When choice isn’t fair?

November 18, 2006

Chris Leslie, Director, NLGN
Inside Housing

Recent years have seen a fundamental shift in the purpose of local authorities, from being direct providers of services, to institutions that facilitate and support others on territory over which they are now expected to offer ‘community leadership’. Of all the services ‘lost’, housing is perhaps the most well documented. From having been firmly in the remit of ‘the council’, this is now often delivered by Housing Associations (HAs) and community trusts.

Moreover, where previously housing professionals determined who lived in which property and where, allocation has become more user-focused. Once powerless to deal with a seemingly Byzantine system, families and individuals get greater leeway to negotiate their housing needs. So has the consumer as active citizen assumed the role of king in this domain?

Having long researched choice-based letting (CBL) schemes and other developments in local choice, the New Local Government Network (NLGN) has been broadly supportive of what we ourselves describe as ‘delegated decision-making’. Yet we have also acknowledged the fear that

To this end, NLGN has designed a ‘fair choice’ benchmark, against which CBL and all other choice-based policies can be judged. As a method of gauging the benefits of enhanced choice over relative costs, it involves tests on the following ten criteria: quality, convenience, opportunity, privilege, fairness, community, supply, efficiency, knowledge advantage and localism.

On supply for example, a sufficient number of properties would need to be available for choice in social housing to be truly facilitated. Some CBL schemes in London operate cross-borough partnerships as a way of widening capacity. In practice however, local choice will always run up against considerations of efficiency, i.e. a limit on the number of available properties. Despite the well-documented mass of empty properties in other parts of the UK, an exponential expansion of the supply base in those areas which most people want to live – i.e. locally – is off the cards. As such, the expectations CBLs offer need to be set both honestly and realistically.

This is not to say that the base should not expand. With the quality test for example, the nature of the housing market means that the wealthy will always have the greatest choice. But if quality can be raised by reaching a situation where supply marginally exceeds demand, residents who vote with their feet will also be those most likely to take greater pride in their property; in time, raising the quality of the local environment.

With the community test meanwhile, we need to reflect that like all public services, social housing is arguably part of a public good and not simply the property of those using them at a particular moment in time. Yet the right-to-buy cuts directly across this, and is itself difficult to argue against. CBLs need therefore to incorporate proper planning and co-ordination to ensure that the current and future needs of the wider area are protected.

News that the housing register of those waiting for social accommodation has grown steadily over the one million mark in the past decade suggests that ‘choice’ may only be available to those at the top end of a very long list. Ensuring that sustained capital investment creates additional new units as well as repairing existing homes is the best way to provide greater choice for a greater number – as the alternative of positing meager options to the most in need is hardly a great step forward.


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