Bedford social housing delays include households waiting for a home 'in the right area'

Social housing waiting times in Bedford borough include delays caused by households waiting for a home in the right area, a meeting heard.

Bedford Borough Council’s Housing Committee had requested a report on social housing waiting times to see if there were any differences for people with disabilities and those without.

However, as Lee Phanco, the council’s chief officer for assessment, application and business support, pointed out, the report presented on Wednesday (November 2) didn’t break the numbers down as requested.

He explained: “The information provided is comparing people who are eligible to go into the housing register because of medical grounds.

“We can’t easily separate out people with disabilities and people who have other medical needs.

“The other important thing to know that the committee will be aware of is because of the way that the allocation scheme works, it’s a choice-based scheme.

“It allows people applying for housing to choose when they want to bid for properties.

“They can choose just to bid on properties in a particular area and to wait in their [current] accommodation.

“The figures don’t give a measure of the absolute time that it’s necessary for somebody to wait to be re-housed, the time includes that element of personal choice,” he said.

Mr Phanco said 412 people of the 1,658 households on the housing register have a medical need.

“But there is quite a high proportion of those that aren’t actively bidding for properties at the moment,” he said.

“We do periodically contact people that haven’t been bidding for a period of time to check if they want to remain on the housing register or not.

“We haven’t actually done that recently particularly during the pandemic, it’s a piece of housekeeping activity we need to to pick up.

“But clearly that does demonstrate that people may be very choosy and waiting for the right property to come along,” he said.

Councillor Fouzia Zamir Atiq (Labour, Cauldwell) said she’d been approached by residents who claimed they had been on the list longer than neighbours who had been allocated a new home.

Mr Phanco said: “First of all people are given a priority band.

“There’s A, B, C, and D, so when somebody applies we would look at all their circumstances and based on the criteria in the allocation scheme that determines which band they go into.

“If two people in the same band both bid for the property, then priority isgiven to the person that’s been on the housing register waiting the longest.

“If somebody was in band B and had been in that band for a couple of years, and their neighbour has applied more recently but he’s in band A if they’ve both bidding for the same property the neighbour in band A is going to get priority,” he said.

Mr Phanco added that if somebody is just lacking a bedroom and so claims to be overcrowded they would go into band C.

But if they met other criteria, such as the current property being unsuitable for medical reasons, they would move into band B.

“It’s not possible to say that somebody should be waiting no more than x amount of time before they get rehoused, unfortunately,” he said.