOOD
Q108 Chairman: Could I welcome our
witnesses this morning who are Tim Brown, Alan Walter and Chris
Wood. It is very kind of you to come and help us. This Committee
is doing an inquiry into the Government's public service reform
agenda and is particularly focusing now on issues of choice and
voice and although we do not want to get into the details of policy
areas, we want to get illustrations of how some of these things
might work and you all bring considerable expertise in housing
to us this morning. I do not know if any of you want to say a
word by way of a very short introduction or shall we just continue
with the questioning?
Mr Walter: Could I make two very
brief points?
Q109 Chairman: Yes, of course.
Mr Walter: I attended a public
meeting in Tower Hamlets last week where there is a stock transfer
ballot about to take place. We do not know when it is going to
take place because it is under the control of the local authority.
We ended up having a meeting in a church hall in an area where
a significant minority of the tenants are Muslim and that is far
from an ideal venue. We ended up there because the confirmed booking
we had at the local primary school was cancelled at the last minute
on the instigation of local authority members on the Board of
Governors. I think that is an example of how we have got an outrageous
situation where there is supposed to be choice but one side of
this debate has unlimited resources, the names and addresses of
electorates, they can employ professional consultants, translate
material, they control local halls and determine when the ballot
is held—maybe there is an analogy with what is going on
in the Ukraine at the moment—and the other side has no resources
and fits in campaigning around picking up the kids from school
and their jobs and everything else. On any democratic criteria
you apply that is not proper choice and it is not very balanced.
The second thing is that there are plenty of authorities now where
tenants who have been asked to exercise choice have done so and
voted no and they are now being told to ballot again. The housing
minister has gone to these areas and when he asked what will happen
if tenants say no a second time, he said he will keep balloting
them until they say yes and the money that is available if you
give the right answer will not be available if it is the wrong
answer. Those two principles sum up the fundamental contradiction.
Q110 Chairman: Thank you for that.
I am not quite sure it is quite like the Ukraine yet. Perhaps
we could start more positively and concretely by turning to the
choice-based lettings system. One of the things the Committee
is interested in is trying to find examples of choice models from
different areas that have been designed to produce certain outcomes
that are thought to be beneficial and choice-based lettings is
one of those that is often referred to. Could you just give us
the essence of the scheme and tell us why the research seems to
support the view that this is an advance over what happened before?
Dr Brown: My name is Tim Brown.
I am the Director of the Centre for Comparative Housing Research
and I have been involved in both the development and evaluation
of a number of choice-based lettings systems. One of the key principles
of choice-based lettings is that it gives the customer or the
applicant a relatively greater say in the allocations process.
I think it has to be seen in relation to the traditional allocation
systems that have dominated social housing provision where previously
it has been very much based on housing officers taking the lead
in the process and customers being passive and waiting for a letter
or a phone call from the council or from the housing association
to say, "We've got a property that we think is suitable for
you." Often in high demand areas it is a limited offers policy,
maybe you can only have two offers before you are suspended from
the waiting list, and that does not give customers much choice
in the process. Empowering customers to respond to adverts seems
to be a very positive way forward and something that comes across
from many of the Government pilot schemes and other schemes on
choice-based lettings where customers like the process of having
greater relative choice.
Q111 Chairman: Do you want to add
anything, Chris?
Mr Wood: I would be more enthusiastic
than Tim about the positive attributes of choice-based lettings.
I think it has transformed the nature of my relationship with
the people who are coming to the council asking for housing. It
has given them control and greater power than can be exercised
in their choice of housing. I strive to ensure the system is similar
to that that we enjoy in the private market. We have an unlimited
choice of housing. We can buy a house wherever we want. There
are constraints on that and that is the affordability of it, but
we do have choice. We can buy a large house in outer London or
a small flat in inner London. Our applicants in choice-based lettings
schemes are afforded similar ranges of choice. There are variations
between the schemes and the currency that is used to bid for the
property. In the scheme that I administer waiting time is the
currency and so the people who have the longest waiting time come
to the top of the list and can choose any property that is available,
but if they have a lesser waiting time they can choose a less
popular property. They can sit and wait for the ideal three-bedroom
house with a garden and off-street parking or whatever, but they
recognise they may have to wait a long time for that. If they
want to take a high-rise property of a similar size then the currency
of waiting time is that they can move earlier.
