Reclassification of housing associations was an accident waiting to happen, but it’s wrong to let it determine what kind of regulation should apply to the sector. It’s ten years since Steve Wilcox in the UK Housing Review first warned of the possibility that housing associations could be reclassified as public bodies. At that time the…
The new right-to-transfer finally allows tenants to own their homes again, but time is already running out. The faltering history of council tenants’ attempts to become collective owners of their own estates entered a new phase last week when right-to-transfer regulations finally took effect in England. It’s taken more than five years, two governments and…
The housing minister, Grant Shapps, has just finished consulting on a new set of rules, refining laws introduced in 2008, to give council tenants the right to take over the management of their estates and request that ownership ‘be transferred from the council to a local housing association’. ‘Nobody knows the needs of a neighbourhood…