An excellent opinion piece on 24 Housing last week by Tony Stacey reminds me just how supine – and in parts, complicit – the housing industry has become. From the off, Red Brick has objected to, criticised, parodied, and been outraged by the Government’s ‘Affordable Rent’ scheme. And in equal measure we have tried to expose the deliberate attempt to reduce and, we think, eventually eliminate social rented housing.
Tony, who is Chair of Placeshapers, says he refuses to use the term ‘Affordable Rent’ and describes ‘the wretched thing’ as ‘AR’. He finds the few references to people speaking out against AR and in favour of social rent, including the important ‘Just Say No’ blog by Colin Wiles, which in turn led to the creation of the SHOUT campaign for social rented housing. Tony hopes that Boards and Chief Executives will ‘find their voices’ having ‘sleepwalked into acquiescence’. He makes the simple but blinding observation that ‘subsidised housing needs subsidy’.
The reason I use the word ‘complicit’ is that some in the housing world have been rather more than naïve people going meekly along with an externally imposed agenda. Quite a few were actively involved in creating this whole plan. There are of course many honorable exceptions, but over the years I have experienced a considerable number of chief executives and other senior people distancing themselves from social rented housing, travelling away from their associations’ original mission to assist the homeless and people in greatest housing need, becoming obsessed with home ownership and equity stakes, prioritising what they called ‘aspirational’ people, and stigmatising people trapped in ‘welfare dependency’ in a way that would make even Iain Duncan Smith blush. In the words of one housing director, ‘it’s not the homes that need fixing, it’s the people’.
And so they would rather build for shared ownership or even private sale than social renting, even when their business plans allowed for a choice between them. Promises of future cross-subsidy from surpluses – we should make shed loads of cash, then invest it in rented homes, I can remember being told – never quite materialise in the way promised. Just like developers, they don’t want the value of their for sale products diluted by having social housing mixed up with them. They are in awe of ‘the market’ and the magical importance of ‘market rents’ even when it is so blindingly obvious that the market is completely dysfunctional. They have changed the brand and image of their organisations, becoming ‘developers’ and ‘regeneration agencies’ rather than housing associations building homes to meet housing need.
I have heard chief executives complaining about having to house ‘chavs’, objecting to local authority ‘dumping’ of tenants and demanding that landlords should have more power to evict tenants and to end the tenancies of people they feel don’t deserve them. Some even specifically advised the Conservative Party in the development of policies in favour of higher market-related rents and reduced security of tenure, which in turn mutated into the ‘AR’ policy. Too often they seemed obsessed with development, irrespective of what was being developed, and disinterested in existing tenants and housing management or old fashioned concepts like meeting housing need. Strategy was a word they applied to their own organisational objectives and not to the needs of communities.
Be careful what you wish for. The scene was set, the monster was created and then incubated by a 60% reduction in investment in the Coalition’s first spending review. The only way to build any new homes at all was to slash grant for each home and to massively increase rents – in new but also in existing homes. Now housing associations have to live with a product that is almost useless to their poorer tenants in high rent areas, stretches their own resources, and – what madness – costs more in the long term in public expenditure. And yet some of these same chief executives still sit smugly on CIH and NHF platforms telling the world what a wonderful job they’re doing.
If associations had refused to play ball in the first AR round the product would have been dead in the water. Some were just toadies but the depressing fact is that others were getting what they had been seeking for years. I’m not normally a bitter and twisted person, but if I was in charge if Labour wins the next Election, some of these organisations would never see another penny of public money.
So well done Placeshapers and well done SHOUT for helping to change the tone of the debate. The housing industry must stop failing the people.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is ‘going big’ on his plans for affordable housing, according to the New York Times. In his 116-page plan launched this week, the new mayor promised to build or keep 200,000 affordable units over the next ten years, trumping previous mayor Bloomberg’s 165,000 units over 12 years. De Blasio intends to invest $8.2 billion of city money, which he thinks will lever in sufficient funds to create over $40bn of investment in total. If it works, the plan will keep 120,000 apartments already let at affordable rents that are in danger of being lost, and create 80,000 more. He announced the programme at a new development site in Brooklyn which, when finished, will let 50% of its apartments at affordable rents.
As Red Brick has pointed out before, New York’s mixed communities are heavily dependent on rents kept low through regulation or subsidy. The new plans are specifically aimed at low-income families – those earning less than $25,000 for a family of four. This is because, of the city’s rent payers, one third spend more than half their income on rents and utility bills, whereas the city’s own guideline maximum is 30% of income. The current problem is that the city is losing more rent-regulated apartments than it builds, and once out of regulation rents go sky high. De Blasio wants to identify neighbourhoods vulnerable to gentrification, and “lock in” affordable rents before it’s too late.
