Back from the hiatus caused by various bits of leave and my attempt (unsuccessful) at completing a chapter of my book (with Alex Marsh) on welfare chauvinism, this is an attempt to catch up with what has been going on.\u00a0 And, frankly, it has been one of the silliest of silly seasons as far as housing is concerned<\/p>\n
First up, there is what I can only describe as a form of political madness over the allocation of social housing and some form of citizenship test over existing public or social housing tenancies (I’m not going to provide links to this nonsense).\u00a0 Initially, I thought that this political madness, which has been constituted by an auction between Reform UK and the Conservative party, applied solely to England.\u00a0 However, at least the Reform UK proposals are aimed at “Britain” and so we must assume that their proposals are also for Wales.\u00a0 I have tried to find online the pamphlet which Reform leaders are holding in their press release, entitled “Affordable social housing for working Britain”, but cannot do so.\u00a0 All I have is the press release which seems to suggest that “British born workers under the age of 35 will be placed at the front of the queue with priority given to married couples with children.\u00a0 Priority will also be given to veterans”.\u00a0 They have also “… committed to removing foreign nationals from social housing, pledging to evict them after a short grace period”.\u00a0 The Conservatives have similarly “pledged to put an end to social housing tenancies for foreign nationals”, but I don’t think that policy announcement applies to Wales (as it is limited to if the Conservatives win the next Westminster election) and only seems to require that a British citizen is a lead applicant.\u00a0 This is “political madness” not just for what it is suggesting and who would constitute such a citizen, as well as erm how these rules might fit with other legislative obligations and public law etc etc.\u00a0 The best that I think I can say about these kinds of announcements is that, at heart, they recognise that housing need is overwhelming the provision of social housing.\u00a0 However, newer forms of welfare chauvinism are not what is required (if you are as old as me, you will remember “Back to Basics” and the effect of the Court of Appeal judgment in\u00a0R v SoS for the Environment ex p\u00a0<\/em>Tower Hamlets LBC<\/em> [1993]).<\/p>\n Secondly, there has been more parochial madness in a media report<\/a> about Pembrokeshire’s new housing developments being used to allocate accommodate people from Birmingham, Liverpool, and other English areas.\u00a0 \u00a0Almost inevitably, it seems that the rumours are that English local authorities would be using that accommodation to house asylum seekers – I can’t believe that I am writing that nonsense.\u00a0 This all seems to have been based on rumour, perhaps enflamed by some form of social media (not in my Bluesky echo chamber, obvs), but was refuted by all councils involved.\u00a0 I despair at the inaccuracy and our inability to cut through with how social housing is allocated.\u00a0 But it does speak to the kind of “fairness” and bitterness which applicants for an allocation may feel, especially when out-of-area households are allocated social housing.\u00a0 Frankly, though, that possibility is unlikely for a whole host of reasons not least because of residency criteria and local lettings policies.<\/p>\n Finally, there has been a more sobering report that applications to the PSOW have increased by 48 per cent<\/a>.\u00a0 The PSOW’s quarterly newsletter<\/a>\u00a0noted that<\/p>\n “We have been focusing this year particularly on housing associations, working to bring all of them under Complaints Standards. We now have 27 housing associations operating under these Standards, with the remaining five making strong progress towards compliance. All are on track to achieve this by the end of September.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back from the hiatus caused by various bits of leave and my attempt (unsuccessful) at completing a chapter of my book (with Alex Marsh) on welfare chauvinism, this is an […]","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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"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\/447","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=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}