FHDC Housing Allocations Policy: ‘Fully in Line’ With the Law?

Tonight, Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee will be asked to examine a new 78-page Housing Allocations Policy — the rulebook deciding who gets on the housing register, who gets priority and, ultimately, who gets a scarce council home. The officer report makes a bold claim: the draft has been reviewed to bring it “fully in line with current Government guidance, updated legislation and best practice”.

That sentence is doing a lot of work.

We’ve read the policy, the committee report, its summary and the Equality Impact Assessment, then tested them against the Housing Act framework, statutory allocations guidance updated in April 2026, the 2025 domestic-abuse and care-leaver changes, and recent allocations cases.

The result isn’t a policy that should simply be dismissed. There’s good work in it.

But nor is it a document that comfortably supports the words “fully in line”.

Take one of the cleanest errors.

The draft tells an applicant still unhappy after stage two that they can escalate the matter to the “Housing Ombudsman”.

That is the wrong ombudsman for a council’s Part 6 allocation decision.

The statutory allocations guidance points applicants towards the Local Government Ombudsman, now the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. Curiously, FHDC’s own committee report gets this right when warning that an unlawful scheme can result in complaints to the LGSCO.

The main policy doesn’t.

The biggest warning light, however, isn’t buried in the 78-page policy.

It’s in the Equality Impact Assessment.

FHDC’s own EIA template says officers should look for negative impacts, gaps in knowledge, equality data, research and known inequalities. If the likely impact on a group is unknown, the template says action should be taken to acquire that information.

Yet when the assessment reaches the question of whether there are concerns indicating possible inequalities or negative impacts, the answer is simply: “None at this time.”

It then records age, gender, pregnancy and maternity, sexual orientation and other characteristics as neutral, before concluding: “There is no identified actual, or the potential to cause, adverse impact or discrimination against different groups in the community.”

That is difficult to square with the policy it is assessing.

The draft expressly says serious mobility problems can qualify for Band B, but adds: “This does not cover temporary health conditions such as broken limbs, or those that are pregnancy related.”

It also says additional bedroom requests for children with ADHD, ADD, ASD and autism are “unlikely to be considered unless there are exceptional circumstances”.

Those provisions may or may not ultimately be legally justified. But an EIA declaring pregnancy neutral and disability positive without analysing the potential disadvantage created by those very rules has plainly left questions unanswered.

The Court of Appeal has already shown councils why this matters.

In Gulle TW v Hillingdon ([57]–[59]), a ten-year residence rule indirectly disadvantaged Irish Travellers and non-UK nationals. Hillingdon also breached the Public Sector Equality Duty after failing properly to confront relevant evidence of differential impact.

A council doesn’t make an equality problem disappear by inserting exceptions or calling the overall policy fair; it has to consider the actual effect.

Then comes one of the strangest contradictions in FHDC’s draft.

The EIA labels gender “Neutral”.

Yet the sensitive-lettings section says that, for a one-bedroom property, “the Council may need to assess whether the tenancy should be offered to a male or female applicant, where this might be a relevant consideration.”

Sex is a protected characteristic. There may be tightly defined circumstances where differential treatment can be justified, but this clause gives no legal basis, test or limit.

It simply opens the door.

There are harder, cleaner errors too.

FHDC proposes a two-stage allocations review system. Stage one can be carried out by “a housing officer”; stage two by “a different housing officer”; and the council allows up to eight weeks for each stage.

Current statutory guidance says the review should be conducted by an officer senior to the original decision-maker, or by a panel excluding anyone involved in the original decision, and suggests eight weeks as a reasonable timescale for the review. FHDC’s wording doesn’t guarantee the required seniority and could turn eight weeks into sixteen.

Domestic abuse shows both the strengths and weaknesses of the exercise.

FHDC has done useful work here. The new section says each case will be assessed on its own merits, even where written or recorded evidence is unavailable, and recognises that a blanket approach cannot be used.

That is sensible and closely aligned with the direction of current statutory guidance.

But the local-connection wording is narrower than the law it is supposed to implement.

FHDC says those “needing to move to escape domestic abuse in their own local area” will be treated as having a local connection.

The 2025 regulations are broader: a victim who needs to move for reasons connected with domestic abuse, including from accommodation initially occupied temporarily, must not be disqualified through a local-connection test. Someone may already have fled to a refuge, friends, family or temporary accommodation elsewhere.