Apart from subsidy, the essence of the de Blasio plan is to permit higher-rise developments providing they meet affordable housing quotas and that the units are guaranteed as affordable forever. This is thought to be risky, as some developers may simply refuse to build if they have to comply with the new norms. However, the president of the influential Real Estate Board of New York said the plan provides “a realistic road map for solutions”, so there is hope that the private sector will co-operate.
The ambition and pace of the plan is exciting given that the new mayor was only elected in November. His focus on very affordable housing is in complete contrast to the Johnson plan for London, whose result has been to push even so-called “affordable” rents up still higher. And as Steve said at the time of de Blasio’s victory, his ideas could be an inspiration for Labour: set an ambitious, well-constructed plan, and go for it soon after the election while your new mandate can help nullify any opposition.
 

There was genuine optimism. But in the years that followed it was all thrown away. Council housing investment tightened following the IMF crisis and its decline accelerated for ideological reasons under Thatcher after 1979. Councils were prevented from municipalising housing and both new build and rehabilitation programmes stalled. The much-heralded ‘third arm’ – housing associations – grew in status but crucially never came close to matching the number of homes that were previously provided by councils. Private enterprise continued to build in parallel with economic cycles. The pattern was set that has lasted since. The hole left by councils was never filled and the housing system could no longer respond to rising housing demand and need. Since that watershed period, we have failed to build enough homes of all types to meet the needs of the population and we have allowed, indeed encouraged, house values (and hence rents) to soar through successive bubbles, making homes increasingly unaffordable.
Although wholly discredited, the theory of ‘trickle down’ still infects housing policy – the belief that building executive homes in Cheshire or Hertfordshire will somehow eventually assist people in housing need in Manchester or London (in reality such additional supply leads to a more rapid rate of household formation before the trickle has got very far). For example, in the debate about building New Towns in the south east, the assumption is still made that somehow this additional general housing supply will benefit those in housing need in London.
We have failed to match the distribution of prices and rents in the housing system to the distribution of incomes. Inequality has grown and so has insecurity: the number of people with very low incomes in the ‘flexible labour market’ with zero hours contracts, casualised labour, irregular self-employment, and part-time work. The correct housing policy response to these changes is that homes need to be cheaper not more expensive.
For thirty years housing policy has suffered from the erroneous analysis that it is more efficient to let markets set rents and then to subsidise the individual household to find somewhere to live. Even worse was the growing belief that social housing rents should be closely linked to whatever the market comes up with. As a consequence, housing benefit has been rising and investment grants falling, to the extraordinary point where 95% of the money put directly into housing by Government is in the form of benefit and only 5% in the form of investment. People on low incomes, in or out of work, are charged increasingly high rents, making them more reliant on housing benefit and creating extraordinarily high marginal tax rates.
A rational housing policy would deliver homes in a way that is consistent with the income distribution and thereby maximises the advantage of working. Only a traditional form of social rented housing offers what is needed to people near the bottom, whether they are in or out of work.
Misguided policies have been compounded by the demonization of benefit recipients, including social tenants. The perceived wisdom that social tenants are ‘subsidised’ and that many of them live the life of Reilly on benefits is as dominant as it is inaccurate: but the prejudice is reinforced by the media, some politicians, and even some in the housing business, every day.
Better public understanding of the real pattern of flows of subsidies, discounts and tax reliefs (economically they are the same) in the housing system would transform the debate. All of the tenures are subsidised. One policy alone, the right to buy, has cost £50bn in discounts over 25 years. New social rented housing receives an initial grant per dwelling to enable it to be built but subsequently receives nothing towards running costs.
Different people draw different conclusions from each part of the patchwork of assistance to housing. But the most important lesson is that the system is expensive and incoherent, badly geared towards meeting primary housing objectives (increasing supply and making homes affordable), and detrimental to the wider economy. The narrative is even more damaging if you take a wider view of property and land taxation as a whole. Not fit for purpose is something of an understatement. In particular, the primary forms of support for home ownership over the past 50 years, from MITR to Help to Buy, have bolstered demand not supply: they have been hugely expensive and largely counter-productive. In renting, we have stopped funding the most efficient and value-for-money sector, social renting, and instead expanded subsidy to the least efficient and lowest value-for-money sector, private renting, a policy change that is now driving a very rapid increase in the cost of housing benefit.
Of course I do not argue that the world of social renting is some perfect nirvana. Many mistakes have been made in social renting over the past 50 years as well. I would name the failure of imagination in urban planning and its inability to create mixed neighbourhoods across the piece, the disaster of system-build and some gross errors made in the design and construction of large estates during the heyday of building in the 60s and 70s. And it is the case that social rented homes have often been badly managed both by councils and housing associations.
