Author: Steve Hilditch

In advance of its Housing Policy Conference in June, Labour Housing Group has published ‘One Nation Housing – 50 Policies for Labour’ for consultation and comment. The paper, reproduced below, aims to provoke debate about a radical agenda for housing under the next Labour Government.   

Comments can be posted below on Red Brick or sent to the Secretary of LHG, Paul Eastwood, on [email protected] 

One Nation Housing – 50 Policies for Labour 

Housing is central to Labour’s One Nation approach and our plans for economic recovery and social well-being.
Housing Investment
1. Housing should be a central feature of a new National Infrastructure Plan looking ahead 10, 20 and 30 years at the country’s requirements for a modern economy and a cohesive society.
2. Increasing housing investment in all tenures should be a key component of economic policy.
3. To ensure an adequate supply of affordable homes, capital investment subsidies should be restored to 2008 levels as quickly as possible, with over-riding priority given to building homes for social rent.
4. Councils should be enabled to invest much more under the new self-financing regime. The existing borrowing cap should be lifted and international conventions for measuring public borrowing (which exclude public corporations) should be adopted.
5. Smart national accounting should be adopted that recognises how housing investment contributes to savings in health, education and benefits budgets.
Planning for Housing
6. Councils should be under much stronger planning duties to meet housing needs in their areas, to plan for mixed communities, and to co-operate in planning for new housing across sub-regions, especially City regions.
7. Local plans should prioritise social rented homes separately from other sub-market rented and low cost home ownership homes.
8. Local communities should benefit more clearly from development through requirements for affordable housing and other facilities.
9. The New Homes Bonus should be ringfenced to be spent on housing infrastructure and benefits for communities affected by development only and should be phased out.
10. A proportion of new homes should be made available to people from the local area.
11. There should be much stronger duties on public agencies to release land for affordable housing.
12. As a general principle, brownfield land should be used first and broad Green Belt protections should remain.
13. Minimum space standards should be applied to all new homes.
14. More rapid progress should be made towards achieving high environmental and energy efficiency standards in new homes, with higher priority given to cycling, play and recreation facilities.
15. Planning permissions should expire sooner and should be based on project completion.
16. Planning powers should enable Councils to take more effective enforcement action against rundown and empty homes that blight neighbourhoods.
Tenure Reform
17. Labour should undertake comprehensive tenure reform with standard mandatory tenancy conditions across private and social renting.
18. Labour should adopt a plan to ensure that the Commonhold form of tenure, introduced by the last Labour Government, is more frequently used.
19. Labour should renew its commitment to co-operative and new forms of tenure.
Private renting
20. The private rented sector should be modernised and reformed, with longer tenancies, more predictable rents, better regulation, and proper enforcement of safety and decency standards.
21. There should be tough regulation of letting agents and encouragement of not-for-profit agencies.
22. Stronger enforcement action should take place in cases of landlord crime like harassment, illegal eviction and theft of deposits.
23. All landlords should be registered in a self-financing scheme.
24. As part of a package of reforms, Labour should review the tax treatment of private landlords to encourage investment, and reintroduce repair grants to achieve a new PRS decency standard.
25. Shared housing should be regularly inspected to ensure compliance with standards.
Social housing
26. All social landlords in receipt of public money should be subject to effective regulation and occasional inspection to achieve higher standards in terms of customer service, efficiency, governance, accountability, and viability.
27. Statutory requirements for tenants to be involved in scrutiny and in the regulatory system should be strengthened and the right to complain to the Ombudsman should be strengthened.
28. Labour should ensure that housing associations remain not-for-profit organisations and review the scale and use of their surpluses.
29. There should be genuine ‘like for like’ replacement of Council homes sold under Right to Buy. Give-away discounts should be restricted. Councils should be enabled to take an equity stake in sold property and strict covenants should be applied in relation to future letting and onward sale.
30. A new social sector Decent Homes Standard should be adopted with stronger environmental and communal area requirements.
31. All social landlords should produce an annual Asset Management Statement, demonstrating how they have made best use of their stock. There should be a presumption against unjustified sales of property.
32. Security of tenure should be restored so there is a basic requirement that a household cannot lose their home without the landlord’s case being tested in a court.
33. It should be a priority to ensure that homes that have been ‘converted’ from social to so-called ‘affordable rent’ revert back to their original status.
Home ownership
34. Government help for home ownership should be targeted to provide help with deposits for first-time buyers.
35. Labour should require the energy industry to provide better grants and loans to ensure minimum standards in energy efficiency.
36. Repair grants should be reintroduced in housing priority areas to enable owners to bring their homes up to basic standards.
37. Labour should work with the development industry to introduce a Rent To Buy scheme for first time buyers.
38. Labour should work with the mortgage industry to deliver more loans at higher loan-to-value ratios but without encouraging sub-prime lending.
Tax and benefits
39. The total benefit cap should be regionalised to take proper account of rent differentials between areas of the country.
40. Local Housing Allowance should be made available up to the level of median rents in an area rather than the 30^th percentile.
41. HB direct payments to landlords should be restored based on tenants’ choice.
42. The ‘bedroom tax’ should be ended in favour of a new national plan to tackle under occupation based on incentives and a stronger ground for possession with a right to suitable alternative accommodation.
43. Labour should develop and adopt a long term plan to switch from personal subsidies to investment subsidies in housing, reducing the benefit bill by reducing the cost of rented housing.
44. A Mansion Tax on properties valued at £2m or more, or additional Council Tax bands, should be introduced.
45. Options should be investigated to impose additional taxation on foreign buyers in the prime property market.
46. Additional charges should be levied on long-term empty properties and unused development land.
47. A fundamental review of property taxation and reliefs should be undertaken, including council tax, capital gains, stamp duty, to find a system that meets wider housing objectives.
General
48. It should be a key target of a Labour Government to reduce homelessness. The strong homelessness safety net should be restored.
49. A new National Tenant Voice should be created, for all tenants
50. Labour’s commitment is to encourage mixed and sustainable communities across the country – in cities towns and rural areas.

