Red Brick

Monimbo
The National Tenant Organisations have embarked on an interesting exercise to test tenant opinion on a range of issues about housing policy, many of them about changes which the government has already made or clearly plans to do.  It asks for views on issues such whether tenants with higher incomes should pay higher rents, the fairness of increased right to buy discounts, and the effects of welfare reform.
The NTOs are hoping for a range of replies from tenants’ groups and bodies that work with tenants.  It will be good if they receive a big response and the bigger it is the more interesting the results will be.
I’m particularly looking forward to the response to a question that effectively asks for views on the government’s pay-to-stay proposal, which is still out for consultation.  I’ve been surprised that straw polls of housing professionals show support for the idea, as it seems to me it is questionable on both practical grounds and because of the implications for the sector as a whole.  Given that social landlords only collect income data – if they do at all – at application stage, how are they going to track down all their tenants who are not receiving housing benefit and administer means tests on them?  And presumably not only do that once but repeat the exercise at regular intervals?  To ensure everyone is treated equally, they will all have to be asked for similar proofs of income.  The cost in training staff to do this and the time required in writing to and visiting one million tenants is surely going to be many times the cost of any potential savings?  It is going to be interesting to see if tenants’ organisations are more switched on to these snags than housing officers evidently are.
Another question asked in the NTOs survey relates to the real reasons behind proposals such as pay-to-stay and the enhanced right-to-buy, as well as several more of the government’s recent policies. The survey asks what should be the future role and purpose of the social rented sector – should it be an ‘attractive sector of choice’ or a ‘tenancy of last resort’?  In an interesting short book published by Shelter in 2009, The Future of Social Housing, Mark Stephens posed a similar question, looking at the different experiences of social housing sectors in different countries.  He suggested three (rather than two) possibly roles for social housing. One is the commonest in the northern European countries: he calls it the ‘affordability’ role but it equates with an ‘attractive sector of choice’ because its purpose is to compete on similar terms with private renting and even owner-occupation.  Another is to be an ‘ambulance service’ (or tenancy of last resort) as in Ireland, the US and Australia, whose social sectors are much smaller than Britain’s. Stephens puts the English sector between the two, as a ‘safety net’ (and by implication the same would apply across the rest of the UK).
But it’s not only in Britain that debates about the purpose of social housing are taking place, given pressures to reduce subsidies and either charge higher rents or concentrate on housing those on the lowest incomes.  In some cases like Sweden and Austria the outcome so far has been to maintain the sector’s wider ‘affordability’ role.  In others, such as the Netherlands, there is pressure for the (very large) social sector to target lower income groups.  If the debate is resolved in a particular way it doesn’t mean there are no ensuing tensions.  For example, in both Sweden and Austria there are marginalised groups like migrants who struggle to get access to social housing, and in Sweden and France there are now ‘sub-social’ sectors catering for such groups and providing less security.  In the Netherlands, tenants who gain their house using a ‘priority card’ because of their housing need might well end up in a poorer neighbourhood than someone allocated a house through the waiting list.
So the ‘safety net’ role is perhaps a typical British compromise that attempts to get the best of both worlds – providing secure and attractive homes but without excluding the neediest groups.  It is clearly under threat as the sector continues to decline and many who would like to enter it can’t do so.  If tenants opt in the NTOs survey for an ‘attractive sector of choice’ they will (rightly) be challenging any further shift towards social housing becoming an ‘ambulance service’.  It will be interesting to see if the government pays attention.
But it will also be important for the NTOs to show how a vision for social housing can balance creating or maintaining an attractive sector with a continued role in housing the most vulnerable.  This is a challenge for housing organisations, too – and of course for the opposition front bench in developing its new housing policy.  Although it doesn’t provide all the answers, boosting supply is clearly one of the biggest priorities. A sector that – in the course of this year – will provide fewer tenancies than private renting is rapidly ceasing to be available as an ‘attractive sector of choice’ for many on the outside who would like to make that choice but simply aren’t able to.

