'House teachers - not the homeless'

In a move likely to outrage homelessness campaigners and pressure groups, Peabody Trust director of development and technical services Dickon Robinson (pictured) said: “Commitments should be sought from local authorities and housing associations to give greater priority to key workers in their allocations schemes and in nomination agreements.”

He told delegates at a Town and Country Planning Association conference: “We do not encourage approaches which discriminate against homeless households, [but] this can happen where unemployed households are given a lower priority than those in work.”

Robinson called the policy of automatically putting homeless families at the head of the queue for re-housing “short sighted and perverse”. Teachers and other key workers should be given priority, he said.

Attacking the “short-termism over long-term stewardship” attitude across the sector, Robinson also condemned the local authority strategy of housing people just to “get them out of temporary accommodation to reduce costs”.

Developers can walk away from a development after completion but RSLs have to manage the site and ensure smooth running for decades, he complained.

The conference, which looked at housing key workers through planning gain, saw speakers heap criticism on section 106 agreements for making the supply of social housing “dependent on the private sector”.

Firefighters, nurses and teachers were dismissed as the “cuddly” and acceptable face of the definition.

“If you are an employer, everyone you employ is a key worker, otherwise you wouldn’t have needed to employ them,” Cardiff university planning professor Stephen Crow said. “What about stockbrokers’ clerks, hospital porters and cleaners?”

TCPA director Gideon Amos said the difficulties in housing essential staff showed little sign of going away. Poor house building figures and affordable housing quotas" suggest there is little political will to house people,” he complained.