Red Brick’s immediate verdict on the so-called ‘Help to Buy’ policy when it was introduced in the March 2013 Budget by George Osborne was that ‘no rational person wanting to splash the cash in the field of housing would do what the Government has done’. We asked ‘If there is no money left, how can billions be found to support (help to buy)?’
The central criticism was that the scheme as proposed would be much more likely to lead to house price inflation than to increase supply, but that this was exactly what the Chancellor wanted to achieve. Rather than learn the real lesson of his economic policy – that austerity damages growth and is largely self-defeating – he would rather look to cover his tracks by engineering a feel-good increase in house prices, and possibly a mini-increase in consumer spending.
Since then, ‘Help to Buy’ has attracted growing critical attention, from the Governor of the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund and from the Guardian to normally reliably-Tory Spectator magazine (‘George Osborne’s property bubble will lead to disaster’).
Let’s look at what the IMF actuually said:

The 2013 Budget announced a new scheme, Help To Buy, aimed at boosting activity in the housing market. This measure may temporarily help boost confidence in the housing market, but there is a risk that, in the absence of an adequate supply response, the result would ultimately be mostly house price increases that would work against the aim of boosting access to housing. To mitigate this risk and engineer a supply response, the government should consider fiscal disincentives for holding land without development.’

It is action on the supply side that is most urgently needed to get Britain building again. There are many possibilities. Even Boris Johnson has recently been railing against ‘pernicious land banking’ as developers sit on land as its value goes up. ‘To constrict supply to push up prices by land-banking is plainly against the economic interests of this city’ he said.
Developers are, of course, relatively rational people who like to reduce risk and maximise their profits. But their activities tend to be governed by the confidence with which they view the future. In the current marketplace, they see significant demand from foreign investors at the luxury end and they see rising demand from landlords with a buy-to-let mortgage in their pocket, but they do not see much demand from first-time buyers, and they don’t see any change on the horizon.
The fact that developers aren’t building is just another verdict on Osborne’s failed economic policy.

This blog post was published on Left Foot Forward yesterday and was written by our regular guest contributor Monimbo, writing as Gordon Banks.  We have made the case for changes in the Treasury borrowing rules many times on Red Brick. We have focused on the benefits this would bring to housing investment, but the logic applies to other sectors too.
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By Gordon Banks

The treasury’s rule that includes the borrowing of public corporations as part of general government debt is unique. No-one else in Europe does it and the international organisations all regard public corporate borrowing as a self-financed trading activity.
The effect in the UK has been to squeeze out borrowing by public corporations that would be entirely justified by their business plans. One casualty has been council housing but attention is now being given to other sectors, like transport and the Royal Mail.
The campaign to change the borrowing rules to allow more council housing investment is a long one, but Labour and the trade unions should now be campaigning to change the rules to allow the Royal Mail to stay in public hands.