But my point is that the model of social rented housing has been tried and tested and it works. It is a wheel waiting to be reinvented. Targeting subsidy at building homes in the first place, with no subsidy for subsequent running costs: this is the most efficient use of resources. The focus is on construction and there are strong multipliers in the wider economy so that the Treasury gets a big slice of its money back. Rents rise over time while borrowing costs flatline, so the pooling of rents allows a cross-subsidy from older properties to newer properties, helping to keep them all affordable. Social landlords can borrow money to build at the best possible rates. Housing Associations get a return on their investment over the lifetime of the loans they take out; councils currently make a surplus on their activities with no general subsidy. Cost-plus rents mean there is a need for housing benefit but at much lower levels than that required for private rented homes.
So what’s not to like about social renting?
Neo-liberals assert that markets lead to an optimal use of resources. Economic theory would tell us that high prices lead to more homes being provided so that an equilibrium price is achieved over time to the satisfaction of those providing and those buying or renting the homes. And the evidence is?
It is a particular nonsense to have a dysfunctional housing market, inflated by demand subsidies, and then to require social rents to be tied to it, whether at 40% or 80%. Once council housing started to make a profit, people hostile to any form of public housing provision switched from complaining about cash subsidies to claiming that it was subsidised simply because it was sub-market. Of course it is fair enough for economists to identify the ‘economic subsidy’ or ‘opportunity cost’ involved – ie how much you could get for it if you sold it in the market instead and applied the money to some other activity – but it is unrelated to the cost of provision. In the real economy, where there are tens of thousands of market distortions caused by taxes, tax reliefs, imperfect competition, and even geography, the notion of economic subsidy makes little sense. Staying in hospital, for free, involves a taxpayer subsidy for the cost of treatment and the cost of occupying a hospital bed. No-one goes to BMI Healthcare, asks how much they would charge, and then says the subsidy for an NHS bed is the difference between free and private fee levels.
Social rents should be linked to the net cost of provision of the stock as a whole adjusted by local or regional variations in incomes. Hence rents in London would be higher than rents in Newcastle, which everyone would agree is fair.
Labour’s social rent policy, introduced in 2001, followed a review which concluded that social rent levels were set at broadly the right levels but needed to rise gradually over time (in those days incomes tended to rise faster than prices) to help fund investment. The outcome was too formulaic and centralised, with little local flexibility, but was quite well accepted, predictable and stable.
Since 2010 rent policy has gone haywire, but the underlying principle is that social rents will be much higher than in the past. A rapidly reducing proportion of ‘social housing’ lettings have been for ‘social rent’ under Labour’s policy and a rapidly increasing proportion have been tied to irrational and volatile market rents through the Coalition’s ‘Affordable Rent’ regime. Actual rents vary between 50% and 80% of the local market rate as determined in negotiations between providers (when bidding for contracts) and the Homes and Communities Agency or the London Mayor. As the investment programme was cut by 60% during George Osborne’s first spending review, it was always underfunded, so providers are required to help fund new build by selling some existing property and ‘converting’ a proportion of their existing social rented homes to ‘Affordable Rent’ levels when they are re-let. Councils building new council homes are charging a variety of rents to ensure that schemes are viable. The picture now is chaotic. A new ‘Affordable Rent’ tenant living next door to a social rent tenant might be paying as much as twice the rent, with less security of tenure.
The central argument deployed against an expansion of social renting is that it would require additional borrowing to fund a larger grant programme and that this cannot be afforded. Currently the programme is around £1.5 bn a year: chickenfeed in public expenditure terms, almost within the margin of error for housing benefit. Builders buy materials and newly employed workers spend their incomes. Tax revenues rise and benefit payments fall. Homes are let at rents that might be half the price of private lets, saving hugely on housing benefit in every future year. The net cost to the Treasury is significantly below the gross cost.
The new campaign group, SHOUT (Social Housing Under Threat), in its submission to the Lyons Commission, argued that half of Labour’s proposed target of 200,000 homes a year by 2020 should be homes for social rent. They estimate that the cost of these proposals would rise to £6bn a year by 2020 (an increase of £4.5 bn over current spending plans). A proportion of the cost would be borne by the private sector through planning gain and some of the grant could come in the form of free public land. There would be savings in other programmes, such as health. It would be an ideal form of investment because there are no additional revenue costs – management, maintenance, renewal and debt servicing would be paid for out of rents.
