Residents are to gain wider access to affordable housing with a new Choice Based Lettings service delivered in partnership across the region.

Chester & District Housing Trust, Weaver Vale Housing Trust and Cheshire West and Chester Council are working together to deliver the unified Choice Based Lettings service called Trust HomeChoice for residents across the new West Cheshire region.

The new service recognises the success of Chester HomeChoice over the last two years and the expansion will offer wider choice and access to affordable housing. A partnership group has been formed and actions are in place to ensure the new service is made available in the coming 12 months in line with the new authority Cheshire West and Chester.

Consultation exercises have already started with a questionnaire about choice based lettings and the proposed joint allocation policy.

The joint policy and register will mean that residents across West Cheshire will only need to join one housing register to be able to apply for social housing owned by the Council, CDHT, WVHT and other participating registered social landlords.

The new service uses a banding rather than a points based system because it is simpler and more transparent for applicants. Banding systems help applicants understand their housing needs and identify more clearly why they have been placed in a specific band. The banding system has already been well received in Chester by both applicants and partner agencies.

All applicants are being invited to complete the questionnaire, together with tenants and stakeholders. The questionnaire will be available from housing offices across the region and needs to be returned by 30 June 2009.

Charlie Seward, Director of Regeneration and Culture at Cheshire West and Chester Council, said:
“Trust HomeChoice is a great example of different groups working together in the new local authority. The new, larger local authority provides residents with greater choice across a wider area.”

Dave Shaw, Assistant Director Customer & Housing Access at Chester & District Housing Trust and chair of the Trust HomeChoice group, said:
“Trust HomeChoice will deliver happier communities with a wider area of choice than has been previously available. By introducing choice based letting in 2006, our experience in Chester has seen a significant decrease in evictions, less tenancy failures, increased customer satisfaction and a more positive effect on communities and sustainability. We are excited about this concept expanding across the whole region under the new authority and by working together with key partners we believe we can all deliver this.”

Chris Rowbottom, Director of Housing at Weaver Vale Housing Trust said:
“The partnership we have agreed today provides a tremendous opportunity for all the major social landlords in West Cheshire to work together in providing a more open and less confusing way of allocating social housing across West Cheshire.”

Heriot-Watt University was commissioned to undertake Office of the Deputy Prime Minister/Dept. Communities & Local Govt. research on the longer-term impact of Choice based letting (CBL) in 2004-06: “To assess the longer-term impact of CBL in terms of creating communities that are more stable, viable and inclusive”