“In their own local area” risks missing precisely the journey the regulation was designed to protect.

There is another tension.

FHDC says homeless households in temporary accommodation will generally not qualify for welfare priority and generally won’t receive medical banding, save for acute cases where exceptional circumstances are applied.

That isn’t automatically unlawful: councils don’t have to stack every reasonable-preference category on top of another. But current domestic-abuse guidance specifically stresses appropriate priority for survivors in refuges and other temporary accommodation. It goes further and “strongly encourages” councils to apply the medical and welfare reasonable-preference category to victims and their families in such accommodation.

FHDC needs to make clear that its general temporary-accommodation rule cannot blunt the protections it has just created for abuse survivors.

This is also where the council deserves some credit.

The draft doesn’t repeat the error that made Westminster’s scheme unlawful in Khayyat.

FHDC includes people who are homeless but not in priority need, sofa surfers, rough sleepers and those who haven’t made a Part 7 homelessness application, provided they otherwise qualify. Prevention, relief and main-duty households appear within its banding system.

That matters because the High Court in Khayyat struck down Westminster’s attempt to exclude whole groups of homeless people Parliament had placed within the reasonable-preference categories.

Its anti-social behaviour provisions are also more carefully built than some of the weaker sections.

FHDC says it will consider when conduct happened, mitigating circumstances, the passage of time and evidence that behaviour has changed, with review rights if an applicant is excluded.

That resembles the safeguards the High Court accepted in Willott v Eastbourne when upholding an ASB qualification rule capable of taking disability and personal circumstances into account.

So this isn’t a story about 78 pages of failure.

It’s a story about a council making several genuine improvements while simultaneously claiming a level of legal completion its own paperwork doesn’t yet justify.

And that becomes especially obvious when you reach what happens next.

The EIA says the draft will go through Overview & Scrutiny and then be made available for eight weeks to stakeholders before a final draft goes to formal Cabinet.

The committee report says something different.

The draft goes to Cabinet in October and, “If approved by Cabinet”, will then be put out for public consultation, with delegated authority requested for only “minor amendments” afterwards.

Those are materially different sequences.

Consultation law isn’t ceremonial.

The Supreme Court in Moseley reaffirmed the established principles governing lawful consultation, including that consultation must occur at a stage when proposals are still capable of being influenced and that responses must be conscientiously considered before the decision is taken.

Cabinet can perfectly lawfully approve a draft for consultation. But if Cabinet has effectively approved the substantive policy first and only minor amendments can follow, FHDC needs to explain what happens if consultation exposes the need for a major change.

Then there are the smaller errors which shouldn’t have survived into a supposedly legally refreshed 2026 policy.

FHDC says Freedom of Information requests and Subject Access Requests both have a 20-working-day deadline. The ICO says a SAR must normally be answered within one month.

The policy also says an applicant’s “permission to share their personal information is a condition of being accepted on to the Council’s Housing Register”. FHDC may have other lawful bases for necessary processing, but that is precisely why mandatory “consent” is the wrong language.

And then there are local lettings plans.

FHDC says these future plans “will have their own allocations criteria”.

The statutory guidance says all aspects of the allocation process must be covered by the scheme and allocations must be made in accordance with it. Local lettings policies are lawful, but they cannot quietly become a parallel rulebook operating beside the statutory scheme.

FHDC should make explicit how every such plan is incorporated and published.

The problem isn’t that officers have done nothing.

The problem is that the council has declared the job finished while its own documents still contain contradictions, omissions and some straightforward mistakes.

Overview & Scrutiny therefore has something more important to do on tonight than admire a rewritten policy.

It should ask why an EIA found no potential adverse impact while the policy expressly treats pregnancy, disability and sex differently; why the statutory review mechanism doesn’t mirror current guidance; why applicants are sent to the wrong ombudsman; why the domestic-abuse exemption is narrower than the 2025 regulations; why Cabinet and the EIA describe different consultation sequences; and why basic data-protection law is misstated.

Fix those things and FHDC may end up with a substantially better allocations scheme.

Ignore them, and “fully in line” becomes not a conclusion, but the first sentence someone challenging the policy will test.

The Shepway Vox Team

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