This kind of programme is achievable if housing is a genuine political priority. Additional spending on grant would clearly be an extra public spending commitment. But the headline cost is, according to SHOUT, “well under 1 per cent of planned 2013-14 spending; the equivalent of less than 1p on income tax, or just 13 days of welfare spending; and less than 15% of the planned cost of HS2.“
To achieve a new social rented programme of this size, changes will be needed to how both local authorities and housing associations operate. In the council sector there is considerable capacity for additional prudential borrowing within business plans following the reform of the housing revenue account subsidy system. Despite being a self-financed trading activity, borrowing by councils is artificially constrained by Treasury conventions which are different in the UK compared to the rest of Europe. By switching to international measures of public borrowing, it is estimated that councils could build an additional 12,000 homes.
For housing association programmes, additional private borrowing to match additional grant is already ‘off balance sheet’ and does not add to public borrowing. The issue here is a different one. It is hard to generalise because it is a more diverse sector than ever, but too many large housing associations have lost their way and have actively pursued a path away from social renting. They see themselves as large development and regeneration companies. They are not accountable and have lost sight of their mission to provide homes for the homeless and badly housed. Of course their activities contribute to the overall supply of housing but they detract from what should be their core product – social rented housing. Their mission should be rebooted.
Even if we begin to build many more social rented homes again, the gap between supply and demand will require a system of rationing and allocation. The question still has to be asked ‘who is social housing for?’
The mix of tenants living in social housing has changed over the years. In the 1950s the rents of high quality single occupation new council homes were often higher than in the multi-occupied poor quality private rented sector, and were out of reach of the poorest. Many families were deliberately excluded by devices such as assessing ‘housekeeping standards’. Council housing became focused on meeting the needs of the ‘respectable’ skilled and semi-skilled working classes rather than the unskilled. Homes were often allocated against unclear and unpublished criteria and frequently involved councillors making individual letting decisions. Judgemental attitudes, discrimination and favouritism were common. It was a long struggle to move to transparent housing allocations policies based on assessments of housing need, with no means test, with individual lettings decisions made objectively against public criteria by officers.
It is commonplace to be told that ‘the problem’ with modern social housing is that it is let on the basis of housing need and that too many poor and vulnerable people have been congregated together on ‘sink estates’. Thatcher pursued a deliberate policy of residualisation and a shift towards the American model of a small welfare housing sector, turning off the supply tap and selling hundreds of thousands of the best homes to better-off tenants. No-one should be surprised that over time this obligated the sector to restrict access to the most desperate applicants. In my view it was right, and still is right, to prioritise housing allocations to those objectively assessed as being in the greatest housing need, and the length of time they have been in need, and not on income or employment or community contribution or other factors. In the circumstances of a sector forced into decline it was right to focus resources in this way.
It was also inevitable that residualisation would have implications for housing management down the track. In my view many landlords failed to identify the challenge or to rise to it. Better and more intensive management was required but blaming the people was easier than fixing the problem. It would be wrong to respond to difficult management challenges by housing even fewer people in the direst housing need, just as it is wrong to be reverting to the 1960s by excluding homeless families from social housing by recycling them back into insecure private renting. It is a worthy aspiration to want social housing to house a wider cross-section of society, but it is a pipedream in the current circumstances.
In this short essay I hope to have conveyed the view that social rented housing has been a huge factor in the improvement in housing conditions in our country and in breaking the automatic link between poverty and bad housing. Over the last 35 years it has had the life squeezed slowly out of it by ideology and bad policy. But it can be reinvented. And the benefits of doing so could be great.
Steve Hilditch
May 2014

Two recent surveys show how much concern there is among housing professionals about the failure to replace houses lost through right to buy. First, in March, in responding to the LGA’s housing self-financing survey, 71% of authorities said that the rules about capital receipts fail to let them build sufficient houses. Then a recent CIH member survey showed that one of their top three demands was to be able to make better use of right to buy receipts (see the graphic above). This is hardly surprising when the latest figures show sales to have risen to over 10,000 over the twelve months to last September (in DCLG live table 691), compared with just 4,000 for the twelve months before that. Over the same period when councils were forced to sell more than 10,000 homes, they were able to build less than 1,000.
The government’s pledges to replace right to buy sales were always qualified as applying only to the sales generated by higher discounts, which for the past two years have been at a maximum of £75,000 outside London and (for the past year) £100,000 in London. Furthermore, local authorities were expected to finance no more than 30% of the cost of a new house from receipts, funding the rest from other sources. The final twist was that replacement units have to be let at Affordable Rents, so they are not really replacements at all.
Even so, one-for-one replacement now looks like a sick joke. And what has been the government’s response to the haemorrhaging of social-rented stock? – to further promote the right to buy. It wants to reduce the qualifying period from five to three years through the coming Deregulation Bill. It’s going to appoint right to buy agents to facilitate sales and waste £100m in the process. And Eric Pickles wants to increase the maximum discounts still further and ensure that in future they keep pace with inflation.
