A busy Thursday for housing law, not yet law, housing benefits and housing misc. Item one. A Scottish Upper Tribunal is to hear a room size appeal on 18 September. This is one of the first Fife decisions. It is not the lead case in the English Upper...
A longer waiting to wait
Barnet Council are consulting on changes to their 2012 Allocation policy. The main change proposed is that the current 'residence requirement' of two years be increased to five years. That is to say that no-one would be eligible for Barnet's housing register...
Impossible Preference: Excluding the homeless from housing lists
R (Jakimaviciute) v LB Hammersmith and Fulham [2013] EWHC 4372 (Admin) [Not generally available yet. I've seen a transcript] This judicial review permission hearing raises very significant issues for post Localism Act Council allocation policies. The central...
End times.
I have been told that there must be an end of year round up for the blog. But, before I get to the figures, here is a soundtrack. NL, it has to be said, seems to be prospering in bad times (not that we make any money from it, not at all. The reverse in...
Allocations and legitimate expectation
In R(Alansi) v Newham LBC, Stuart-Smith J held that, although Ms Alansi had a legitimate expectation that she would remain a priority homeseeker on Newham's housing register, Newham had not acted unreasonably and in abuse of its power by withdrawing its...
Allocations Code: Draft Amendments
Although there appears to be a ministerial vacancy for housing policy (https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers/minister-of-state--11 h/t to Martin Partington and Jules Birch), quite a lot is happening. There are some interesting goings on about the...
Allocations: where have all the claims gone?
Allocations under Pt.6, 1996 Act. A big topic. A sexy topic. A true behemoth of a topic. And, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, a topic that isn't giving us very many cases these days. Which is odd, given the ever-growing tendency by local...
Tories to regulate private rented sector? Don’t get excited…
The detail of this may have passed you by at the time, it certainly did me, but amongst the wind and posturing of David Cameron's 'big speech' in March on stopping immigrants from getting things from healthcare to driving licences was quite a significant...
‘Homeless Legislation – a thing of the past?’
[Update at the end of the post 15/11/2012] Now that the Guardian has the story, I feel able to quote a briefing paper by Andy Gale of the DCLG that had found its way to me. This is the briefing that Andy Gale has been giving to Council officers (not...
Let’s all move to … Wales
This is another one of our irregular posts on our theme of happenings in Wales; this time with an apology because it's all rather later than I had hoped and SO much is going on in Cardiff that they must be in a state of permanent combustion. Following on...
Barnet’s brave new dawn
And, like a sudden, startling and slightly embarrassing squeak from a vinyl sofa, flexible tenancies are here! London Borough of Barnet have announced, in a manner which suggests absolutely no political motivation behind the decision at all, the 'end of the...
Deckchairs/Titanic: New Allocations Code
The new allocation code of guidance was published by DCLG today - it had been trailed a little and the smiling face of Grant Shapps appears in a Murdoch rag today (he tweeted the story this morning). There are some interesting snippets in it but, in truth,...