With her background at Shelter, Louise Casey understands the power that a strong case history can have in humanising and illustrating a complex policy issue.  But her report on interviews with 16 families, in her current role as Head of the Government’s ‘Troubled Families’ project (or Troubled Families Tsar if you prefer), published this week, leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
The problem lies not so much in the project itself, which builds on the previous and successful work on family intervention, but in the spin and the dirty politics that lie behind it.  A potentially useful programme is being dressed up for media consumption to make a point.
We have commented before that Ministers seem absolutely determined to portray these ‘troubled families’ in a particular way, to caricature them as depraved not deprived.  That way they hope the public will conclude that all we have to do is address the personal behaviour of a tiny minority, heaping the blame on the so-called dependency culture rather than poverty and failing services.
The original estimate of the size of the problem, which led to the adoption of the oft-repeated ‘120,000 families’ figure, was based on 2004 data which took a much wider view of indicators of multiple deprivation, including poor housing, no qualifications, mental health problems, disability, and inadequate income to cover basics.  The criteria for the selection of families are now much more targeted at involvement in crime, risk of going into care, school truancy, and domestic violence, factors that have very little to do with the original 120,000.  This has been expertly exposed by Jonathan Portes and by Fullfact.  As   New Statesman says ‘This zombie statistic refuses to die’.  
The excellent Fullfact have challenged the way CLG spins the 16 as being somehow representative of the 120,000, which they aren’t, and then spins the 120,000 as being  somehow representative of a whole underclass, which is misconceived.
It looks like the project itself is being steered away from families experiencing multiple deprivation (which might require public resources to resolve) towards the Prime Minister’s idea of neighbours from hell (and he has experience given what we have discovered about his neighbours in Chipping Norton), and towards Eric Pickles’ notion of people we should understand less and condemn more.  Gone are the criteria relating to poor housing and disability and low income.  And nowhere is there reference to the fact that existing Family Intervention Projects have been subject to cuts so there are fewer services not more.
Casey’s report on the selection of 16 families is undoubtedly grim.  The stories of violence and abuse are shameful and disturbing.  As always, there are a few families that fit the Shameless stereotype and you do wonder what young people are being taught about contraception.  But ultimately the report reads like a script from the loathsome Jeremy Kyle Show: pointing at the Chavs and moralising about their sub-human behaviour.  Despite being mainly in the families’ own words, it feels like it has been put together by a redundant News of the World journalist.
I couldn’t get past case study 7 and jumped to the end.  Here we find an assessment of the evidence that is largely balanced and occasionally insightful.  But most journalists didn’t get that far and so more lurid headlines are generated.  ‘Criminal culture at the heart of feckless families: Shocking report lifts lid on incest, abuse and spiral of alcohol abuse’ said the Daily Mail.  No wonder that Zoe Williams in the Guardian concluded: ‘I believe the ulterior motive is the demonisation of the poor’.
The problem with the whole underclass theory is that many of the behaviours that are identified are classless.  Undoubtedly they have a much harsher impact, and are a lot harder to resolve, when the family is also badly housed, poorly educated, and very poor – but that is the bit the Government doesn’t want to recognise.  Having a child with ADHD, or a parent with mental ill-health, as many of the 16 families have, would devastate most middle class families with good incomes.  Alcohol and drugs can have a huge impact on even the wealthiest families, witness the Rausings; but children from wealthy homes don’t normally end up in the disastrous care system.  Sexual abuse and violence have been perpetrated by the most religious as well as the most godless.  And as for incest…..
The problems faced by the 16, or the 120,000, and indeed many more families, are rooted in poverty and bad housing whatever their individual pathology or personal failures.  The latter will not be treated without also treating the former.

By Paul Dimoldenberg
A report to today’s meeting of Westminster City Council’s Housing Scrutiny Committee shows that more than 3,500 former council flats are now owned by landlords, often charging more than four times a council rent.
The report reveals that the Council has sold 9,135 (45%) of its 21,243 Council flats under the Right-to-buy and that 3,603 (39%) are now sublet and “owned by small and multiple landlords”.
Former Council flats in Westminster owned by Buy-to-let landlords are now rented out at more than £500 a week, over four times the average rent of Council flats, and are out the price range of the vast majority of Westminster residents in housing need. The transfer from public to private ownership has a huge cost to the public purse as many of the Buy-to-let landlords are being subsidised by thousands of pounds of Housing Benefit payments.
The Right-to-buy has transformed many Council estates in Westminster into Buy-to-let goldmines for private landlords. Rather than meeting housing need, some of Westminster’s Council estates are now providing Buy-to-let landlords with increasing financial returns as rents continue to escalate, often with the help of a huge Government subsidy. Meanwhile Westminster residents in overcrowded conditions have to wait even longer to get rehoused.
We need a massive building programme of new homes at social rents right across London and an end to the current sell-off of more Council property. Westminster’s housing stock of homes for those on low incomes has been almost halved over the last 30 years. No wonder there is a housing crisis of epic proportions. When will the Government see sense and reverse its damaging housing policies?”
Councillor Paul Dimoldenberg is Leader of the Labour Group on Westminster City Council.