Q112 Mr Prentice: In the briefing
material we have been given we are told that there are 91 bids
per property, that is the average in Newham, but in the best areas
there are 477 bids. How long do you have to be on the waiting
list to be considered for a property in one of those popular areas?
Mr Wood: You would have to be
on the waiting list seconds to be considered. How realistic it
would be that you would secure one of those properties—
Q113 Mr Prentice: You said it goes
to the person who has been on the waiting list for the longest
time.
Mr Wood: That is right.
Q114 Mr Prentice: How long would
a person have had to have been on the waiting list to get a property
in one of the popular areas of Newham where you have 477 bids?
Mr Wood: In one of the popular
areas then the waiting times can be eight or nine years, but for
a similar sized property that same person could wait half the
time or less.
Q115 Mr Prentice: Do people who have
their eyes focused on one of the popular areas in Newham think
this is a great system that allows them to successfully bid for
a property after eight or nine years on the waiting list?
Mr Wood: I would make two points
in response to that. You need to compare it with what went before
and this is a hugely popular scheme compared to what went before.
People feel much better about this scheme than what Tim described
before, the kind of rationing system that we had previously.
Q116 Brian White: People do not join
the waiting lists because of that eight and nine year waiting
time as they do not think it is worth it. Have you had people
who previously would not have applied to go on to the waiting
list now coming on to the waiting list and an increase in the
number of people wanting council housing?
Mr Wood: No, I do not think so.
Dr Brown: I think certainly in
high demand areas what is being changed is the process. Choice-based
lettings does not affect the supply. If it is a high demand housing
market it is still going to be high demand. What a number of local
authorities have done is to broaden out from choice-based lettings
to what I would call a housing options package by making information
available about other ways of meeting housing needs, meeting their
housing aspirations, promoting shared ownership, low cost owner
occupation, the private rented sector and disabled facilities
grants as a way of thinking about whether people really do need
to move. There is always in a high demand area, whether it is
east London or rural areas such as Harborough in Leicestershire,
an imbalance in the housing market, but I think it is quite interesting
that after two or three years some local authorities and their
housing association partners are broadening it out to give people
choice in social renting and making them aware of other products
and services.
Q117 Chairman: One of the issues
that has arisen in our discussions about all of this is whether
there is a conflict between choice and equity and I would be interested
to know what you think of a scheme like this because someone could
argue that the old system was basically, for all its defects,
a needs driven system, ie you totted up the points that people
got based upon the needs that they had and a property was allocated
to them. That has the virtue of some sense of equity about it.
Is equity a casualty of this, and do those people who are least
able to operate this kind of system lose out?
Dr Brown: One of the principles
of choice-based lettings is that it helps vulnerable people. A
number of the schemes are trying to build equality into the scheme,
not just by giving priority to vulnerable people through priority
cards or bands rather than waiting time as the currency, but what
we have found in choice-based lettings is that it is about involving
a wide range of advice and support agencies in working with vulnerable
people, their advocates, health sectors, the social care sector,
the Citizens' Advice Bureau, who are all partners in developing
the scheme so that they take account of people's needs. Can I
give you an example to illustrate that? One of the issues in Harborough
in Leicestershire, which is an agricultural area, was that many
residents have got low literacy levels. Harborough talked to county
council education departments and said they should not put the
adverts in text format but use diagrams, signs, that sort of thing.
There are all sorts of ways of ensuring that vulnerable groups
are not missed out by the system. I am quite passionate about
the fact that we have got to be sure that vulnerable groups do
not lose out because of not being able to access the information,
not having the support.
Mr Wood: All the choice-based
lettings schemes that I am aware of hold back some properties
for emergency applicants. I think in Newham it is around about
75% of our properties we advertise through the scheme, but if
there are life and limb situations then obviously there is an
opportunity to move people urgently into properties and that protects
the most vulnerable people in the most extreme circumstances.
