Tenant’s voice: Time-out for target

But we must still brace ourselves for record numbers of homeless families in 2009. So how will local housing authorities cope with the demand?

Sadly, we’ve already witnessed a growing ruthlessness when it comes to assessing whether a local authority has a rehousing duty towards homeless applicants. An Afghan client of our housing advice centre had been through horrors too dreadful to describe before arriving in the UK. He suffers from a debilitating bone disease, causing constant pain. When he lost his shorthold tenancy, his local authority found him to be non-priority – no housing duty. And any hint of rent arrears, whether or not it was the grounds for possession action, will trigger the response of intentionality.

Many families don’t even get as far as a homeless persons interview. Local authority gatekeeping is now a fine art. Housing ‘options’ teams no longer attempt to give impartial advice. Instead, they persuade families to accept help with finding accommodation in the private rented sector before the council even considers if it has a re-housing duty.

I recently rang one local council on behalf of a family that was being evicted. The family had been told that the landlord could not evict them without a court order, so I wanted to explain that the advice was wrong because the landlord was resident and only needed to give reasonable notice. As soon as I started explaining this to the officer, she interrupted, saying, ‘Yes, of course, [we told them to go away]. People think they can just turn up here and we will re-house them.’

Is it callousness that makes some officers (not all) adopt such attitudes? I don’t think so. The pressures on local authorities are immense. And these pressures come not from the scale of demand, but from the government- imposed target to halve the number of households living in temporary accommodation by March 2010 (from a baseline set at December 2004).

Of course we’d all love to see an end to temporary accommodation, especially as families often wait years for a permanent home. It creates uncertainty about the future and it is disempowering. Families have no choice about where they live or whether they will be moved on. But we can’t make temporary accommodation go away simply by wishing it.

Is temporary accommodation always worse than being coerced into private renting? Most temporary accommodation is managed by a social housing landlord and a complaints procedure exists if things go wrong. Tenants in temporary accommodation don’t have the fear of retaliatory eviction which makes so many private tenants put up with appalling conditions.

I think we must accept that, in this period of recession, the temporary accommodation reduction target should be suspended. Let it be replaced by targets for good conditions and sensitive management of temporary homes.

Let’s use the properties built for affordable home ownership which now cannot be sold, and give families some choice about where they live. And gear up the use of empty dwelling management orders to bring these homes into use for homeless families. Above all, let’s bring humanity back into homeless persons units.

Jacky Peacock is director of Brent Private Tenants’ Rights Group.