Starring Boris Johnson on the  kazoo and Grant Shapps on the  swanee whistle
The ‘affordable rent’ scheme is up and running but FOI requests show that the Housing Minister and the Mayor of London appear to know little about what it means for rents.
The Government’s ‘affordable rent’ programme allows landlords to charge rents at up to 80% of the market rate.  They say that the homes will be let to the same people who previously would have been offered homes for social rent, and that they will receive full housing benefit if entitled (robbing Peter (CLG grant towards new homes) to pay Paul (increased HB cost on substantially higher rents)).
The ‘affordable rent’ scheme is costing hundreds of millions of pounds and an untold amount of additional housing benefit.  It is a dramatic shift in policy as Government subsidy for social rented housing has virtually ended.  Rent levels are a crucial factor in the scheme.  You would therefore be forgiven for thinking that there would be some careful monitoring of the rents being charged by providers.
In the run up to the election the Mayor of London tried to take the sting out of the housing debate by claiming that most ‘affordable rent’ rents would be similar to the old social rent levels and that the average across the programme as a whole in London would be 65% of market rates.  He made great play of his efforts to keep rents reasonable.
Last week’s National Audit Office report on the ‘affordable rent’ scheme didn’t pay much attention to the implications for tenants, but it did note that the annual average rent would be £6,552 compared to £4,698 under the previous National Affordable Housing Programme, that the average rent across the whole programme would be 75% of market rents, and it confirmed that ‘in London providers typically planned for rent levels at approximately 65 per cent’.  I have taken ‘typically’ to mean average.  It strikes me as a statistical oddity that London, which will get more than a quarter of the programme’s homes, will charge 65% of market rent but the national average, including London, is 75%.  What does that imply for rents outside London?
The NAO also confirmed that there was little monitoring of rents for homes of different sizes – one of the key pieces of information demonstrating affordability for different types of household.  They say: Our analysis of the high-level information held by the [Homes and Communities] Agency shows that average weekly rent will range from around £100 a week in the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber to £182 a week in London. However, it does not have information on rent levels charged across homes of different sizes. As a result, we could not compare actual rent charged under the model and rent levels under previous programmes.
A month ago I put in a Freedom of Information request to the Mayor of London seeking information about a) how the 65% average figure was calculated, b) the average for each bedroom size category, and c) how many homes were being ‘converted’ from social rent to ‘affordable rent’ to help pay for the scheme.
In his response, the Mayor says:

The 65% affordable rent to market rent figure is based on an overall programme average across the 60 partner programmes approved during the allocation round for the 2011-15 Affordable Homes Programme. Partners provided an overall view of the affordable rent level against market rent that would be achieved across their programme covering indicative programmes where firm schemes were not identified. As an overall programme average based on a partially indicative programme it is not possible to provide a breakdown by unit or bedroom however we will be publishing details on rents annually.

This is, how should I put it, disingenuous.  I have sought further details, arguing:

Thank you for your email. I regret to say it does not answer my question nor on the face of it does it appear to comply with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, specifically my request for papers and emails. I believe I am entitled to see these unless a reason for non-release is provided. Of course I would be happy for any commercially confidential material to be redacted on the usual basis. I am also happy to receive information in electronic form.
The Mayor and the Deputy Mayor for Housing have both made statements over the past few months that the average rent for ‘affordable rent’ properties will be ‘65%’. I wish to see information showing in some detail how this figure has been calculated, as their statements are, as far as I can see, the only public information available on rents within the new programme. Given that the level of rent is a critical factor is assessing the worth of the programme, the requirements of scrutiny suggest this information should be available. Given that this is the Mayor’s primary housing programme, and now fully his responsibility, I suggest that there must be monitoring information showing the position on all contracts and a document or documents showing the calculations that lead to such definitive statements that the outcome rent is ‘65%’…..
Frankly I find it extraordinary that there is no information on rents for different size units, given that achieving a good share of family units was one of the Mayor’s stated objectives and a requirement of the bidding process. I believe that there must be, within the GLA, a document or documents showing the estimated bedroom size breakdown of the programme and their expected rents. I wish to have these documents released to me. The fact that it is indicative is neither here nor there as the information must have been sufficiently robust to enable the Mayor to approve contracts worth millions of pounds.
I therefore look forward to receiving the information originally requested.

