In brief: Deputy Montfort Tadier has warned that Jersey risks “sleepwalking into a form of social cleansing” due to the absence of a social housing exchange scheme. The Housing Minister, Malcolm Ferey, has confirmed there are no plans to reinstate such a scheme, describing it as costly and impractical. The debate has exposed a tension between helping first-time buyers onto the property ladder and preserving established communities.
The Exchange Scheme Question
The issue surfaced during States question time when Reform Jersey Deputy Lee Carpenter asked Housing Minister Malcolm Ferey whether he had considered reinstating a general home exchange scheme for Islanders seeking social housing. The minister’s answer was unambiguous: the exchange scheme had, in his words, “been found to be costly and impractical to administer”, and he had “no plans” to review gateway priority rules.
Deputy Ferey also clarified the stakes for applicants who push back against an offer. Those who refuse accommodation “may be moved to a lower priority band or lose their priority within their current banding”, he confirmed. Andium Homes, he added, “no longer” operates a home exchange scheme for applicants unhappy with their offer, except in “rare and exceptional circumstances”.
In short: take what you are given, or go to the back of the queue.
Tadier’s ‘Social Cleansing’ Warning
It was Deputy Tadier, co-leader of Reform Jersey, who raised the temperature of the debate. In a supplementary question, he argued that Islanders should not be forced to accept a choice of three properties that might be “in another part of the Island” to where they have grown up and put down roots.
He went further, pointing to what he described as Andium Homes “selling off key social housing infrastructure” in certain parishes to first-time buyers, while “not building or making any other rented accommodation available” in those same areas. The cumulative effect, he suggested, was a gradual displacement of social tenants away from their communities and into concentrated pockets elsewhere.
“I hesitate to use this term,” Tadier said, “but we could be sleepwalking into a form of social cleansing that is going on whereby the gentrification of one area comes at the cost of concentrating social housing in other areas. And we lose that balance that people have grown up in and we lose exactly that communal balance that makes Jersey a special place currently.”
It is a striking phrase, and one the minister was quick to contest.
The Minister’s Defence
Deputy Ferey acknowledged that Islanders using the Affordable Housing Gateway “will like to continue to reside in the communities where they were brought up”, but argued that the pressure on the gateway made parish-specific promises impossible to keep. “What we are unable to do is promise that that property will be in a particular parish or in a particular district,” he said, “and that’s purely because there is a certain amount of pressure on the gateway to make sure that it delivers.”
On the question of Andium selling social housing stock to first-time buyers, the minister took a broadly positive view. He argued that first-time buyers who “might aspire to purchase a property” in their preferred area had benefited from the policy, describing it as serving “two different parts of the market”. Andium, he said, “want to service both those parts of the market”, and the arrangement “benefits one part of the community” without being “over another part of the community”.
Whether that reassurance will satisfy those on the gateway who find themselves offered a flat several parishes away from their family, their school, their doctor and their friends is, perhaps, a different matter entirely.
Source: Jersey Evening Post
