Councillors want sight again of who gets social housing in their areas, amid confusion about how lists work

Council managers should go back to providing councillors with reports on who has recently got social homes in their areas, according to a motion supported by the Protocol Committee.

Up to around 10 years ago, the council used to provide a report like this to councillors. It stopped due to concerns about privacy and data protection.

At the January meeting of the committee, Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey tabled a motion calling for “the reintroduction of the fortnightly housing allocations and transfers report in order to maintain proper oversight as previously existed”.

Councillors need more information to be able to explain to people how the system is working, says Lacey. “It isn’t about advancing anyone’s cause,” he said. “It's about fully understanding the integrity of the process.”

So many people raise questions and concerns about how homes are being allocated. “When you saw the allocations, you could stand over that process,” Lacey said. 

The majority of councillors at the committee supported him, and the motion was agreed. Lacey said council managers are now considering whether they can reintroduce the reports. 

Privacy issues

A council-commissioned privacy impact assessment, carried out in 2017, found multiple reasons why the council shouldn’t provide councillors with the names of people who had been housed locally. 

In the report, barrister David Fennelly examined the issues and found that social housing applications can involve sensitive personal and financial information, including whether people are homeless, refugees, or members of the Traveller community. 

“The Housing Allocations team frequently deals with acutely sensitive cases, involving issues such as domestic violence and witness protection, which demand strict respect for privacy and data protection,” the report says. 

“In these cases, the disclosure of names and addresses to all Councillors in the manner which has operated to date presents a heightened risk,” it says.

Still, the council needs to find a way to explain who is being housed ahead of others and why, says Sarah Lawless, a special needs assistant who joined the housing list 20 years ago, is currently facing eviction from a private rented home. 

“There is just so much confusion,” Lawless said. “The whole system doesn’t make sense.”

Lawless said that after two decades, she’s number 10 on the list. But she said she knows someone who joined the list 12 years ago and is number 3. 

Both get the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), are from the same area, and are approved for a four-bedroom home, Lawless said. 

“You don’t want to begrudge anyone,” she said. “Everyone has a right to a roof over their head.”

Multiple lists

One of the reasons that the social housing list confuses people is that there are actually multiple lists in each area of the city, Lacey said. 

There is a homeless list, a medical priority list, a transfer list, the main housing list, and others, he said. 

The council allocates one home to each list in turn, and then it begins again, he said. 

There’s widespread confusion among applicants about how the social housing allocations system works, said Social Democrats Councillor Jesslyn Henry. 

Even councillors struggle at times to understand it, she said.

Choice-based lettings

The confusion has worsened since the council introduced the choice-based-lettings system, Henry said. 

People can still just wait on the list until they’re offered a home, and then decide if they want it, or want to pass and hope for a better option.

Or they can watch adverts from the council for choice-based lettings, and if they see something they want, apply for it.

Lawless recently applied for a home in the new Oscar Traynor Woods development. “Every time you apply, you think this could be the one – you really get your hopes up,” she says. “You can picture yourself moving in.”

This choice-based system can get people into a vacant home faster, by avoiding a situation where a person refuses an offer, and the council has to offer it to someone else, who may also refuse it, etcetera.

But if hundreds of people apply for a home advertised by the council via its choice-based lettings system, it’s a bit of a mystery to many how the council chooses who’s going to get it.

Many people believe the name is basically picked out of a hat, said Henry, the Social Democrats councillor. “People do think it's a lottery system, which it absolutely is not,” she said.

Lawless did not get the home in Oscar Traynor Woods she applied for. “It’s soul-destroying,” she said.  

She had thought that was decided by lottery, she said. “A lot of people think it is,” she said.

If it’s not a lottery, “What way does it work then?” she wonders. “How do they decide?”

Councillors say that choice-based lettings homes are also allocated using the multiple waiting lists for the local area. 

Choices and consequences

Another somewhat mysterious aspect of the workings of the social housing allocations system is how choices applicants make can affect their position on the list, as Lawless learned the hard way a few years ago. 

Since she moved out of her childhood home 18 years ago, until around five years ago, Lawless paid her own rent privately, without help from government schemes like HAP, she said. 

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, though, she was struggling to keep that up and she managed to persuade her landlord to accept HAP, she said. “At the time, it was a lifesaver, because it was helping me pay the rent.”

Back then, she was around number 30 on the social housing waiting list, but after she applied for HAP she was shocked when she dropped down to number 150, she said. She had no idea that would happen. 

She later learned that people on HAP are moved from the waiting list to the transfer list, which she says gets fewer allocations. 

The idea being that people receiving HAP are housed already and looking to transfer to a different housing situation. 

But Lawless, who has four children, two of whom are autistic, says her situation is precarious. Her landlord recently told her he’s selling. Because she has lived there a long time, she has until the end of the year to move out, she said. 

Lawless says she cannot understand how other people, who appear to have very similar circumstances to her, but joined the list more recently, could be higher up it. “You wonder what way the numbers work,” she said.

So what is the solution?

Henry, the Social Democrats councillor, says that something needs to be done to help social housing applicants understand how the allocations system works. 

She is not convinced that the council can report the names of all the people it houses to councillors, within current data protection laws. 

“It is a fine line as well,” she says. “If someone was homeless, that is not for everyone else to know.”

But Lacey, the Labour councillor, says he’s not convinced there is a data protection issue. 

The council needs to look at this again, he said. He doesn’t think issuing such a report to local councillors would be a breach of privacy. 

People living locally already know who got a house in their area. “Moving into a house is a public statement,” he said. “That is not a private matter.”

Lacey said it would be better for transparency if councillors knew more information and could reassure people that the list is working correctly. 

So says independent Councillor Mannix Flynn, who, back in 2009, looked into the housing allocations and found that there were homes being allocated to people who were not next on the list.

The allocations report was introduced after that, he says, and it allowed councillors to oversee that the allocations process was transparent, he says. “It gave us clarity,” he says. “Without it, we have no way of tracking our clients.”

He says councillors would use it to try to take credit for people getting houses. “Councillors will always look for credit,” he says. “They will look for credit for the good weather. It's insatiable.”

Flynn says the allocations list shouldn’t contain people’s personal information, like the reason they got priority, or anything like that. It should be a list of names and their new addresses, he says. 

Fennelly, author of the 2017 council report on privacy concerns around telling councillors who’d been housed, wrote that the practice couldn’t continue within privacy law unless the reports were anonymised. 

“The transmission of this personal data to a very large group of individuals by email – in this case, 63 elected members of the Council as well as certain other individuals with whom the information has traditionally been shared – presents very clear and significant risks,” says the report.