As CIH pointed out in commenting on the original plans to ‘reinvigorate’ the right to buy, the problem with setting ever higher discounts, combined with the complex rules about reusing them, is that there simply isn’t enough money left in the pot to pay for replacement housing at local level. Apart from the rather blatant evidence provided by the new build statistics, the predictions made by CIH are also supported by the latest figures on capital receipts.
DCLG live table 692 shows that receipts in the past year (the money that came in after allowing for discounts) totalled £665m. Given that councils can build a house for an average cost of £125,000, these receipts could have financed over 5,000 new homes. They won’t of course, because the Treasury siphons off a hefty proportion of receipts and also imposes the rules noted above about replacements. The effect is to give far more priority to repaying debt than to building new homes. In other words, the right to buy offers the perfect combination for the coalition government: it helps to reduce government debt, it promotes home ownership and it cuts the numbers of council homes by ensuring that the best ones are sold off at knock-down prices. A better Tory housing policy is difficult to imagine.

Today Ed Miliband rides to the rescue of ‘Generation Rent’ – taking the boldest of steps and bringing together a number of Labour’s big themes – by promising thorough reform of the private rented sector.

Tackling the cost of living crisis, taking on vested interests, intervening in a hugely dysfunctional market, extending the core rights of consumers, and tackling the cost of benefits by sensible reform – all in one new policy which matches his energy prize freeze as a spectacular initiative.
For years now, people have been saying ‘something must be done’ about the private rented sector, and now ‘something’ is on the agenda. It’s the right thing to do, it’s audacious, it’s imaginative, and it’s not before time. And it will come under sustained attack from the Tories and from the less enlightened end of the landlord lobby. Already the lead Tory buffoon Grant Shapps has called it ‘Venezuela-style’. He has apparently never heard of Germany or Ireland, where rules similar to these have been successful and led to a much more stable private rented sector. I suspect Shapps knows next to nothing about  Venezuelan housing policy and is ignorant of the great success of the late Hugo Chávez’s Great Housing Mission, which aimed to build 350,000 houses in 2011 and 2012 – a target actually exceeded by nearly 25,000. Shapps can only dream of matching Venezuela’s  housing achievements, or even those of Angela Merkel.
No other major UK industry has been left in such a mess for so long. Despite being a supposed ‘free market’, private renting is a major cost to the taxpayer: it benefits from a patchwork of subsidies, guarantees and tax reliefs and is the main driver behind the escalation in housing benefit costs. Encouraging private renting rather than building social housing has been one of the biggest policy blunders of the last 25 years. A hugely expanded sector is here to stay but it must be brought into the modern world where there is a greater equivalence between the power of the producer and the rights of the consumer. As with Labour’s energy reforms it is the role of Government to step in and provide regulation when the producer gets their own way for too long, benefiting both tenants and landlords although, crucially, not letting agents.
By making a longer-term tenancy the ‘default’ position in a letting contract (with suitable exemptions), with capped rent rises during the term, Labour is dragging the sector into the 21^st century. Labour has learned from some of the more successful examples abroad, where private renting is seen as a stable long-term investment rather than a ‘get rich quick’ hedge bet. And before the Tories and the vested interests get their arguments running, let us be clear that this is not ‘old fashioned’ or ‘blunt’ rent control which is blamed for bringing the private rented sector almost to extinction in the decades up to 1988. It is a modern approach, tempering the market and cooling price increases whilst giving occupants – who increasingly are families with children – a greater sense of commitment to their home and some security on which to build the rest of their lives.
The three elements of the reform package are:

• three year tenancies to be the norm, with suitable exemptions (eg a mortgage covenant and students) and a 6 month probationary period.
• an upper limit on rent increases during a tenancy.
• scrapping extortionate letting agent fees to tenants, saving tenants an average of £350 for each letting.

Miliband plans to deal with some of the usual criticisms made of longer tenancies and greater security: that landlords may need to sell their property or may need it for their own use. These will be reasons for regaining possession, but ending a tenancy to get a higher rent (the letting agents’ favourite) will not be.
Ed Miliband said: “One of the biggest causes of the cost of living crisis in our country is the price of renting or buying a home. People simply can’t afford it, they’re priced out, saving for a deposit year after year, decade after decade, or having to look for somewhere to live further and further away from where they go to work or where the kids have always gone to school.”
Coming on top of the commitment to build 200,000 homes a year by the end of the next Parliament, and the growing interest in developing a strong ‘benefits to bricks’ policy to curb housing benefit spending, Labour’s housing policy is beginning to take shape.