Nothing could better illustrate the stupidity of the rules than their use in justifying the need to sell a profitable business. Royal Mail has growing profits which could be used to service any borrowing it needs to invest in improved services, which of course is precisely why it’s an attractive proposition for private investors.
But why shouldn’t those profits also be available to the exchequer?
Instead, ministers want to sell off the golden goose (well, maybe not golden, but at least a convincing shade of silver). The unions are rightly up in arms – their members have made the sacrifices needed to modernise the service, only to see it flogged off. We, the taxpayers, have also taken on the burden of its pension fund to make it more profitable. Yet we are going to see a valuable business sold and – no doubt – pay higher charges in future so as to generate bigger profits for those who invest in it.
Yet how does the responsible minster, Michael Fallon, defend his position that he has no alternative? He claims that “every £1 it borrows is another £1 on the national debt”. He also asserts: “We can’t divert capital we need for schools and hospitals to Royal Mail – a very large business making substantial profits”.
There is of course absolutely no reason why Royal Mail should have to compete for public borrowing in order to invest – if it weren’t for treasury rules. Royal Mail is a public corporation which, in any other country, would be able to borrow outside general government borrowing constraints.
There are already rules in place to ensure that its borrowing is prudential and paid from its revenues. And in pushing it into the private sector we are creating yet another business that will be too important to be allowed to fail if its new owners make a hash of it.
As Fallon said, “It’s a great British brand with the Queen’s head on it”. Presumably then we would never allow it to go bust, so the taxpayer will continue to have a hidden liability.
It’s interesting that ministers have had to move onto the shakiest possible ground to justify the sale. After all, the argument used to be that the Royal Mail was a basket case that could only be dealt with by private enterprise. Well, surprise, surprise, it’s now doing pretty well in the public sector, so the justification is now that it’s competing for funds with schools and hospitals.
Let’s spell the argument out simply so that even the likes of Fallon can understand it. There are certain parts of the public sector which are classified as public corporations, not part of government, because they pay their own way. Bodies like Royal Mail, council housing, Manchester Airport and the tram companies are all in this sector. The rules that put them there are international ones, administered here by the Office for National Statistics.
In every other country, public corporations are also treated differently when it comes to assessing what counts as public borrowing. We have to follow these international rules in the forums that matter, like the IMF and the EU. However, in the UK itself we insist that there is no difference between a profitable business that pays its own way, like the postal service, and one that depends mainly on taxation to fund it, like a school or a hospital.
This is a nonsense which allows other countries who do make this sensible distinction to compete against us – as we have seen in the French and German government-owned firms who have taken over our public utilities. We need to stop the nonsense and bring our rules into line with everyone else’s.
There may be (though I personally doubt it) a respectable business case for privatising the Royal Mail. But if there is, let ministers make it, and don’t let them come out with spurious arguments based on treasury rules which (contrary to the impression they give) are far from being written in stone.
Gordon Banks is a regular contributor to the Labour housing blog Red Brick

Mayor Boris Johnson is good at making a loud noise and bad at delivering anything of any value to Londoners. Yesterday there was a big splash from the final report of his London Finance Commission chaired by Professor Tony Travers. The report, Raising the capital, is full of good analysis and challenging conclusions. But like Boris’s last big idea – London keeping its share of stamp duty – the big question is ‘will anything happen as a result’?
The Commission’s central conclusion is that the financial arrangements for London are a major restriction on growth. It says London needs an integrated capital investment plan, fewer borrowing constraints for infrastructure, and more devolved tax powers – although the first of these points makes you wonder what Boris has been doing for the last 5 years and the second and third will put Johnson on a collision course with George Osborne.
The report unashamedly backs greater prudential public borrowing for capital spending as the principle way to solve London’s many problems, targets existing borrowing controls for removal (borough housing caps and the caps applied to the GLA group are main targets) and identifies new ways of funding these borrowings (eg tax incremental financing). A strong case is made for the early devolution of property taxation to London’s control although I do not think they have considered sufficiently the problem that devolving a range of taxes to London (starting with stamp duty but there are many other proposals) would create for the national Treasury by reducing central Government tax take – creating a hole that would have to filled by something else.
The report is strong on the need (as well as demand) for housing and the vital importance of providing sufficient homes that are accessible and affordable for those on lower and moderate incomes. It could be argued that current policies are the very opposite of this: instead of providing homes for poorer people, policy is shifting poorer people out. To meet population growth, London has to provide around 40,000 additional homes a year, around twice the historic trend.
For the short term the Commission recommends the lifting of the cap on borrowing within the new regime for council housing finance, a move that has many supporters. They are also in favour of finding a way to switch public subsidy from benefits to investment – over 10 years, London has received £17 billion of capital investment in public housing compared to £50 billion for housing benefit. Despite calling for further assessment of IPPR’s proposal to combine and devolve all housing budgets, they accept that it is seriously problematic to do so, especially with the coming of Universal Credit. I think they are right to say that the key challenge ‘in any attempt to shift away from revenue to capital subsidy through control of benefit are the transitional consequences for low income households in receipt of benefit that continue to pay high rents while funds flow out of benefits and into home building. Additional funding would be required to mitigate these transitional costs.’ Exactly.
In my view the most important housing-related conclusion is that ‘the relaxation of borrowing controls is the only obvious solution to enable the delivery of greater supply’ which would, ‘over time, allow reduced dependence on high-cost privately rented housing for low-income households.’
Boris Johnson will see the main benefit of this report as enabling him to make the case for London whilst actually doing nothing because he knows Osborne will not concede the central points it makes. I see the main benefit of the report as providing a framework for radical new economic policies for Labour – investment-led growth, public sector leadership where needed, and a major increase in infrastructure generally and housebuilding in particular.

