Key guarantees for secure tenants

If you need to be rehoused during the rebuilding of your estate, you will either be able to remain on your estate or take ‘Band A’ status to move to another council or housing association home in Lambeth.

Existing residents living on estate regeneration estates have priority for the newly built homes.

You have the following options:

1. To move to a newly built home on your estate with an assured lifetime tenancy as a tenant of Homes for Lambeth
2. To move to an existing home on your estate with a secure tenancy as a tenant of the council (this option only exists where some homes are being retained on your estate and a suitable home meeting your housing need becomes available).
3. To bid for an alternative home elsewhere in the borough through the Choice Based Lettings scheme with the high priority (Band A). Through the Choice Based Lettings system, you can bid for both council and housing association homes in Lambeth; if you move to another council home, you will retain your secure tenancy.
4. To ask the council to provide advice and, if possible, assistance to move to another home outside of Lambeth. Note, however, that you would not have any priority status for rehousing with any other council.

If you move into another home in Lambeth, you can choose to retain an option to return to your original estate in a newly built home with an assured lifetime tenancy, if a suitable newly built home becomes available. If you wish to retain an option to return, then you can apply for this at the time that you move. You will then be notified what homes are available on the estate at the end of the regeneration process (or, if new homes are available, at the end of each phase of the rebuilding of an estate) before these homes are offered to those on the housing waiting list. In these circumstances, there will be a “right to return”, where the council/Homes for Lambeth will commit that suitably sized accommodation will be available on the new estate and that those with a “right to return” will be considered with same priority for a new home as those that continue living on the estate. It is anticipated that there will only be very limited circumstances where the council/Homes for Lambeth asks someone to move temporarily off the estate.

If a secure tenant decides to move away from your current estate, but wishes to retain an option to return, then they would need to notify the Housing Regeneration Team. Secure tenants remaining on an estate would have priority for new choice of homes. When an estate has been mostly built (or, where relevant, a phase has been completed) and all the secure tenants remaining on the estate have been re-housed, then the Housing Regeneration Team would contact those who have retained an option to return to ask if they now wished to exercise that option and return to the estate. Anyone responding to that offer would be provided information on what homes are available and how they can bid for those new homes. Only after all those who wish to take up the option to return have moved back to the estate would new homes be made available to those on the general waiting list.