The first chief executive of the National Tenant Voice, set up by Labour but abolished by the Coalition Government shortly after the last election, has died of the rare peritoneal cancer aged 64. We were friends for 42 years.
Having worked at the front-line of community development for his entire career, Richard was seconded from the Priority Estates Project (PEP) to the Communities and Local Government Department to work on neighbourhoods policy before being asked to project manage the setting up the new National Tenant Voice (NTV), designed to make social tenants much more influential in the development of policy at local and national level.
Richard’s networking and people skills – honed on estates around the country – were crucial in negotiating the minefield of civil service rules and procedures, and getting the Treasury and Cabinet Office behind the project – a quango run by tenants wasn’t a concept they entirely understood. Richard made it happen but he also made sure that the tenants’ movement stayed in firm control of the project. Following its establishment, which involved bringing together tenants from all over the country into a National Tenant Council, Richard was appointed as the first chief executive. Regrettably, he was hardly in post before the incoming Coalition Minister, Grant Shapps, abolished the NTV and pushed tenants out into the policy wilderness again.
Richard’s career was unusual because he had no intention of climbing the greasy pole. He loved working with tenants on the ground and realising the untapped potential of community leaders in some of the country’s most deprived communities. His first job, a rare step for a civil engineering graduate from Nottingham University, was with Cambridge Cyrenians, followed by a four year stint doing community work in North Paddington. Then on to Stonebridge Estate in Brent, setting up the Charteris Neighbourhood Management Co-op in Islington and the tenant management scheme on Belle Isle Estate in Leeds (both still successful after 20-30 years). He then worked for PEP until his Government secondment, helping and advising tenants on estates all over the north of England.
Richard’s decision to leave London and return to Yorkshire in 1984 was a watershed moment for him. He was a real, but not stereotypical, son of Yorkshire – West Yorkshire to be exact. Born and raised in Halifax, the son of a monumental mason, the area was in his blood. From there he could easily reach his beloved Yorkshire Dales and even the Lake District to indulge his other passion – walking the fells. He settled in Leeds with his partner Jane Williams, conveniently almost within touching distance of the cricket ground.

In Headingley Richard and Jane set about building a new community spirit, with a range of projects on the go at any one time. With others they formed the hugely successful Headingley Development Trust which now runs a series of projects including HEART, a large social enterprise centre packed with activities. Amongst other things, Richard loved organising the film club, with the selection of films decided by the members.
In 2012 Richard achieved one of his life ambitions, to go trekking in the Himalayas. His high point was Gokyo Ri, a peak 5200m above sea level commanding an astonishing view of the Everest range and much more. To get there he had to endure snow, severe temperatures of -20c and the effects of altitude. He took it all in his stride and, as a regular runner (having competed, for example, in the Great North Run) he seemed to be at the peak of his fitness.
Within a year of the trek Richard had fallen ill, had a bowel operation and then been diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer of the peritoneum. Intensive treatments followed at ‘Jimmy’s’ hospital in Leeds and the Christie in Manchester, but, as his health declined, Richard launched a new adventure. He started writing the most extraordinary blog, detailing his illness and treatment, but also his reflections on life and death: he was a humanist and did not believe in the afterlife. He praised the wonderful staff of the NHS and reflected on his career and housing policy, and on his love of the dales and mountains. He criticised the language of cancer: I’m not battling an external force called cancer, he would say, I’m living with it: when I die, it doesn’t win, it dies too. He wrote movingly and inspiringly, completing his last entry days before his death.
Richard’s blog stands as a testament to a uniquely strong and emotionally literate person, full of compassion and empathy but with the competitive streak of an activist. A long-term supporter of CND, his politics were a mix of red and green, but his distinctive contribution was as the unwavering advocate of much-maligned social tenants. He had an enduring belief in the ability of ordinary people to work collectively to take greater control over their lives and environments.
In January 2014 Richard received an OBE for services to neighbourhoods and tenants. It was a just award, even for a committed republican. But it took a superhuman effort (by him and his family) to come to London for the Investiture in March 2014. Despite his now extreme ill-health and weakness, Richard refused a wheelchair and walked the whole event, taking the family for a celebratory coffee and cake afterwards. He even managed to talk to Prince Charles about the advantages of tenant management.

Richard’s wish was to spend his final days at home, which he achieved with the loving care of his partner Jane, daughter Emma and son Alex, and many other family and friends.
Richard Crossley OBE, born 11 January 1950, died 21 April 2014.
 
Steve Hilditch

It’s a long time since waiting lists did what they say on the tin. But the changes resulting from the latest DCLG guidance mean they will soon be more a barometer of local politics than of housing need.