There is much to admire about Alan Johnson, although I have disagreed with many of his policy positions over the years. He has always seemed to be a charming yet serious person, with many achievements and a hinterland, a politician with a real story to tell.
Now he has told his story, or at least the first part of it. His autobiography This Boy takes us up to the age of 18 in 1968 and covers his childhood in what is now called Notting Hill,  in the area between the canal and the railway which is also variously described as Notting Dale, North Kensington, Kensal Town, and Golborne. With a disappearing father and a sickly mother, it is a tale of grinding poverty and appalling housing conditions told in an unsentimental, humorous and brilliantly observed way. It is both inspirational and thought-provoking. When we read so much about the failings of the poor, and the apparently growing belief in our nation that they bring it on themselves, here is something closer to the truth: a family that took on any job that came their way, and took every opportunity. It’s just that opportunities were few and far between.
The book is fascinating because I know the location so well, having lived not far away for more than 30 years. As Alan tells constant stories of the streets, and lived through the Rachman era, the riots, the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane, the slum clearances ending with the building of the iconic Trellick Tower, the building of the Westway, and the spookiness of the house previously known as 10 Rillington Place where he delivered milk, he makes it all seem so familiar. It is a personal story so he doesn’t delve in to the political context of the area at the time: the indifference of the Tory Council, the explosion of community action, and the rise of organisations like the Notting Hill Housing Trust.
Like so many other genuine stories of working class life, this book is mainly about women. His mother was from Liverpool and endured a life of penury, but lived and worked for her children. The real heroine of the piece, Alan’s sister Linda, took responsibility for the family in her early teens as their mother fell ill and eventually died, constantly standing up to authority and holding things together. There are other remarkable characters: friends who share what little they have without hesitation when crisis looms, a social worker who keeps Alan and Linda out of care, and an inspirational and caring teacher.
Alan’s book is about a time of hardship which was only 50 years ago. So many things have improved since, inside toilets for a start, and most of us thought we would never go back. But as welfare reform bites and more people fall below the poverty line, we will hear many more stories of families struggling against the odds in just the same way.

Guest blog post by Romin Sutherland

The effect that the Benefit Cap will have on homelessness and the use of temporary accommodation is a complicated and confusing area, but as most of the current legislation remains unchanged, it is possible to envisage the likely outcomes for local authorities’ duties and resources.  With the Benefit Cap reducing larger families’ housing benefit to virtually nothing, it is not as simple as saying “get a job or move to cheaper accommodation”.  As local authorities will remain under an obligation to provide these households with affordable accommodation, they cannot simply move them out of their jurisdiction without keeping them in expensive temporary accommodation under a homelessness duty.  The reasons for this will be given below, but it suffices to say that had the government wanted this policy to work they should have changed the rules around homelessness and/or Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs).

A local authority has an on-going duty to provide homeless families with temporary accommodation (TA) and this must be both suitable and affordable.  Homeless households affected by the Benefit Cap who are already in TA will remain on the authorities’ housing register no matter what happens, as long as they went into TA before the 8^th Nov 2012. After that the household could be discharged into the private rented sector under the new powers included within the Localism Act, but again this must be affordable, so for larger families who would be left with no or virtually no housing benefit, local authorities will have to keep them in TA because they cannot rely on another authority making the property affordable for them through a DHP.  This is because a DHP can only be paid when the housing benefit claim and the DHP are within the same authority, and the only way for a local authority to do this is through the TA regime, which allows housing benefit to be paid to a household placed in another authority.

This is the key point that the government has failed to grasp.  How can a local authority discharge to another authority, when even that authority is not affordable?  The answer is that they cannot.  A local authority can place such a household anywhere (subject to suitability), but they need to use their own DHP money, and that requires an active housing benefit claim in their own authority, which can only be achieved through the provision of TA.

Furthermore, such a household would remain ‘homeless’ as any placement would still be TA, so they would have access to that local authorities’ social housing register.  Until the household is discharged they are still covered by that local authorities’ allocation policy, and unless that authority introduced a new policy to exclude them, they would be able to bid on social housing, even though they have had their housing benefit capped.  As the Localism Act left the ‘reasonable preference’ categories with the Housing Act, which include homelessness, intact, any such change of policy would be liable to legal challenge in the Courts.