It is extraordinary that such a significant shift in policy, using large amounts of public money and private borrowing, and involving a huge increase in rents, should be accompanied by such flimsy monitoring.  It demonstrates little interest in the actual output of the scheme, who it houses and how it might meet needs, apart from a simple numbers count of the number of homes produced.  As a minimum Government should know what bedroom size mix is being achieved and at what rents; it should know the pattern of cross-subsidy if rents of some homes are held down whilst others are pushed up; and it should be able to estimate the overall impact on the housing benefit bill.
The ‘affordable homes’ programme has been badly managed from the outset, as the NAO report makes clear, and contains major risks.  But even more risks arise from not having a clue what is happening, and that is what Grant Shapps and Boris Johnson stand accused of.
Find out more about the real ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a clue’

Monimbo
A minor bit of today’s housing news is about John Healey MP backing a private member’s bill which, it is claimed, is a ‘blitz on council house sub-letting’. As someone who thought John did a half-decent job as housing minister I’d not normally want to take him to task.  But there are reasons for questioning whether this particular bandwagon is a good one to jump on, even if his former opposite number Grant Shapps has already done just that.
First of course it needs to be said that council tenants who move out and make a fast buck by sub-letting the property without handing it back to the council are acting despicably, especially in areas of housing shortage (which let’s face it, means pretty much everywhere).  It’s even worse when the new ‘tenant’ is using the property for selling drugs or something else which harms the neighbourhood.  So it’s right that the problem is tackled and that such sub-letting should be illegal.
But as our esteemed co-bloggers at Nearly Legal have pointed out, not only is the practice already recognised as fraud, and so is already illegal, but councils like Camden have had successful prosecutions against tenants who have done it, as indeed has Tory Westminster.  The private member’s bill from Conservative MP Richard Harrington is therefore a complete waste of parliamentary time, as unlawful sub-letting is already a criminal offence.
Why then are the likes of Harrington and Shapps trundling on with their bandwagon?  First of all they presumably want to give the impression that ‘for far too long’ (to use a phrase beloved of Shapps) tenants have been getting away with murder (or sub-letting), and that only judicious action by a Tory MP has alerted us to the problem.  Well surely if they want to play that game (and it’s not the first time), Labour ought to be making clear that it’s a ruse and have nothing to do with it.
Second, once again, social housing tenants are being targeted, as they have been recently with anti-social behaviour and other measures.  This, surely, is the real reason for the private member’s bill. It’s to remind tenants once again that they are only temporary custodians of an asset owned by the state.  “An Englishman’s home is his castle” is not intended to apply to social housing tenants, who’d best be moved on to a proper home in the private sector.
The message to Labour should be this: don’t be fooled into going along with measures which encourage social housing, and especially council housing, to be treated like an emergency social service. Even if extreme shortages and spending constraints are putting enormous pressure on landlords to use their stock as effectively as possible, we ought to think twice about any measure of this kind which the government supports.  The chances are that its real aim is not what it says on the tin.  And it’s not Labour’s job to undermine the objective that – ideally, if resources allow – social housing should be about providing homes that people can feel proud of and want to raise their families in.
I heard an anecdote recently from a social housing manager which reminded me of this point. He’d been chatting to a tenant who’d moved into a housing association house after many years in different private lettings.  She said that she was so relieved to be in a place she could now call ‘home’, after having so many landlords who had imposed petty rules and having never been offered a long-term tenancy.  It was encapsulated in a trivial conversation she’d had with her son, who’d asked whether in this house he’d be able to put posters on his bedroom wall. For the first time, she could say ‘yes’.
 
