HOUSING has hit back at criticism over its licensing regime. Deputy Mike Hadley claimed it was costing departments millions and asked for more 15-year licences to be issued.
But deputy Housing minister Graham Guille said that doing what Deputy Hadley wanted would fly in the face of what the States had last year decided: that the population should remain at or near its current level.
‘All employers, whether in the private or the public sector, complain about the costs of recruiting and retaining staff, but there would also be a substantial cost to the island if every incomer was issued with a 15-year licence,’ said Deputy Guille.
‘This is because any person who serves the full 15 years under an employment-related licence gains permanent residency, regardless of whether they remain in the post of employment for which they were recruited after those 15 years have been served.’
Deputy Hadley is a member of the Health and Social Services Department.
Deputy Guille said that not all that department’s recruitment and retention problems could be laid at the door of housing-licence policy.
‘The cost and availability of housing and pay rates that are perceived as non-competitive, are also significant issues,’ he added.
‘I’m extremely disappointed that Deputy Hadley should state that the Housing Department needs a change of attitude, when he clearly acknowledges that the department has been responsive to meeting the needs of HSSD by issuing longer licences for some posts.
‘Contrary to the impression given by Deputy Hadley, we work very closely with our colleagues at HSSD and where it can be clearly established that there is a need for licences of longer than five years, then the Housing Department will respond accordingly.
‘But it is unrealistic to think that every time someone is recruited under licence by HSSD, the housing licence should be for 15 years.’
Deputy Guille said that not only would such a policy block job opportunities for returning islanders, but at the last count would mean nearly 250 current HSSD employees on licence could qualify for permanent residence. That would increase each year as more 15-year licences were issued.
‘It is a pity that despite the Housing Department spending considerable amounts of time with Deputy Hadley explaining the reasons for the licensing system and how it operates – including providing him with reports detailing the work that is ongoing with HSSD and other States’ departments to modify the licensing system and improve the availability of accommodation for incoming employees to ease their recruitment and retention difficulties – he remains fixated with abolishing the five-year licence.’
* In April 2007 the States decided to maintain Guernsey’s population at its current level, around 60,000. The Housing Department says that to support this objective it applies a long-standing policy that most essential employment-related housing licences will be restricted to no longer than five years.
Article posted on 2nd September, 2008 - 1.00pm
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21 Article Comments
David Jones is a member and a regular speaker at UKIP conferences. Any country he drifts in to, he appears to dance a fine line between immigration policy and borderline racism. Clearly a dangerously confused individual who in Guernsey is anti English, in England anti Europe yet holidays in his house in France.
Having heard snippets of the radio interviews with Deputy Hadley I didn’t think that he was advocating 15 year licences for all staff at all. just a bit of stability within the public sector workforce which used to happen.
I don’t understand the population argument as when a member of staff leaves the public sector they are replaced - the population doesn’t change.
Millions of pounds are spend on recruiment and retention and substantial savings could be made if excellent staff were offered 15 year licenes (perhaps after having proved their committiment by working for initially 5 years.
Try it and see - without a trial it is all speculation. Deputy Hadley is like a breath of fresh air amongs dinasours who do not see the problems of short term recruitment, hight turnover of staff and low morale.
Its obvious that Housing’s fear is of licence-holders “becoming local” after 15 years and then their children also having rights to settle here. While that is perfectly understandable in trying to control the size of the population, its already been established that the size of the working population needs to grow over the next 30 years so a degree of relaxation makes sense.
Maybe there is a case for essential workers in the non-commercial sector (i.e. teachers, nurses, policemen, civil servants etc.) being able to be granted 10-year renewals of their initial 5-year housing licences if the States wish to continue to employ them. In other words if they come up to scratch then they can settle here permanently. Unwise to grant 15-year licences to anybody before they have been evaluated though.
Surely its the “lesser of two evils” to allow some controlled long-term settlement of essential public sector workers when weighed against the ridicuolous and expensive merry-go-round that exists at the moment, which benefits absolutely nobody.
I see merit in distinguishing between the public sector and the commercial sector because the commercial sector does have the added commercial option of paying for open market accommodation. However, my preference would be to enable the commercial sector to pay a substantial annual premium fee for a 15-year essential employee licence on the basis that if the premium isn’t worth paying by a commercial organisation then the employee arguably isn’t so “essential” after all. The premium on the longer licence fee would be to contribute towards the additional social costs of allowing additional long-term settlement of essential employees and their children.
The whole system needs to be looked at afresh, taking into account the obvious impact of human rights. Its clear though that the current system no longer works for the benefit of Guernsey.
If the States are in fact serious about managing population growth, we should be hearing about legitimate initiatives such as updating immigration laws, introducing a work permit system and reducing teenage pregnancies, rather than ejecting teachers, doctors, nurses and committed finance professionals form the island when they wish to stay and contribute to driving the general prosperity of this island community into the future.
Moreover, most people do not realise that the wide discretion to issue housing licences is restricted by the principles of “public law” and it is not legitimate for the Housing Law to be used for the purpose of population control. In fact, housing licences may only be legitimately refused where there is a genuine shortage of dwellings available for occupation (ie the shortage is not simply a perceived position, and there is a real need for the States to protect and control the stock of houses in the island).
