At the start of December it quickly became apparent that the Homes4Wiltshire choice-based lettings scheme had quietly and surreptitiously turned into an unmitigated disaster.

It was unintentionally announced that an impressive figure of nearly 25,000 people had been accepted onto the housing register since it was launched in 2010. When it was also revealed that only 2,000 people a year were actually being housed, it didn’t take much to work out that the majority of those registered were never going to get a property.

So, someone somewhere had had the blinding idea, in the months previously, to overhaul the system and change the banding criteria. And to remove 10,000 people from the register by ‘losing’ everyone who was currently registered in the most popular bronze banding.

And that person also realised that if they made every remaining person re-register and also made the process as complex as possible that they would definitely manage to ‘lose’ a further significant number of people. Simply because they hadn’t been notified by letter, or they couldn’t get online to fill in the application, or they didn’t have the necessary patience, life skills or head space to be able to complete an hour-long form.

I wholeheartedly agree that there should be criteria met before someone can join a housing register. I also agree that people should be sorted and prioritised according to their needs and circumstances and then subsequently allocated to a specific banding. What I don’t agree with is the process that has been implemented to make the necessary changes to a scheme that has slowly grown out of control.

When the scheme was introduced in 2010 it was welcomed by those of us working in the sector as a radical way of not only bringing together all the different housing associations onto one register, but also giving people a countywide choice, thereby eliminating the previous district boundaries.

It was meant to maximise housing opportunities and simplify application procedures whilst also meeting the statutory requirements of the council and the needs of the various landlords/housing associations.

So, how did it go so very wrong? Why were nearly 25,000 people allowed to be registered on an allocation scheme that was only housing 2,000 a year?

I believe that part of the problem was due to the two separate issues of both the large number of empty properties in the county and the serious shortage of new affordable housing built over the last decade.

The Empty Home website recorded a total figure of 5,691 vacant homes in Wiltshire at the end of 2012. Bearing in mind that in 2011 13,000 were people registered on the housing list, it is not rocket science to work out that nearly half of them could have potentially been housed in those empty properties. In fact, Wiltshire Council actually employed someone as an Empty Homes Officer to sort out the issue.

There is the huge issue of the national housing crisis. In April 2013 the Home Builders Federation published a report highlighting the fact that the number of homes built across the country was “one of the lowest peace-time rates since the 1920s”.

First-time buyers were at an all-time low, house prices had risen and there was a lack of affordable private rental properties.

The report concluded that: “Changes to the welfare system are exerting new pressures on local authorities: by building more homes in Wiltshire affordability will improve and therefore lighten the load on social housing in the region.”

So, in hindsight it is becomes very apparent that building more affordable housing in both the private and the social sectors and changing the empty properties into habitable homes might have helped to prevent 25,000 from registering on a totally ineffective social housing register.