 

This article by Steve Hilditch was published on the Guardian Housing Network blog this morning. 
Tinkering around the edges won’t invigorate the construction industry – new housing needs political will.
Concern about house building is rising as fast as actual house building is falling. A new report from BNP Paribas Real Estate shows that English councils have reduced their housing targets to 160,000 a year – down 13% from the now defunct Regional Spatial Strategies, and a whopping 70,000 below the number of new households formed each year – a gap equivalent to a town like Bournemouth.
Real delivery is different again: only 110,000 homes were completed in England in 2011 and completions are down 18% in the first quarter of 2012. Commentators are gloomy; key indicators – from construction employment to new orders — are pointing down, and from a very low base.
Housing minister Grant Shapps will no doubt find a statistic somewhere that gives grounds for optimism, but the finger of blame for the double dip recession can be pointed firmly at the housing construction sector.
Fiddling at the edges, as Shapps has already been doing, is not enough. Targets reflect our hopes and desires, but in real markets people only build what they can sell and make a profit on.
It will take many years of economic recovery to re-establish a self- assured housebuilding sector. Even then, there is no economic reason why the output from profitable housebuilders should coincide with our national aspiration to build homes. When you look over the long term, the private sector has never built the number of homes that the nation requires.
It is not an ideological statement to observe that we have only built enough homes when there has been very active intervention by the public sector. We won the numbers game when councils were building a lot of homes and their contribution, ended by Margaret Thatcher, was never replaced by housing associations despite all the hype.
We need to think big, in billions of pounds. We need to put the public sector to work, with councils commissioning new homes for all tenures, but especially shared ownership, intermediate renting and social renting, deploying their underused capacity to borrow prudentially.
Most councils are itching to act. The private sector would do most of the work.
Borrowing and debt have become dirty words but it is the sensible way to achieve long-term investment. There is nothing wrong with borrowing if it creates real physical assets and you can pay it back. It is a lot better than borrowing to fund unemployment.
Please don’t tell me there is no money: with a wave of a hand, last week the governor of the Bank of England marginally adjusted quantitative easing, but it was enough to finance the current housing programme for a generation.
It is a question of political will to get that money working for housing rather than rebuilding bank balance sheets for no wider social purpose. An emergency public sector housebuilding programme would kick-start the economy, reinvigorate the private construction sector, and create real jobs. If you work through the multiplier effects, by reducing benefit payments and increasing the tax take, in Treasury terms it will pay for itself. What’s not to like about that?

When is localism not localism? Well, we shall soon find out as Islington Council has announced it is pressing ahead with its plans to build new social rented homes using its own resources rather than participating in the programme being run by the Government’s Homes and Communities Agency.
Islington’s Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr James Murray, said:

“We have 13,000 families on the waiting list in Islington, most of whom are in severe overcrowding. Only family-sized homes, rented by the council or housing associations, will help families like this – in almost all cases, private or even intermediate housing will not. That’s why we are sending a clear message that for this council, social housing comes first.”

Islington’s move coincides with a report from the National Audit Office which highlights the significant risks involved in the Government’s so-called ‘affordable rent’ programme, which effectively ends Government support for social rented homes in new development.
There are many ‘in principle’ objections to the ‘affordable rent’ programme.  The two key ones are that rents will be set at up to 80% of market rent, which is unaffordable in many parts of the country, and that many of the tenancies will be insecure and time-limited.
But whatever the principles involved, it is also clear that the management of the programme has been seriously deficient.  Inept might be another word to describe it:

• There has been (at least) one missing year between the end of the previous National Affordable Housing programme and this new programme getting under way.  As a result, affordable housing starts (which includes the AR programme) have collapsed in the hiatus.
• According to the NAO one in five of the contracts for a programme that supposedly started in 2011 have not yet been signed.
• The programme is heavily back-loaded so half the homes are planned for the last year, 2015, with a major risk of slippage.
• Rents of 80% of market rents look unachievable as both providers and councils took fright at the difficulty of letting at such high rents.  If the average is closer to 65% in practice the Government will probably claim credit for keeping rents down rather than putting them up.
• There is a paucity of information about the impact the programme will have on the finances of housing associations – with grant cut by two-thirds and rents far short of initial predictions, the gap has to be filled by more borrowing, eating into associations’ borrowing capacity and increasing their risk.
• And finally, Peter has to pay Paul as a significant proportion of the extra high rent will be met by housing benefit – estimated by NAO to be around £1.4 bn.

