Building for a better future

In a week when the visit of Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, made most of the headlines for many of the wrong reasons here, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has still found time for a spot of domestic politicking.

His campaign promise to review from top to bottom the country’s stock of HLMs (Habitation à Loyer Modéré or low-rent council housing) hit the news on Tuesday when he outlined his plans for reform.

An estimated 10 million people in France live in HLMs, so any change in the way they’re managed or allocated could potentially hit a sizeable chunk of the population.

At the heart of the issue is a waiting list of more than 1.5 million households who, according to government figures, qualify for subsidised housing but there’s just not the accommodation available for them.

To reduce that waiting list, Sarkozy wants to take a two-pronged approach: make sure that those who most need subsidised housing actually get it, and encourage local authorities to build.

If the government figures are to be believed then the way council housing has been allocated certainly needs to be changed.

More than 400,000 families who are currently living in HLMs have an income above the official entitlement threshold. Basically this has been allowed to happen because when families are allocated housing their income might well be below that limit but there has been no way of checking whether there has been a change in earnings.

Sarkozy wants to reintroduce “transparency” into the whole process by means-testing entitlement every three years. Such a review would not just look at income but also a change in family circumstances (where the children leave home for example) a factor that means that an additional 800,000 HLMs are apparently currently “under-occupied”.

But Sarkozy admits that the size of the waiting list is not just down to occupancy being gridlocked. Local authorities, he maintains, are often reluctant to build new subsidised housing.

His solution is to have the state lead by example by selling off land owned by different ministries – most notably by the defence ministry around Paris – to build new HLMs. Sarkozy’s goal is 60,000 new homes by 2012.

In other parts of the country, where local authorities may well lack resources, he wants the State to chip in to boost funds and simplify the process of granting building permits.

Of course all these proposed changes will require a mass of paperwork at exactly the same time as the president is looking to rationalise the French preoccupation with administrative red tape.

And where’s the money going to come from to help local authorities? After all as Sarkozy himself admitted recently in a television interview, the State coffers are pretty empty at the moment.

Ah well that’s where a dollop of 80s-inspired Thatcherism might well help out. Fulfilling yet another campaign promise, Sarkozy wants to allow tenants the right to buy.

The target is an eventual 40,000 council houses to be sold a year. But tenants will have no automatic right to buy their house or apartment – that will be determined by the independent organisation running HLMs. And local authorities can only sell if they agree to build two new HLMs for every one sold.

Yep sounds like a classic case of bureaucracy a la française.