Social housing allocations survey from Crisis and CaCHE

The NHF is collaborating with Crisis and the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) on a survey looking at current practices and issues affecting social housing allocations. This is the first part of wider research that Crisis and CaCHE are doing to understand what challenges social landlords face when deciding who is prioritised for access to social housing. You can read more about the research on the Crisis website.

This is the first opportunity for housing associations to talk about their allocations practice and their experiences, challenges and perspectives. The Homelessness Monitor in England has included survey data from local authorities, including criticisms that pre-tenancy checks make it harder to access social housing for homeless applicants, but there has never been a corresponding survey of housing associations.

We are keen to support this work to explore the perspective of housing associations. This adds to our own recent research on allocations to homeless families, due to be published ahead of our webinar on 5 April.  For this research, we interviewed families with experience of homelessness, local authorities and housing associations.

We appreciate that the landscape around allocations is complex, with different systems across the country. We are keen to learn more and for you to share your thoughts and experiences.

One person per housing association will be contacted and asked to complete the survey on behalf of the organisation. Please keep an eye on your inboxes, therefore, for an email from CaCHE/Crisis researchers with a link to the survey. It will be sent 5 May. If your organisation don’t recieve a link, then please get in touch with the team at Crisis to request a link to the survey.