Prime Minister calls for end to secure tenancies

At a ‘meet the people’ session in Birmingham, the Prime Minister called into question the future of secure tenancies for social housing tenants, but his comments haven’t gone down well with housing professionals – nor tenants, who called the idea “nasty and unworkable”. Mark Cantrell reports

Prime Minister David Cameron has hinted that secure tenancies in social housing may face the chop, indicating he favours a more “flexible system” that allocates on the basis of need rather than lifelong security.

Cameron said that more social housing is needed, but he questioned the continuation of secure tenancies for life – at least for new tenants – thereby raising the prospect that this much-cherished feature of social housing may be discontinued as a result of future reform.

Speaking at a ‘PM Direct’ session in Birmingham, where the Prime Minister took questions from an audience of the public, Cameron made his comments about tenure in response to a woman who had been unsuccessful in obtaining a larger council home for her family. The woman, who works full-time, pays her rent and council tax, said she lived in a “very small” two-bedroom house with her 16-yearold
daughter and her 13-year-old son. “For the last two years, I have slept on a blow up bed in my living room because I cannot get a bigger house,” she added.

“It ought to be about need,” Cameron told her. “Your need has become greater because of the reason that you give, and yet there isn’t really the opportunity to move. Many councils operate very good swaps policies where they try, when the kids have left home, to encourage people to leave the family home and go into a bungalow, and good councils make that work – we should encourage that.”

However, he added that there is a question mark over whether in future social housing tenancies should be granted for life.

“In future, should we be asking when you are given a council house is it for a fixed period, because maybe in five or 10 years you may be doing a different job with better pay and you won’t need that home – you’ll be able to go into the private sector,” he said. “Do we need to reform tenure to enable people to move through tenure, rather than see it as something that you either get – good, I ’ve got my council house – or something you don’t get – bad, I’m on a blow up mattress – so I think a more flexible system makes sense for the future.

“It makes sense, not for existing tenants, but for future tenants to be asked can we relate more the need you have to the housing that you get to make sure we have more social mobility and people can move through council housing rather than see it as something that they get for life.”

Responding to the Prime Minister’s suggestions, Helen Williams, assistant director at the National Housing Federation (NHF), said: “Changing security of tenure for existing social housing tenants should not be on the table, as people moved in and signed tenancy agreements on the basis that it was for the long-term, but there is a case for looking at what is offered to new tenants, as a way to seeing if over time social housing could help more people.

“It may be for some people that renting from a council or housing association for a short-term could be the base from which they can build up to buy or rent in the private rented sector. But, there are lots of issues to consider, like the impact on people’s behaviour if they thought they might have to move if they bettered their circumstances, for these reasons we would expect government to take its time to discuss these issues with tenant groups and social landlords.

“It is also worth bearing in mind that currently very few people living in social housing are earning the kind of money that suggests they could buy or cover rent levels in the private rented sector, with just 10 per cent of households having incomes of more than £20,900.”

The long-standing Defend Council Housing (DCH) campaign called Cameron’s suggestion “nasty and unworkable”, adding that combined with measures in the Budget to cut Housing Benefit, the proposal “makes a lie of his pre-election promise to respect tenants’ rights”.

The organisation fears the policies will lead to more tenants being evicted, greater levels of homelessness, and longer waiting lists. “In what kind of Victorian nightmare world would tenants be forced to move house if you got a job or promotion or if someone dies? What new ‘poor law guardians’ would vet our income and family life?” said DCH Chair Eileen Short.

“This is a nasty and unworkable attack which will not build one new home. Existing and past council tenants have paid many times over for our homes. Tenants and those on the waiting list, like millions more in Britain, cannot afford exorbitant mortgages or private rents. We need a new generation of first class public housing to create homes and jobs.”