How to Get a Council House

With our social housing in crisis, brand new three-part series How To Get A Council House looks at two major councils dealing with lack of properties and too many people in need of homes at affordable rents.

Each week, the series follows the stories of contributors and council homes and reveals who is successful and who loses out in the bidding battle for these select few homes. Some people’s hopes are answered but most find themselves with hundreds, sometimes thousands, more suitable prospective tenants ahead of them, making the possibility of a council house seem out of reach.

By 2015, it has been reported that local council authorities will have lost a third of their budgets and this series also observes some of the issues faced by an already over pressurised system – through the eyes of those on the front line. Council officers are tasked with the difficulty of matching homes to some of the 1.8 million people living on England’s social housing list.

With access over six months to Tower Hamlets and Manchester councils’ homeless persons’ unit and lettings teams, How To Get A Council House follows the day to day lives of the workers tasked with implementing the system and the stories of the people they deal with. Through these personal stories the series addresses the housing headlines and challenge our preconceptions of the way housing is allocated and our view of the deserving and undeserving poor.

How To Get A Council House also follows the journeys of the families and individuals already on the housing list bidding for homes, the system by which the council decide who should get a property and the decision making process of those who are eventually offered a home.

Prod Co: Studio Lambert
Exec Prod: Ros Ponder
Series Prod/Dir: Barnaby Peel
Dirs: Toby Paton, Tom Pearson, Stuart Froude
Prod: Jessica Spencer
Comm Ed: Emma Cooper