Council housing

We’ve made several changes, including: 

No more points

• You’ll be placed in order of priority based on your housing need. There are five bands, with 1 being the highest, and 5 the lowest.
• You’ll be put in band 3 if you have overcrowding and/or medical points. This is regardless of how may points you had before.
• You won’t get any priority if you live in a home with shared facilities.

Change in the 2-year residency qualification period

• You must usually have lived in the borough for at least the last five years to join the register. This includes existing applications. 

Other household members

• You can only include immediate family members you live with on your application. For example, your partner, husband, wife, sons and daughters. You can no longer normally include extended family members (subject to allocation scheme criteria).

Number of bedrooms

• If you now qualify for fewer bedrooms, this may be because some of the people you live with no longer do.
• We will expect two household members of the same sex to share 1 bedroom (apart from the main applicant and partner). This applies regardless of their age or relationship to each other.

Some applicants who are assessed as needing fewer bedrooms will now be considered adequately housed and put in band 5.

Band 5

• If you’re placed in band 5, you won’t be able to bid for any properties we advertise in our Choice Homes scheme.

Read the new allocation scheme (pdf) to find out more