{"id":283,"date":"2026-01-23T06:08:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T06:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/?p=283"},"modified":"2026-01-21T17:15:53","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T17:15:53","slug":"homelessness-and-social-housing-allocation-bill-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/homelessness-and-social-housing-allocation-bill-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Homelessness and Social Housing Allocation Bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Bill trundles its way through the legislative process.\u00a0 The inestimable Jennie Bibbings has provided a great summary<\/a> of the changes made at and following the Stage 2 proceedings before the Local Government and Housing Committee.\u00a0 Jennie’s summary also highlights how, even in devolved areas, legislation is an negotiation between the WG and the UK government about what is possible (eg around the duty to ask and act).<\/p>\n

One significant concession has been the removal of the right of local authorities to create their own categories of “qualifying persons” for an allocation of housing.\u00a0 Experience elsewhere has not demonstrated that such a provision is always used in intended ways, and there has been much litigation over it.\u00a0 So, it is good to get rid of it in Wales (and good riddance).<\/p>\n

One clause which I think is of particular interest in the Bill and (I think) has flown under my radar – unaccountably given I have a significant research interest in the issues – is what will be the new sections 96A and 96B of the 2014 Act.\u00a0 These will require a RSL to comply within a reasonable period with a request made by a local authority to make a homeless applicant an offer of suitable accommodation in its area.\u00a0 Further, the RSL “must comply with any reasonable request for information in relation to that accommodation made to it by the authority in connection with the exercise of the authority\u2019s functions under this section”.\u00a0 The similar duty to co-operate in England is much weaker and isn’t really serviceable.\u00a0 In our work on nominations, we found that RSLs commonly cherry-picked applicants (or were accused of doing so) and nominations agreements were either forgotten, not adhered to, or honoured in the breach.\u00a0 There isn’t much a local authority in England can do in these circumstances, but refusals are not litigated (interesting).\u00a0 The Bill provides that the Welsh Ministers may give guidance in relation to “good reason”, “reasonable period” and “reasonable request”, but an amendment now makes that a duty.\u00a0 Again, good.\u00a0 These provisions are likely to cause some friction, I suspect, in practice, and, perhaps some rather different allegations between partners in meeting housing need (some kind of reverse cherry-picking).\u00a0 If you are interested in this area, we published a rather academic piece back in 2009 with the title, “Trust, distrust and betrayal”, about the nominations process in England.\u00a0 Absolutely key here will be information sharing protocols.<\/p>\n

Stage 3 plenary proceedings are slated in for 3rd February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This Bill trundles its way through the legislative process.\u00a0 The inestimable Jennie Bibbings has provided a great summary of the changes made at and following the Stage 2 proceedings before […]","protected":false},"author":7123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homelessness"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}