Local councillors have questioned an unconfirmed practice within Waterford City and County Council. Representatives say that council staff within the housing department are allocating houses depending on how many times a person has bid on them.
The Choice-Based Letting (CBL) Scheme was adopted by councils across the country to allow people to bid on social homes on the councils' website every Friday. Speaking at a recent plenary sitting of the council, councillor Jason Murphy questioned the practice.
"There have been 1,262 properties that have been advertised on CBL and at the moment we are running at 425 refusals which is a 30% refusal rate.
"I am wondering if this is related to a practice that I think is happening within the housing department, where it seems to be that staff in the department are telling people on the housing list that housing allocations are related to how many times you bid on CBL rather than solely the time they have served on our housing list."
In response, Director of Services for Housing, Ivan Grimes, says that is not the case.
"I am not necessarily sure I agree with your suggestion that there is a correlation between the overall number of refusals with people bidding on everything.
"I do agree with you that the housing allocations process, whether you are bidding on choice-based letting or not, should have nothing to do with the decision to allocate a property and I have had that conversation with our allocations team on a number of occasions recently."
Councillor Damien Geoghegan added his points at the meeting saying, "I welcome the strong statement you have made here at today's meeting, that it is not taken into consideration the amount of time somebody interacts with Choice Based letting. As Councillor Murphy said, up until now, that was the impression that was given to applicants that the first thing that was looked at was how often they interacted.
"It is choice-based letting, they choose to interact. I think there has been an issue up until now as they had to be seen to interact with choice-based letting where when people were applying for a house, they were crossing their fingers that they would not be offered a house."
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