I would concur with everything Tim has said. Again you have got
to compare it with what went before. I do not think people used
to read our lettings policy, I think they used to weigh it. There
were just huge volumes to try and account for every conceivable
circumstance that someone might find themselves in and make a
judgment about whether that was relatively more needy than someone
else. The system is very much more transparent and simple. The
feedback I get from the users is that they much prefer that. The
thing that most dissatisfied people about the old system in the
research that we did was what we had called "leapfrogging"
in that you could have 125 points and be top of the queue today
and you would be told that you were top of the queue or second
in the queue, but tomorrow if three people came in with 128 points
you would suddenly become fourth or fifth in the queue. It was
just counter-intuitive for people how they could be a priority
today and then tomorrow that priority could be reduced. Many of
the new schemes are based on high-tech solutions for delivering
these schemes. Newham is one of the most ethnically diverse places
in the country. The concern about accessibility for people whose
first language is not English has been a key concern for us, but
we have been able to develop new methods and new solutions. We
have automated telephones available in 11 and 12 different languages
and we have talking heads on our website schemes so that if you
want to receive instruction advice in the language of your choice
that is available on the website. People use that and they have
responded to it. Our tracking applications from different ethnic
groups show that there is absolutely no lack of take-up from the
different ethnic groups and we have solved the problem of language
as a barrier. The area where I still have some concerns appears
to be with older people where there is perhaps some technophobia,
reluctance to engage with websites and touch screen kiosks and
so on and so forth. People can be assisted through the process
by staff in our centres if they wish.
Dr Brown: Information communications
technology does allow choice-based lettings to do very cutting
edge stuff, such as virtual viewings of property. My concern on
that, wearing my information communications technology hat, is
that only between 10 and 20% of applicants are likely to have
access to the Internet at home and it is not going to be Broadband
and if they are trying to download information with pictures,
etcetera, it is very frustrating. I think we have got to be careful
about the use of technology. It can be quite liberating but it
could reinforce the digital divide.
Mr Wood: I do not agree on that.
Q118 Chairman: Tell us why not.
Mr Wood: There is this notion
of a digital divide and how that Internet banking is used by people
in higher income groups and all these new facilities are for the
more advantaged section of the population. Newham is one of the
most deprived areas in the country and we have had absolutely
no difficulty with people using the technology-based system. We
thought that automated telephones would be the primary channel
by which people would access the service and the rate of take-up
through the Internet took us by surprise. These are very disadvantaged
groups where Internet access in the home is only slightly less
than the rest of the country, but now about 60 or 70% of all our
users are accessing it through the Internet either at home, in
libraries, in our centres, we have touch screens in our public
offices or Internet cafes and they are managing without any difficulty
to use the technology and I think it just makes it very much more
open and accessible and I am a great fan.
Q119 Mrs Campbell: I was not going
to follow up on ICT, I was going to take you back to the question
of who manages the housing stock. The first question is really
whether you think tenants should make the choice or councils should
make the choice and why?
Mr Walter: I think what is fundamental
is that as far as we are aware there have been no instances in
the country where that issue has been raised by the tenant. The
debate about management and about who the landlord should be is
one that is coming from the top down. What tenants are concerned
about is the quality of the homes that they are living in. The
issue of choice-based lettings is outside of our remit. In metropolitan
areas and the South East I think the major issue is how many homes
there are and what the quality is like. I am not against choice-based
lettings but I think it is cosmetic and you have to ask why so
much energy is going into something that is cosmetic rather than
tackling the fundamentals of the problem. The satisfaction levels
amongst council tenants about the principles of having decent,
affordable and secure housing provided by the local authority
are extremely high and universally across the country the criticism
centres around the issue of investment predominantly, not the
issues of who the landlord is and whether it is public or private.
In that situation it seems to me it is completely false and dishonest
for the Government to then try and make the issue of ownership
and a change of landlord the central debate. As we have laid out,
the justification they use for that, the arguments about separating
housing strategy from housing management and the benefits of tenants'
involvement, does not stand up to any examination whatsoever.
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