Back in the good (or bad?) old days, anyone could put their name down on the waiting list for a council house and many people used to do so as an insurance policy. The last Labour government arguably had contradictory lines on this. In its quest to reverse the 1996 Tory homelessness legislation, its Homelessness Act in 2002 made waiting lists open to anyone (except those ineligible because of their immigration status). However, it later began to backtrack and encourage councils to adopt a ‘housing options’ approach to housing applicants. Some councils implemented this enthusiastically, notably Portsmouth who by reviewing old applications cut their waiting list from 12,500 to 2,500. Nevertheless, the 2002 requirements stayed in place.
The coalition saw the rise in waiting list numbers over recent years in England as resulting partly from these open lists, which in its view encouraged people to register even when they had ‘no real need of social housing’. The Localism Act 2011 introduced the concept of ‘qualifying persons’ who would be eligible to apply for housing, and gave considerable discretion to local authorities to decide who they should be. That said, the initial guidance wasn’t very different from the previous government’s: both emphasised a ‘housing options’ approach.
This changed last December when the government more specifically encouraged councils to give preference to local people, or those who have ‘a close association with the local area’. Its recommended ‘residency requirement’ is now two years. As a result of the various changes different councils have been trimming their lists (while equally some have done nothing). For example, Bournemouth seemed to follow similar practices to neighbouring Portsmouth in cutting its list from 9,425 to 3,177.
There is a difference between applying a residency test for entry to the list, and applying one before an allocation is made. It’s relatively common, for example, to have a local connection test like Dover’s which requires applicants who get an offer to show that they’ve lived there for three out of the last five years.
However, the changes seem to have launched a war of attrition in London, with various Boroughs implementing increasingly tough criteria before people can even get onto the list. Most now have a three-year test. But last year both Hammersmith & Fulham and Brent introduced five-year residency requirements for entry to the list. In Hammersmith’s case, this enabled them to cut its numbers by a gigantic 90% to only 768 applicants. Then Hillingdon upped the ante by introducing a ten-year residency requirement. Barking and Dagenham have just followed on by also adopting a ten-year test.
It is interesting to read the paper to B&D’s cabinet meeting on 8 April on its housing allocations review. Officers put forward options of having two-, five- or ten-year residency tests. In their assessment of the variable impacts, they judged even the five-year test would have a disproportionate impact on BME residents (they form three-quarters of those affected), with other affected groups being young people and those with jobs. Nevertheless officers recommended a five-year test.
They appeared very concerned about the impact of a possible ten-year test, because of those who would then qualify 80% would be white British – even though they now form only an estimated 40% of B&D’s population. Their equalities impact assessment indicated that it would not only disproportionately affect BME groups, but that these are also (on average) in greater housing need. It concluded that there was a potential impact on community cohesion in the borough as well as risk of a legal challenge.
Guess what Barking & Dagenham’s brave councillors decided to do? – they went for the ten-year test. Facing UKIP challengers in all wards in the coming elections, they decided a policy change was needed which would (on the advice of their own officers) give clear preference to white British housing applicants over the majority of the borough’s population.
We’ll have to see if the more extreme residency tests remain in place after next month’s polls. But whether they do or not, it’s clear that housing need is again becoming a political plaything. Of course local politicians should be able to decide their waiting list criteria and allocations policies, but they shouldn’t be able to throw objective tests of housing need out of the window. Surely the best response to UKIP is to get out the black, young and working voters who’ll be penalised by the sort of policies they’ll introduce if they get into power?

On the first occasion I appeared in the 24 Housing ‘Power List’ my son commented that he couldn’t imagine that I would want to be in any list where Grant Shapps was number one. Last year the stars of both Grant and myself waned, and we dropped out (I’m not suggesting any connection). This year we are both back as minor players, but now I’m ahead of him. I wish our relative power in the real world was that way round; unfortunately not.
The Power Player List is a bit of fun and has a highly selective constituency but most people would be quite pleased to be on it rather than off it. Deservedly at the top of both last year’s and this year’s lists is David Orr of the National Housing Federation. Despite having a difficult membership to please, David consistently gets good coverage on the need for more affordable housing and is the most effective of the housing professionals/lobbyists. CIH’s Grainia Long remains near the top but Julia Unwin of the Rowntree Foundation is coming up fast on the rails. JRF have had a good year especially on making the links between housing and poverty – and the Resolution Foundation’s Gavin Kelly might deserve to be there as well given their recent hugely influential work. Campbell Robb of Shelter has disappeared off the list, which may mean that the organisation continues to punch below its weight, or it may just reflect the disgracefully low place that homelessness now occupies on the housing agenda.