An expensive local authority like Westminster might try to place a homeless household outside of London or in a cheaper borough, but obviously suitability still applies.   This means that if a household is engaged with local services or has another reason for needing to remain in the borough, perhaps because they have caring responsibilities, Westminster would not be able to place them outside of their area without acting unlawfully.

If an out of borough placement would not be suitable, Westminster would have to pay to keep them and could not force them out. It is when this group becomes too large that Westminster’s DHP money will not be sufficient and they will have to make use of their general funds.  Also note that most local authorities have leased their TA from private landlords so they have on-going financial liabilities that they cannot escape without following whatever arrangements they have agreed.  This makes out of borough placements even less likely, as an empty TA property would be a costly and inefficient use of a local authorities’ resources.

Similar problems will also arise for social services departments that are forced to house ineligible or intentionally homeless families under section 17 of the Children Act.  Although the numbers will be smaller, the consequences are starker.  Section 17 covers “children in need” and was never intended to cover housing costs.  However, if necessary social services can and do use it for this purpose.  But what happens when these households have been housed?  Does this go on indefinitely?  If it does there will be less money available for social services to meet their legal obligations to vulnerable children and families.  Another unintended and disastrous outcome for local authorities, not to mention the disadvantaged who rely most heavily on them for support.

Ultimately we have no idea what local authorities are going to do. It is likely that households in TA will be kept in their local areas if engaged with services, but when and under what circumstances local authorities will try to move them out, we simply do not know.  I doubt that most local authorities know either.  My understanding is that they are watching the 4 pilot boroughs and have only just started the policy work on this issue, with the first step being the transfer of the responsibility for DHPs from the Benefits Department to Housing, if this has not already taken place.

As much as some local authorities would like to, they cannot get rid of large workless families entirely.  Things will be slightly different outside of London where authorities can prevent homelessness through small DHPs and where PRS placements are viable, but with families with 6 plus children, the same problems will arise.  A lone parent with 6 children will be receiving £482 a week excluding housing costs, leaving only £18 per week to secure a 3 or 4 bedroom property, which as you will know is not going to be possible anywhere in the UK.

Early indications from Enfield show that they are looking to move people voluntarily, but what tactics they will employ to convince people to move will need to be monitored.  Oddly there is every reason, and perhaps no other choice, but for families to make homelessness applications and go into TA.  Yes, they might be moved out of their local area, but at least they would retain an important link to their sending authority, and would have been forced to move in any case.

For those families, including pregnant and nursing mothers, who are simply unable to find appropriate employment, this policy simply doesn’t make sense, and there are structural problems with it that cannot be resolved without changes to existing legislation.  If the Local Housing Allowance caps of 2012 made preventing homelessness difficult, the Benefit Cap will make it impossible.

Romin Sutherland is NextDoor Project Manager for the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (Z2K)

It is forty years since I first met Richard Crossley and we have been good friends and sometimes house mates since. We learned the community development ropes together in North Paddington in the 1970s and have debated the issues around housing and community empowerment at great length ever since. We were reunited in a work sense in 2008 when Richard was the lead officer based in Communities and Local Government setting up the National Tenant Voice (subsequently becoming its first and only chief executive) and I chaired the Government’s project group.

Recently Richard was diagnosed as having a rare form of incurable cancer and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. In a typical Richard way, he has decided to write about his illness, his diagnosis and subsequent thoughts and experiences, in a frank, and, to his friends, heart-rending blog called World turned upside down.

In his latest post, Richard reflects on his career in housing and community empowerment, and it is a privilege to re-post it here on Red Brick.   

By Richard Crossley

I’ve often thought it a shame that people don’t get to hear their own obituaries. Last Friday I was privileged to hear mine, when my work with social housing tenants was recognised at the TPAS Northern Awards ceremony held in Manchester.  The chairs of the four National Tenant Organisations (NTOs) each spoke about the work I’ve done and the influences I’ve had. It was a proud if somewhat embarrassing moment for me. I got chance to say a few words, and decided to focus on my career rather than my illness and treatment, so that it was more of a retirement recognition rather than a premature wake! So I thought in this blog I’d set out (probably slightly more coherently than I did in Manchester!) some reflections on my working life.

The first thing that shocked me was that my career spans over 40 years. 40 years!! Where did that time go? I can still remember clearly working for the Cyrenians with homeless people in Cambridge in 1971/72 – and after that for 4 years as a community worker in North Paddington. I can remember things I did around that time more clearly than what I did last week! Mine has not been a typical career – but reflecting on it I have no regrets at all about the career choices I’ve made (there’ve been occasions when I’ve thought I would have been better off with a more traditional career that would have enabled me like so many of my generation to retire early with a good pension, but given recent events for me that wouldn’t have been a good choice – following heart rather than head and bank account has definitely been the right move).

