Tipperary council approves big changes for single social housing applicants
The new changes are interim measures, while more one and two-bedroom social units are built over the next four years
Tipperary County Council has changed its housing allocation policy to allow social housing applicants waiting over six years for a one-bedroom home to also be considered for two-bedroom homes when they become available.
Elected members adopted the policy change at a recent meeting, where the Council's Housing Section also announced its plan to build 472 one-bedroom housing units and 153 two-bedroom units over the next four years. Housing Section Administrative Officer Deirdre Flannery informed councillors the change in the housing allocation policy was being introduced, due to the current serious shortage of one-bedroom social homes.
There are currently 1,503 applicants approved for one-bedroom homes on the housing list and 948 approved for two-bedroom homes. She said the policy change would open another housing path to one-bedroom applicants but acknowledged it would “adversely impact” applicants approved for two-bedroom units.
“These are the people who will now be competing in a bigger pot and hence are less likely to secure a tenancy,” she said. In view of this, she explained how the council still weighed the allocation of two-bedroom units in favour of two-bedroom approved applicants. A one-bedroom applicant's time on the housing list will be treated as halved when they are considered for a two-bedroom unit.
Mrs Flannery cited two examples to illustrate the weighting. Where a one-bedroom applicant and two-bedroom applicant both on the waiting list for six years are considered for a two-bedroom house they have expressed an interest in under Choice Based Letting (CBL), the two-bedroom applicant will be allocated the property as the one-bedroom applicant's time on the list will be considered halved to three years.
However, when a one-bedroom applicant on the list eight years and two-bedroom applicant three years on the list seek a two-bedroom house through CBL, the one-bed application will be successful as they will be considered to be on the list four years, a year longer than the three-bed applicant.
She said the expected outcome of the policy change was that 73% of the first 100 allocations of two-bedroom homes will go to two-bed applicants and 27% will be allocated to one-bedroom applicants.
Clonmel Fianna Fáil Cllr Siobhan Ambrose proposed the approval of the policy change and welcomed it because at the moment a housing list applicant had “more of a chance of winning the lotto” than being allocated a one-bedroom home by the Council. She considered the change to be very good news and “transformative” for one-bedroom approved applicants.
Independent Cashel Cllr Liam Browne disagreed that the policy was “transformative”. He acknowledged the Housing Section did a fine bit of work in developing this policy, but there were not enough two-bedroom housing units, and now another cohort of housing applicants can apply for them. The Council's problem was that it was not building enough houses and not building them fast enough, he argued.
Tipperary Town Cllr Annemarie Ryan, a member of the Council's Housing Strategic Policy Committee, said the committee went through a huge amount of data relating to one and two-bedroom homes over several meetings and felt it was the fairest decision to offer a little bit of hope to one-bedroom applicants on the housing list for years. The Sinn Féin councillor said there were also various reasons why single people want a two-bedroom rather than one-bedroom home. In marriage breakdown cases, an extra room was required for visiting family members, however she agreed with Cllr Browne that not enough one and two-bedroom homes were being built in the first place.
Housing SPC Chairperson Cllr Mary Hanna Hourigan said she fully understood the concerns raised by councillors and stressed this is an interim solution until the Council has more homes built. She also strongly believed the council and Approved Housing Bodies need to build more two-bedroom homes.
The Council's Director of Housing Services Jonathan Cooney said that for the past 100 years the Council primarily built three-bedroom homes but it was starting to move away from this to one and two-bedroom homes.
He pointed out the building of these smaller housing units couldn't be achieved overnight. If a decision was made to design one-bedroom units today, it would be three to four years before they were delivered.