However, there is no evidence of any real shortage of housing today - even the Housing Department is not sufficiently concerned to monitor current availability of homes since it does not maintain any substantive records (beyond states-owned dwellings).
The real truth is that the issue of housing licences has no legitimate legal connection with the number of people living in the island or their type of employment, and the supposed responsibility of the Housing Department for “population control” is simply an urban myth, generally used as a stock excuse for refusing housing licence applications where refusal cannot be justified on the grounds of a shortage of homes - i.e. in nearly all cases!!
It is about time that the Housing Department was brought to public account for the ongoing abuse of the Housing Law, and it should be made to properly justify the huge waste of public and private money and resources spent on finding and retaining key productive employees, in the face of simple logic and sound reason.
5 year licences offer no incentive to those that wish to provide a ‘joined-up’ service to the island.
Concurring with previous posts, Housing needs refurbishment.
The outlook of the housing department is just so old and tired. Why not let good, peaceful, upstanding, hardworking, responsible, tax-paying and law abiding persons become citizens?
Becoming a “local” doesnt mean that these good people are all of a sudden going to drop out, go on the pension and apply for states housing.
Five year licences too short ?
Fifteen year licences too long ?
Has anyone considered ten year licences ?
my sister has been on the island for 20 years. She had a 5 year licence so bought a local house. Then when the licence ran out they decided that she should be given a 1 year license (why?). All her family live here, and she has contributed to the tax and social security all of her working life.
Housing is a law unto themselves, they do whatever they want depending on the weather. I feel that housing is predudice to anyone who was not born here. They have no rules written down so they can keep all the power by changing their mind at a drop of a hat.
They dont care about the impact licences have on peoples lives.
And to all those people who complain about non islanders getting the work, go on islanders get the qualifications that Guernsey needs, so local firms dont have to outsorce all the time.
I must speak in defence of Housing.
There are laid down rules concerning the right to residence on Guernsey.
My own experience was that the Housing staff we dealt with ion our return to Guernsey were very helpful.
Ten years later when I applied for my own documentation, giving me the right to live unencumbered on the island; Housing were again very helpful and dealt with the matter efficiently and effectively.
I dont really see Graham Guilles point. How does citizenship fly in the face of population control exactly?
For example, one person on a license is still one person if they become a citizen.
If this really is the underpinning issue then why not just save the island millions of pounds a year by increasing the number of years it takes to become a citizen? why not just double it and make it 30 years? or triple it to 45? A simple change and its a win win for all.
Carol, i firmly believe that this island will never be self reliant on training enough local residents to fill all the posts necessary and that there is a definitie need for longer licences. However, I also have some issues that employers do sometimes ignore the local residents who apply for posts because they want a licence holder. Do housing really check that firms have advertised locally first and found no one with adequate training and qualifications for the job?
I like the idea of Wil’s - increasing the length of licence in order to become a local resident. That would solve the worries of the likes of Deputy Guille who believe that people will stay for 15 years in the public sector and then defect to the private sector!
The island needs to save money and the easiest way is to reduce recruitment and increase retention.
In response to the above postings from Wil and Ray, its not about “citizenship” and changing the period of qualification for local market status would make no difference.
As far as citizenship is concerned nobody is a Guernsey citizen. We are all British citizens and Guernsey’s constitution does not enable us to confer citizenship on anybody. We cannot therefore link citizenship to housing status.
The 15 year local market qualification period is effectively out of date. Everybody knows, including Housing, that after around 8 or 9 years of living here under a 15 year licence it is virtually certain that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg would rule that the person could not be thrown out of Guernsey’s local market. Anybody with the determination and funds to fight their corner would be very likely to win in Strasbourg. Housing seem to prefer to rely on people giving up the fight rather than change the law to reflect that position. Its relevant that Jersey has already changed its own housing qualification laws to take this factor into account but that decision coincided with them accepting that their population had to grow, particularly their working population whereas we voted for no growth.
Whether we like it or not our working population has to grow to support the existing population in their old age. Its time that we accept that we need another 5000 people and start planning accordingly how we are going to house them and who we are going to allow in. Encouraging existing licence holders who are deemed to be doing
a decent job in some of our key and socially vital professions to stay and settle permanently should be a priority.
Totally agree with David. Those who show dedication and service to the Island should be rewarded and encouraged, not feel like the clock is ticking.
Brilliant point David - I think the issues you raise are paramount to immigration in the island.
In response to Lawrence’s and Nickolay’s responses, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that our existing housing policy has at least managed to keep the population to around 62,000. Without those policies my guess is that we would already have 70,000 people here and that would certainly reduce or at least affect the options that we have today. But that doesn’t mean that the existing housing laws are fit for purpose. We know that some aspects of them work very well (i.e. the open market and the seasonal 9-month licences) and that others work very poorly (i.e. long-term licences for essential workers). It should not be seen as a failure by Housing to admit that the policy and laws need to be reviewed and updated. The failure by Housing (and the States in terms of setting Housing’s policy) would be in refusing to carry out a review when such obvious failings exist in relation to the island’s CURRENT needs.