I think there’ve been two drivers to the choices I’ve made. The first has been about trying to achieve some sense of social justice. The second has been about supporting and enabling people without a voice to have some influence over their lives and their neighbourhoods. I’ve been employed by tenants’ organisations, voluntary organisations, local authorities, and spent many years with the ground-breaking Priority Estates Project (PEP), before going on a 5-year secondment to central government and then working with the NTOs to set up the National Tenant Voice.  Over that time I’ve worked with some amazing people: colleagues, housing professionals, councillors, civil servants……but most of all inspiring tenants and residents, many living in neglected housing and neighbourhoods seemingly abandoned by public services who despite all that have been willing to stick their heads above the parapet and strive to make a difference. They are the people who make me look back with pride and affection at my career.

Of course there have been disappointments along the way. Leaving aside specific events (such as the Coalition Government’s chopping of the National Tenant Voice, or the last government winding up the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit half way through its programme without any analysis of its lessons and achievements ) there are three I’d like to mention.

Firstly, we have a seemingly pathological capacity to re-invent wheels. Every new government – indeed every new minister when I was at DCLG – has to make his/her mark with something “new”.  (I do recognise of course that the current government isn’t so much re-inventing wheels as taking them off). Usually only the name and packaging is new, but it’s the refusal to recognise what’s gone before and learn from it and build on it that has been so frustrating. It’s not just governments that are guilty of this – there are many wheelwrights in the housing and regeneration professions.  

Secondly, there’s a growing reluctance amongst housing providers and others to invest in community development. Maybe it’s that community development isn’t properly understood, or maybe it doesn’t produce quick enough results. But I know it’s a process that’s likely to produce more sustainable results if done properly. I took such an approach in developing Charteris Neighbourhood Management Co-operative in Islington in the late 1970s, and with others on Belle Isle North estate in Leeds in the 1980s. Charteris Co-op is still going some 30+ years later, and Belle Isle has been successfully managed by tenants for around 20 years. Both these successes are the result of a community development approach.

Thirdly, in the new world of co-regulation, tenant panels and tenant management, I have a worry that we are becoming too caught up in partnership and management, and as a result are losing a radical edge. I know from all the work I’ve done supporting tenant management that it will only be effective where landlord and tenant work together, and I’ve been promoting partnership working as much as anyone. But I also know that at the end of the day power rests almost entirely with the landlord. I know of many examples where landlords resist tenants having any real say, or where independent tenant organisations no longer get funding. Sometimes a bit of agitation, a bit of direct action, a rattling of the cage, is needed to bring about change. It will be a shame if that radical tradition of the tenant movement is lost. I said at the TPAS Awards that they should consider an award for “agitator of the year”. Assuming I’m still around a year from now, I’d happily present such an award!

It seems like every day I read something about ‘subsidised council tenants’. A number of times on Red Brick we have tried to debunk the fallacies of who subsidises whom in housing and to show that council housing has been running a surplus for a number of years. Now there is also growing evidence that income from rents is being used to prop up the wider finances of a significant number of councils.
In a well-researched piece for LGC News last week, Keith Cooper quoted case after case of councils switching costs and charges from their general funds (GF) to their housing revenue accounts (HRA). He found examples of community centres, libraries and street lighting costs being switched, presumably so that they would appear as savings in besieged general funds.
Despite the fact that there is a statutory ring-fence around the HRA, designed to ensure that tenants’ rents are spent on the management and maintenance of their homes and paying off debt, wily council Finance Directors have for decades managed the interface between the GF and the HRA to meet their overall objectives. There is no suggestion that the practices described by Keith Cooper are illegal, most Finance Directors are well aware of the limits they must stay within, but they are certainly canny practice and there is insufficient transparency. In his article, Keith Cooper quotes one Director saying they are ‘creative’.
In councils where I have worked it would be possible to find up to 60 separate sets of financial transfers between the GF and the HRA, ranging from an apportionment of ‘overheads’ like the cost of democratic functions and senior management, through service level agreements for services like payroll or accountancy or personnel, to proxy contracts for services like grounds maintenance and additional refuse clearance. With such complex arrangements there is plenty of scope for ‘creativity’.
Tenants have in the past complained about some practices which in effect required them to pay twice – as rent payers and as council tax payers – for their services. For example, it was frequent practice for general street lighting and road maintenance to be paid for from the council tax, but for ‘estate roads’ and estate lighting to be charged to the HRA. Another example was for the HRA to be charged for ‘extra refuse collection’ when the service was little different from that provided elsewhere.
Although well-known in the tight world of Finance Directors, these arrangements were often unknown to tenants and leaseholders and normally remained unchallenged. The setting up of arms length management organisations (that then sought to control their own costs) cast light into this gloomy corner of housing finance, often for the first time. Some apportionments turned out to be little more than back-of-the envelope calculations, others more sophisticated attempts to identify real costs. In most cases a review of a council charge led to a saving for the ALMO.
The HRA ring-fence was originally introduced to prevent cross-subsidies going in the opposite direction – from the ratepayer to the rent payer. As rents rose faster than inflation and councils came under increasing pressure to keep rate increases down, so the balance gradually shifted in the other direction.
The pressure on councils is extremely intense at present so it is no surprise they are looking at a service that is currently slightly better resourced to help out. Tenants, if asked, may indeed support a portion of their rents going to aid services that they also benefit from, especially if the option is to lose them. One of Keith Cooper’s examples – a council which is charging its HRA to fund extra welfare rights officers – may indeed be providing exactly what tenants need most.
But there are longer term questions of fairness involved. Far from being subsidised,  tenants in some or even many places are cross-subsiding taxpayers. Council housing is a trading activity, the future of which will only be secure if it shown to pay its way. Individual tenants, as well as leaseholders, are increasingly being asked to pay service charges on top of their rent, charges which do not always count for housing benefit purposes, eating into their other income. And over the next few years tenants on housing benefit will see a growing gap between their HB and their actual rent as HB increases fall behind inflation and specific measures such as the bedroom tax are introduced. What seem like small sums at the margins of a high turnover account might become critical to some individuals.
If it is inevitable and understandable that councils will be ‘creative’ in current circumstances, it is important to retain the integrity of the HRA as a council housing trading account, on the principle that it exists to pay for tenants’ services from tenants’ rents. And as HRA surpluses are an important source of financial strength to enable new council housebuilding, the implications are much wider than they seem.

