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Large housing association to offer lifetime tenancies to private and social renters
A large housing association is aiming to offer lifetime tenancies to private and social renters, its chief executive has told Inside Housing.
In a phased process, 28,000-home Your Housing Group says it will give security of tenure to both groups, as others in the sector plan to scrap fixed-term tenancies for social renters.
The association has started offering three-year tenancies to its private renters, with a plan to move to ten years soon and then eventually to lifetime contracts.
Brian Cronin, chief executive of Your Housing Group, told Inside Housing: “We’re trying to work through the legal issues to get it to a ten-year tenancy and then a full tenancy. What we’re trying to concentrate on is people’s journeys, and match the tenure – how they occupy the property – to their life journey, rather than the way it was funded.”
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He added: “Our whole philosophy is to move to one single tenancy across all our stock and treat people with the same level of high service. You might get different standards in different properties based on rentals, but if we make repairs in seven or eight days for PRS [private rented sector] clients, why don’t we do it for social clients?
Listen to a podcast on fixed-term tenancy in social housing here:
“They’re all renters, they should have the same standard. So actually, the big USP associations have got is that we’re long-term managers and holders of these assets and we know what it takes to manage a property over 30 or 40 years. That’s the professionalism that we should be really proud of.”
A number of social landlords are reviewing the way they run their tenancies after the government U-turned last month on plans to scrap lifetime tenancies and create rolling fixed-term tenancies.
L&Q led the way with its recent eye-catching announcement that it would transfer all its residents to lifetime tenancies.
The association plans to offer lifetime tenancies to all new residents and transfer its 8,500 existing fixed-term tenants onto assured tenancies.
Some associations believe fixed-term tenancies are useful to enable residents to downsize when some move out, but L&Q researched its use of the terms and found that it has never ended a tenancy due to under-occupation.
Other housing associations last week told Inside Housing they were also considering moving to lifetime tenancies.