A factor that seems to have been overlooked in this debate so far is the damage that the licence system has on the local housing market itself. In the private sector, licence holders are (generally speaking) paid an above-average wage, giving them spending power that artificially inflates the price of local market houses; this in turn makes it harder for locals earning an average or below-average wage (especially young people, hoping to return after uni, for example) to afford the housing that is supposed to cater for their needs. I agree with David’s suggestion that private sector employers should pay a premium for non-local staff, but perhaps it’s time to rethink the whole licencing system and ask employers to contribute towards the cost of housing these essential workers in open market accommodation? That would sort out the hoohaa over population control, encourage young locals back to the island after uni and - most importantly - incentivise island businesses to put more effort and resources into training up the talent that we already have here, rather than relying so heavily on the seemingly magic solution of recruiting from elsewhere.
Helen
I suspect that the answer is to create one or more new categories of property which can be held by licenceholders. The gulf in prices between local market and the open market is enormous and if essential workers were required to pay open market prices then they couldn’t come (or local employers could not afford to subsidise them to that extent). Private sector employees (i.e. essential to the employer but maybe not so essential to the community) should be categorised separately from essential public sector employees who often (but not always) get paid less than the level of private sector employees which come in as licenceholders. We also have to bear in mind that there is a drastic shortage of property available to buy or rent on the open market, so as its stands that sector cannot provide the solution.
If we accept that we need controlled immigration (and obviously there will be some people who would prefer no population growth at all), then deciding how best to house a larger population requires a lot of thought and planning. For example, if we were to anticipate a net population increase of 5,000 over the next 10 years then we need a mixture of houses for first-time buyers/returning graduates, essential employees in the public sector, essential employees in the private or commercial sector and, of course, houses for second-time buyers because as the family unit grows the gap in price between a dedicated first-time buyers house and a house big enough to house a couple with one or two kids is still a massive one.
A much broader shared ownership scheme (applying to ANY properties, not just new-builds) could be one answer, as could conversion and regeneration of derelict vinery sites in a sensitive manner which does not overly reward landowners for deliberately allowing their vineries to become eyesores. The States could, for example, offer a window during which vinery owners could take up a general offer to sell their land for a price which is more than the going rate for agricultural land but far less than the going rate for housing land. Everyone’s a winner in that situation provided that the developer is controlled so that it does not pocket the premium, with the current landowner being aware that if they decline that price in that window then it may be another 5-10 years before another window opens.
The land exists and housing will inevitably look better than derelict vineries. Yes there is of course a knock-on effect with schools and extra medical facilities, extra roads etc to accommodate a larger population but growing the population is unavoidable. What is avoidable is doing it in an unstructured, uncontrolled way which would cause just as many problems as it solves. We have to look forward but let’s do it sensitively and kill several birds with the one stone.
I still think it is a permanent residency issue as Graham Guilles states and i agree with him on this point. Therefore the solution must address this primary fear first.
There is no doubt that we need more “essential workers” in Guernsey. The harsh reality is that these essential workers may in the long run become a burden on the state if they become permanent residents. This may happen primarily through the old-age pension and also through their subsequent children. So i will try to address these two (unpopular) issues.
Old-age pension-
Increase the proportion of income that workers (all workers including license holders) contribute to superannuation. If this was undertaken then workers could take care of themselves financially (or at least contribute) in their old age.
Offer incentives for people to work longer.
Increase the age whereby a person is automatically eligible for the age pension (with some exceptions of course dependent on health). As we are all living longer healthier lives then we should expect our working life also to be longer.
Children-
Permanent residency for immigrant children should be subject to them being in Guernsey for 15+ years- with the addition of 5-10 of those years at least in productive fulltime employment. These years may of course be broken up by attending university and/or gaining essential experience off the island.
Housing shortages (especially rental apartments) is a secondary issue which needs to be addressed and i like the recommendations given by David above.
In addition, it would be wise to consider the issuing of full university scholarships for high achieving Guernsey students who wish to become qualified in any of the areas defined as an “essential” service. These scholarships would of course be subject to those persons subsequently working in Guernsey for a specified period (eg: the period of study + 5 years). In this way we would not need so many license holders in the first place.
Good calls from both of you, Wil and David - I hope our politicians take note. The more I think about it, the more I reckon the States need to address the core problem (i.e. lack of essential workers in the local workforce) in tandem with various solutions, both short- and long-term. Your ideas sound workable to me.
I think it’s ridiculous to get rid of people who have “proved” themselves over the 5 years, contributed to taxes, society etc, butd most of all the workforce, just to replace them with somebody nobody knows and needs to trained and invested in from scratch…where’s the sense in this? If I were an employer, this would infuriate me. I’ve seen invaluable staff members lost at our firm due to licences not being renewed, just to have them replaced by people who know nothing and need to be trained to do the job - it’s just a senseless “merry-go-round!”