The programme has been marked by a stunning lack of transparency, some might say secrecy.  Under the guise of commercial confidentiality, almost nothing is known about the contracts signed so far.  We know which providers and how many units and there has been talk in public about average rent levels (eg from the London Mayor and from Grant Shapps) but without any evidence being produced.  So we don’t know what the average rent is, we don’t know what the spread is, we don’t know whether the highest rents have been put on the smallest homes to offer some protection for family homes, we don’t know how many existing homes have been redesignated as AR to help pay for the programme, and we don’t know what type of tenancies have been offered and how many are insecure.  That’s a lot of known unknowns, to borrow a phrase, and there are probably some unknown unknowns as well.
Tomorrow marks 20 days since I put in a Freedom of Information request to the London Mayor for data about the programme.  Unless they’re working weekend overtime at the GLA, they have failed to meet their target response time.  I will of course keep people up to date with any useful response received.
So well done Islington, standing up for their communities and people in need of genuinely affordable homes in their borough.  No doubt their new planning policy – which rejects the AR model as inappropriate for the borough – will come under attack from the Mayor and the Government as they seek to expunge social rented housing from new development.  It could lead to a protracted battle between the borough and the GLA as planning authorities.  The Government will face a real ideological test – will their commitment to localism override their hatred of social renting?  That’s not likely in my view – but watch this space.           

Nothing is quite what it seems when Grant Shapps is announcing new policy.  The man who gave us the name ‘affordable rent’ to describe unaffordable housing, and sustains a Twitter hashtag devoted to his creative use of statistics, #shappstistics , is also expert at diverting scrutiny by making ‘ad hominen’ attacks on anyone who is convenient, often the housing profession and equally often the ‘undeserving’ poor.
Last week’s allocations policy announcement, assessed by Monimbo on Red Brick,  was a classic example of Mr Shapps at work.  In his press release it says he wants ‘to end the perception that council houses are only available to those willing to play the system.’  I wonder who creates that perception if not him?  Because it then says he wants ‘to reward ambition and achievement – ensuring homes go to the most in need such as hard working families – instead of those who merely know how to tick the most boxes.’  Now people working in allocations may be surprised to learn that they allocate homes to those who ‘merely’ tick boxes.  And the tens of thousands of households waiting for a home will feel that their housing needs are being ridiculed and, if unemployed, that their economic status is being used to stigmatise them.
Housing allocations is an immensely complex area where a lot of legislation, case law, and local rules have to be taken into account.  And that’s before the pressure starts over particular cases.  As supply has diminished, and as applicants have become more desperate, the job has got harder.  To mock it as a ‘box ticking’ exercise in this way is ignorant and crass, but it helps divert scrutiny of the new policy.
As night follows day, new starts of social rented homes have collapsed, new completions are about to collapse, and therefore lettings of new homes are about to collapse, making the system even more reliant on ‘re-lets’, leaving less to allocate to anybody.  The Guidance does not address what to do at this point.
Mr Shapps also has a tendency to avoid difficult issues by repeating a previous unproven but well-rehearsed assertion.  And so the Guidance evades the problems inherent in letting ‘affordable rent’ homes at up to 80% of market rents by repeating the silly claim that ‘Affordable Rent homes will be allocated in the same way as social rent properties’.  However, there is a little get out: the ‘framework for allocations provides scope for local flexibility…..’.
It may of course be chance that the new policy announcement coincided with Armed Forces Day, but it gave Mr Shapps an opportunity to get good headlines in the media wrapped in the flag.  In these moments he is so Churchillian: ‘Just as our brave troops answered their call of duty, councils will need to do the same, to ensure that heroes who want a home in their area will be at the top of local waiting lists.’
As a pre-emptive strike against another ad hominen attack I should make it clear that I have always supported priority for homeless ex-Armed Forces personnel, campaigned for this when I was at Shelter in the 1980s (when it was unfashionable), and welcomed the Labour Government’s moves to recognise the Armed Forces specifically in the homelessness priority groups and to change the local connection rules.
But the spin makes Mr Shapps’ new offer seem far more than it is, because the policy change – which I broadly welcome – is largely about ending barriers to being considered for housing and the priority attached to Armed Forces families once they have been given status in a ‘reasonable preference’ category.  They are not being given an absolute priority to be pushed to the front of the general waiting list.  And my reading of the new Guidance is that the homelessness duty to an Armed Forces family could be discharged through an offer of private rented accommodation just like everyone else.  Being offered an unaffordable ‘affordable rent’ home may not help at all.  And, as the Chair of the Army Families Federation said: “It’s a good gesture….. But if there are no houses available, it doesn’t matter what priority you have.”
And proof that Red Brick has influence in Government – the online version of the Guidance has been amended to add the crucial missing word ‘billion’.  Amongst other things, our blogger Monimbo is an excellent proofreader.