The welfare reform debate inside the Labour Party appears to have reached a crossroads ….. again. There are 3 basic positions vying for attention: those that think some cuts and reform are justified because of the deficit; those that think welfare reform is popular with the public therefore Labour should go along with it in order to win; and those that think the current scale of cuts are not justified economically and that, even if they were, they should not be targeted on the poorest.
I am in the third camp, but it does not mean that I am not in favour of major reform. And I am strongly in favour of Labour winning Elections. But the debate needs to go a lot deeper than the ‘how to deal with the deficit’ and ‘strivers versus scroungers’ arguments that Labour constantly gets pushed in to.
The welfare debate cannot be removed from the wider context of society. Income inequality has been rising since around 1980, according to figures produced by the Resolution Foundation’s Commission on Living Standards. In 1977, of every £100 value generated by the economy, £16 went to the bottom half of workers in wages. By 2010 this had declined to £12, down 26%. Annie Quick in the New Statesman this week comments that the bottom fifth would be £2000 a year better off – their incomes would have been 18% higher – if the income distribution had stayed the same.
The decisive shift towards greater inequality came in the 1980s under Thatcher; the trend continued under Labour and there can be no doubt it has accelerated again under Cameron. The prevalence of sub-minimum-wage jobs (where there is a scandalous lack of enforcement), devices like zero hours contracts, self-employment and labour casualisation, and pay cuts, mean that there has been a substantial squeeze on wages at the lower end of the scale. This squeeze on wages is now in turn being used to drive the case for cutting benefits: the Tory line that people should not get more out of work than in work (they don’t but that’s a different point) has gained a lot of traction. The Tories have engineered the position where the in-work poor and the out-of-work poor are racing each other towards penury.
In housing, there is a strong case for reform of the housing benefit system but it is nowhere near the argument that Iain Duncan Smith puts. We should start by repudiating the Tory narrative that HB is ‘out of control’. The size of the HB bill is the direct and predictable consequence of rising unemployment and policy decisions taken over many years – the failure to build in response to the collapse in affordability of home ownership; the minimal building of benefit-light homes for social rent; the sale of council houses which become privately rented at twice the rent or more; the policy of pushing more poor people into private renting generally; demographic change. The most rapid increase in HB claims has been from people who are in work: it must annoy the Tories to realise that the more they complain about HB the more working people realise that they can claim it – and the higher the bill goes.
That we have ended up in a bad place is undoubtedly true – 95% of the money going into housing goes to help people pay the rent rather than building homes – but we are here as a consequence of deliberate policy. Governments have wanted to marketise housing, increase rents and, in the words of former Tory Housing Minister Sir George Young, ‘let housing benefit take the strain’.
This week’s statement by Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne that the way to get the housing benefit bill down is to build more affordable homes is therefore very welcome. This is a genuinely radical shift in thinking and emphasis and leads to potential reforms that deserve strong support. Byrne told the Evening Standard that the initial step must be to get people into work through the jobs guarantee and ‘to show how savings can be made on housing benefit by increasing the amount of homes there are for people to go to.’ He said: ‘Billions are spent with private landlords yet we ask nothing in return. We are spending £24 billion on housing but hardly building any houses. No wonder rents are soaring. We simply cannot go on like this.’
Labour should put its energy into thinking through practical policies that achieve a switch from benefits to building. A coherent switching policy would work in tandem with principled opposition to the appalling bedroom tax and the clearance of poor people from more affluent areas. The Tories are offering punishment of the poor, Labour could offer a genuine alternative – cutting benefits by putting people back to work and building homes that people can live in with much smaller benefit support.
We should not pretend it is easy. In 2012 the IPPR report Together at Home recommended a radical shift in public spending away from benefits and back towards bricks and mortar. Finding the precise mechanisms for achieving this has its difficulties because the investment has to be made before the savings in benefit can be realised. In my view, IPPR went down the wrong path by suggesting that this could be achieved by what they called ‘progressive localism’, rolling all housing budgets together and then localising them, leaving it to local discretion what the balance between benefits and investment should be in any particular area. As with council tax benefit, this would lead to an entirely unhelpful postcode lottery and potentially bizarre conflicting policies within the same housing market areas.
The answer lies in matching our housing aims closely to our aims to achieve growth in the economy. The collapse in construction activity was central to the second dip of the recession and almost caused the third. The sector continues to decline despite all the talk and Government meddling with planning and the rest. Labour has to be even bolder in its commitment to affordable housebuilding. A modest increase in investment subsidies, say back to 2008 levels, could generate a large council housebuilding programme and help housing associations to build many more genuinely affordable homes at social rents. The multiplier effects would give the economy a major boost in the right way: creating lots of jobs without generating inflation and without sucking in imports. By rehousing people in receipt of housing benefit (in work or not) currently living in expensive private rented homes (and in particular temporary accommodation), the benefit bill would start to come down.
Housing investment could be the way out of Labour’s welfare reform dilemma. We could achieve cuts in the cost of benefits. We could have an attractive policy based on getting people off the dole into real jobs. And we could shift decisively away from policies that punish people for being poor.

The 20^th Anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence was an appropriate day for the House of Lords to reject the Government’s attempt to repeal the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s General Duty. It has since been reported that the Government may accept defeat and end their plans to remove the duty. If confirmed, that would be a significant victory.
Section 3 of the Equality Act 2006 sets out the central mission of the Commission, to fulfil its functions so as to encourage and support the development of a fairer society. Without the general duty the EHRC would retain its ability to report on its specific functions and work but would be much less able to report and commentate on the overall progress of society towards fairness. The attempt at repeal was contained in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill currently going through Parliament.
The proposed repeal is one of a number of Coalition attacks on equalities work. It is also downgrading the importance of equality impact assessments in the consideration of Government decisions, it is ‘reviewing’ the general Public Sector Equalities Duty, and it has slashed the EHRC’s budget from £70m at inception to less that £27m in 2015.
These ‘reforms’ did not come out of a principled review of the Equalities legislation or its effectiveness but from the so-called ‘Red Tape Challenge’. To have the whole structure of equalities law and implementation in this country reduced to an argument about red tape was extraordinarily offensive. It also told us a lot about this Government.
Despite standing next to Doreen Lawrence at Stephen’s memorial service, David Cameron has led the attack. In his speech to that bastion of fairness, the CBI, in November 2012, Cameron attacked ‘bureaucratic rubbish’. He said the Government would free up decision-making by cutting back on judicial reviews, reducing government consultations, and ‘stopping the gold-plating of legislation’. His example of ‘gold-plating’ was the Equalities Act and he cited the ‘reams of pointless reports’, by which he meant equality impact assessments. After all, he said, ‘We have smart people in Whitehall who consider equalities issues while they’re making the policy.’ Well, they hadn’t done very well in the previous century had they?
There is great concern that the Government has its eyes on the repeal of the Public Sector Equality Duty, the general obligation on all public bodies to have regard to equalities issues in fulfilling their functions. It is undertaking a review. The duty, as the TUC has argued, is particularly critical in a time of cuts, where the impact of reduced services is likely to be felt by some groups more than others. The TUC has produced an excellent guide.  It has its roots in the Macpherson Inquiry which found the Metropolitan Police to be ‘institutionally racist’ in the aftermath of Stephen’s murder.
Equalities work is being constantly undermined. Eric Pickles evidently thinks equality impact assessments and equalities monitoring are intrusive and unnecessary. Defeating the Government’s attempt to remove the broad remit of the EHRC is important, but they should be aware that they will face an even bigger battle if they come back with a proposed repeal of the Public Sector Equalities Duty.