How one Norfolk council has cut its housing waiting list by 95%

If you found a way to cut the waiting list for your service by 95% while boosting customer satisfaction and shrinking costs, you might expect others to follow your lead. But transformation of public services is seldom so straightforward.

Those outcomes were achieved by a remarkable turnaround of the housing allocations system in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, where the local borough council has put a focus back on individual needs and has thrown out a standardised process described by one housing officer as having felt like being “on a treadmill never getting anywhere”.

Great Yarmouth continues to use its revised approach, and professes great faith in it, but almost all other housing authorities persevere with versions of the “choice-based” lettings system it has abandoned, including several providers that have visited the Norfolk council to study its changes.

“There’s a strong sense of risk aversion in local government, a strong investment in the status quo,” says Neil Shaw, a strategic director at the council. “Choice-based lettings doesn’t ‘not work’, and it has pros and cons, so the easier thing is to leave it be.”

Choice-based lettings was widely adopted in the UK in the early 2000s. Imported from the Netherlands, it enables people who are eligible for council or housing association homes to bid for properties that are advertised as available. Although the system appears to introduce consumer choice into a process previously based on allocation of homes by housing officers, its implementation in Great Yarmouth meant that by 2010 the council had a waiting list of 6,000 and an average 26 bids for each property.

Service design consultant John Mortimer was brought in to facilitate a review. Working with the housing allocations team, he found that people were waiting up to 30 months to find a home and that 56% of those on the waiting list were not in housing need, as defined by the council. When officers talked to people, rather than working through forms, they found that many needs could be addressed in other ways. Some people wanted help to access private rented accommodation or to resolve a dispute with their landlord. One older woman turned out to be seeking a move only because she could no longer manage her garden: a voluntary group was enlisted to help her.

By ending choice-based lettings, and adopting a system based on conversations with people about their housing problem, the council had cut the waiting list to 309 by 2015; increased the proportion of people satisfied within 12 months from 30% to 80%, with the number of appeals falling from 27 a month to one a year; and reduced staff numbers from 22 to 15.

Mortimer says the key to the turnaround, as with successful service transformation in general, was to reappraise the task from the perspective of the person involved. “People are individuals, so don’t standardise.”

Allowing staff to think more creatively about solutions to people’s needs does require managers in turn to think differently, he adds. “It’s moving away from command-and-control, allowing teams flexibility, which can be scary.”

Shaw acknowledges that, like almost all councils, Great Yarmouth still struggles to meet demand for social housing. It has tweaked the model devised by Mortimer’s review, and people now have to be resident for three years, rather than two, to be eligible for housing. But the council has no intention of returning to choice-based lettings.

The techniques and challenges of achieving transformation of public services will be discussed at a conference in London on 24 May. Supported by the Guardian Public Leaders Network, the event is organised by the Public Service Transformation Academy, which runs the Cabinet Office’s commissioning academy. Presentations will cover national and local government, the NHS and the voluntary sector.

Sign up for your free Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with comment and sector views sent direct to you every month. Follow us: @Guardianpublic

Looking for a job in central or local government, or need to recruit public service staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs