Dr. Aideen Hayden:

There were rather mixed views about succession among the people we interviewed. On the one hand there was a desire to ensure we have stability within communities. As Professor Norris has said, it is not practised uniformly throughout the country. Our job as researchers is to reflect the views of the people we interviewed. There is certainly abuse of the succession tenancy situation. Also, as Professor Norris said, there are issues of equity in terms of one person taking over tenancy of a three bedroom house while we have families in hotels. That was simply a response given to us in one of the interviews. We fully accept that succession tenancies create a difficult situation.

The question of succession tenancies was brought up in the context of tenant purchase as well. If we have strong succession tenancies, then, in reality, tenancies never come back to the local authority. That leads to another dynamic of in effect selling houses off cheaply. This is because if the properties are never going to come back to the local authority, there is no incentive on the part of the local authority to keep them within the local authority stock. It is something that we did not embrace in the recommendations but it certainly came up frequently in the interviews.

The reliance of local authorities on the proceeds of sales through internal capital receipts has led to a scenario where because they are underfunded to meet their housing functions, they have been using the proceeds of sales of housing to subvent the carrying out of their functions, which is a perverse incentive to sell housing stock.

I am not sure if we should address the other issue now.