RE-REGISTRATION NOW OPEN

You may recall that the Council recently consulted on proposed changes to the way in which it allocates social housing in the local area.

The revised scheme is now complete and approved, and you see it at www.rbc-homes.org. The changes mean that all applicants are required to re-register. This is because some applicants who currently qualify for the register will no longer qualify, and some applicants will see their priority band changed. There will also be changes to the use of priority dates for applicants who change priority bands.

Re-registration is now open, and will run until midnight on Sunday 20 November 2016.

This means that:

• All EXISTING APPLICANTS will now need to complete the re-registration process. For the first two weeks of the re-registration period, applicants will be able to bid freely and continue to access their member home pages without completing re-registration. After this point, the option to ‘do it later’ will be removed and applicants will need to complete the form before being able to make any bids or access their member home pages. There are no exceptions to this and this cannot be overridden by staff. Applicants who fail to complete re-registration by midnight on Sunday 20 November will be suspended and ultimately removed from the Housing Register. Any changes to qualification or banding will only take effect from 30 November 2016. There is no advantage to leaving re-registration to the last minute, and all applicants are advised to re-register at the first available opportunity, in case further information is required to assess your application.

• All NEW APPLICANTS completing a housing application for the first time will complete the new online form, and be assessed under the new Allocations Scheme, but will not be formally assessed until after Wednesday 30 November 2016 when the new Allocations Scheme launches. This will apply to all new applicants unless there are exceptional circumstances. This means that these applicants will not be able to access their member home page or make bids. Applicants will retain the date that they actually completed the form as their priority date, so will not be disadvantaged.

• There will be a period closer to the launch date when we suspend advertising properties on RBC Living & Homes. A notice will be placed on the website during this suspension.

All applications must be made online. If you believe that you will have difficulty and you have nobody who can help and support you, there will be some appointment slots for assistance to use the computers in the Civic Centre reception area. These will be strictly limited to applicants who genuinely have no other means of re-registering, and we do reserve the right to limit access to these appointments where we believe that other support is available.

If you have any questions about the re-registration process, or if you have having difficulty with re-registering, please contact the Housing Allocations team with your reference number.