Tenants receiving notice to quit from their landlords have spoken of the stress, panic, and powerlessness they feel to determine their futures. In this regard, tenants living in the private rental sector, but reliant on State supports, are the most powerless of all.
Nowhere is this more evident than in how the tenant-in-situ scheme is playing out. This scheme allows local authorities to buy homes from landlords who are selling up and is designed to provide long term security to tenants entitled to social housing, and to keep them in their current homes.
However, while the deal is done between landlords and local authorities, in reality it is the tenants of those landlords, the beneficiaries of payments from local authorities, who become the default brokers of these sales. They work initially to persuade their landlords that selling to the local authority is a better option than going to market. If they do manage to get the landlord to approach the local authority in relation to the sale, they face a horrible limbo period, hoping everything will be to the council’s satisfaction, that officials will agree a price the landlord finds acceptable, and the sale will proceed. But they are powerless to actually effect those sales.
Some councils are embracing the scheme, with obviously dedicated council staff working as hard to push the sales through as if it was their own family member who was about to become homeless. Other local authorities are not, and seem reluctant to engage with the scheme in any meaningful way.
An additional difficulty has emerged with the scheme where a tenant is on the waiting list in one local authority area, but has had to move to another to find somewhere to rent. Where the home they are now renting is available for sale the local authority is enabled to buy it, even though the tenant is not on its waiting list. However, this means the purchase does not result in a reduction of numbers on its waiting list. There is a fear that some local authorities may be reluctant to buy where this is the case, and will find other reasons not to complete a purchase.
A solution to this problem would be to take the scheme out of the hands of local authorities and put it with a central agency which has no direct skin in the game. This has already been done for the separate tenant-in situ purchase scheme, for people who are not in receipt of State benefits, but can become cost-rental tenants if they are on income levels which would make them eligible for cost-rental housing.
The scheme is being administered by the Housing Agency. Perhaps it should look after the State’s most vulnerable, powerless tenants too. Such is the level of pressure in the rental market at the moment that everything possible must be done to protect those most exposed.