‘Fairer system’ for people on Galway City Council housing list

A new online system of allocating social housing in Galway that came into being this month aims to give more choice to people who are on the city’s waiting list.

Galway City Council hopes that Choice Based Letting (CBL), which went live on April 7, will help streamline the process of allocating homes.

The local authority also expects that the new system will cut out the number of refusals of homes offered to applicants in the waiting list.

“It is another layer in the system of allocating houses but it should make the allocation system run a lot more smoothly,” explained Helena Martyn, Senior Executive Officer of the City Council’s Housing Department.

Households on the city housing waiting list were written to in December and January alerting them to CBL, including people on Housing Assistance Payments (HAP) and RAS (Rental Accommodation Scheme). Some 3,638 qualified housing applicants were sent CBL information packs, and as of last week, some 45% of users registered and logged on.

They have been given unique usernames and passwords to log onto the system, where they can register an interest in Council properties that are available.

Just two homes were added to the online portal when it was launched, and a further 23 three-bed homes in the new estate of Ballyburke in Knocknacarra went ‘live’ this week.

But the list is due to be updated regularly, and Ms Martyn hopes that new estates currently being developed will be added, along with voids and houses of approved housing bodies.

Helena Martyn told the Galway City Tribune that the system should be good for staff and for clients of the City Council on the waiting list.

“We hope it will improve the system and speed it up but we have to wait and see. It is a positive. We have people who are genuinely interested in properties and we can’t offer them to them (under the previous system) because they are not long enough on the list whereas this way, they can express an interest.

“It’s fairer. We’re not going through a list of people who don’t want the property, and time is wasted on sending out offers that are refused four or five times. That’s frustrating for the staff and there’s a lot of paperwork involved,” she said.

People should be aware that under the new system, if they express an interest in a house, and are offered that house but refuse it, then they are thrown off the housing list for 12 months.

“The big thing is to bring down the number of refusals. That’s where we hope to get a win here – people are choosing houses they actually want to go in. It’s giving people more choice rather than us picking the property for them.

“It’s still a time-based system. If we get 20 expressions of interest for one property, we still have to go through the criteria. The person waiting 11 years is obviously going to get it ahead of someone who just went on the list yesterday.

“The idea is you’d have a person who is genuinely interested in it. If we make an offer to a person who has expressed an interest in taking a property, and if they then refuse to take up that offer, then they are suspended from the housing waiting list for a year.

“Automatically you will not be offered another property, so really if you are going to make a bid on a property, you need to make sure you’re not just doing it for the craic,” Ms Martyn said.

One fear of the new system is that it might exclude people who are not computer literate. In these cases, particularly with older people, Ms Martyn said that housing stock will be held back to offer outside of this system.

“We will have to keep an eye on that to ensure that people are engaging with the process because if they aren’t, we’ll need to contact them to find out if they are interested in Choice Based Letting, or are they aware of it or is there some reason they can’t access it.

“We’re piloting it and we’ll review it again in three months to see how it is progressing,” added Ms Martyn.