Allocations system overhaul

Plans to overhaul the allocations and homelessness system as part of the government's new "vision for housing" are to be worked up by a new sounding board, it emerged this week.

The government has asked the team to suggest ways of scrapping the current needs-based system, in favour of one which offers greater choice and more sustainable communities.

The news came as Chancellor Gordon Brown's pre-budget report spelled out the government's commitment to giving social tenants more choice and ensuring social landlords "deliver a better service". The report says the government's vision, which will be set out in the housing Green paper "early next year" involves a more coherent pattern of social housing rents and an overhaul of housing benefit.

"Housing policies are central to building strong communities, but in the past they have often had the opposite result, creating unbalanced communities and concentrations of deprivation," the report says. "The government aim is to avoid this by building communities that involve a mix of tenures and by improving the way the social housing sector works."

The new sounding board, which met for the first time last month, includes representatives from councils, housing associations and homeless charities as well officials from across Whitehall.

Its conclusions will form the basis of a section in the Housing Green Paper on allocations and homelessness.

It will propose ways of giving homeless people greater protection - a move that will help the government fulfil its manifesto commitment on homelessness.

But ministers also want suggestions on a new allocations system to help promote choice, and tackle wider issues such as social exclusion and low demand. This would involve abandoning the current needs-based system.

The board is chaired by Mike Baldwin, the official in charge of homelessness and allocations at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions.

Team member Bill Hewlett, group housing manager at Ipswich council, said: "It gives local authorities, who will have a vital role of administering any new system, the chance to think through the implications of new proposals."

National Housing Federation policy officer Helen Williams, who is also on the board, said: "How we arrive at a framework that balances housing need and those wider objectives, is the key issue."

But she added: "It is good to be involved at this stage."

Shelter's chief solicitor Russell Campbell who is also on the team said: "Balanced and sustainable communities at the expense of housing need are not the way forward."

He predicted that the battle between the two viewpoints now lay ahead.