It’s hard to know how and whether to nominate politicians for the list, especially people like George Osborne who has a considerably wider brief. But he makes it up from 4^th to 2^nd and displaces Lord Freud as the top politician. I guess Lord Fraud, as he was announced in the House of Lords this week, has had a quieter year and his boss, the biggest fraud of them all, Iain Duncan Smith, has leapfrogged him.
You would expect the Housing Minister of the day to feature. Shapps certainly did, and Mark Prisk made it to 5^th last year, despite being a fairly anonymous figure. So what does that tell us about the current incumbent, Kris Hopkins, who only makes it to 13^th, behind the noisier Nick Boles and a new entrant, the man behind the scenes at No 10, housing and planning adviser Alex Morton (he of the notorious ‘sell off the expensive social homes’ policy).
It’s interesting that the top Labour politician, shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds, makes it to 15^th, exactly the same as last year’s spokesperson, Jack Dromey. In fact she is the only national Labour figure to feature; this is a little surprising given that Ed Balls has made several important housing speeches in the recent past and is the key person in deciding what will happen to housing investment if Labour wins in 2015. Karen Buck drops out this year, largely due to having a more backroom (but probably more influential) role as Ed Miliband’s PPS. The most prominent non-party politician remains Lord Richard Best, who continues to have significant influence on events from his seat in the House of Lords. He is the nearest thing in housing to a national treasure.
Reynolds is one of 12 women in the list, the same as last year.
Of the London politicians, Boris Johnson has slipped down the list from 5^th to 35^th, heading towards well deserved obscurity, and is now only one place ahead of his new nemesis on the GLA, the very energetic rising star Tom Copley. I can only spot one other local politician in this year’s list, Islington Labour’s James Murray, who has done more than most to launch a new generation of affordable council houses.
It may tell us more about the voting constituency than anything else, but a rather large number of housing association chief executives feature. Several deserve the accolade but it’s overcooked: there are 20 in the list. I do hope there’s no conspiracy involved. This year, South Yorkshire’s Tony Stacey is a nose ahead of Riverside’s Carol Matthews, who was the top CE last year, followed by Steve Stride of Poplar, David Montague of L&Q, Paul Tennant of Orbit and Geeta Nanda of Thames Valley. That’s a good selection and mix. Three ALMO people feature, Eamon McGoldrick of NatFedALMOs, Sue Roberts the current NFA chair, and former chair Alison Inman, who is also heavily involved in CIH, TPAS and now SHOUT, the campaign for social rented housing.
In an industry that was once dominated by powerful Directors of Housing, this year I can only spot one council officer in the top 50, Carmarthenshire’s Robin Staines. 20 housing association CEs and one Director of Housing tells its own story.
Not surprisingly, civil servants and regulators feature. Julian Ashby of the HCA regulation committee is in at 12. Terrie Alafat, Director of Housing Growth at CLG, takes over from her boss, Sir Bob Kerslake, at the highest ranked civil servant.
And a final word about bloggers. Jules Birch is deservedly top blogger in the list. Next year, I expect to see Colin Wiles climbing high, not just for his excellent blogs but also because he has been the driving force behind SHOUT. I also think Hannah Fearn should feature for her consistently excellent writing, in the Guardian and elsewhere.
I’m not sure if my 29^th place is a pat on the back for Red Brick or London Labour Housing Group (which contributes 3 of the 50). Whichever, belief must be suspended by the fact that I am immediately followed by the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney and Grant Shapps, and ahead of both Boris Johnson and his sidekick, Deputy Mayor for Housing Richard Blakeway. As I intimated above, the power list is not meant to be taken too seriously. It is meant to be fun and the methodology is plainly flawed. Because in the real world, those four have a lot more power than is good for us.
Housing’s top 50 Power Players are revealed in the April edition of 24housing magazine out today.
*Jimmy Breslin Notes from Impeachment Summer, 1975

The new London Housing Strategy from the Mayor of London is half a great document. The analysis is broadly sound and it is quite well written and clear. The critical weakness is that the policy prescriptions just don’t match up to the problems identified and the proposals fall apart under scrutiny.
The strategy revolves around a classic Boris Johnson trick. As you’d expect, the document identifies the need for additional housing, concluding there is a requirement for market, intermediate and social rented homes. It estimates that just short of 16,000 homes for social rent are needed each year. Then it switches to how the Mayor will provide these homes. Now you see it now you don’t, suddenly the phrase ‘social rent’ disappears and is replaced by ‘Affordable Rent’. You want juicy apples at 40p each! I’ve got dry oranges, £1 a go.
Unaffordable ‘Affordable Rent’ is of little use to London. Under the current programme (2011-14) rents are far too high and the programme is partly paid for by selling existing social rented homes on the market and ‘converting’ many others from social rent to ‘Affordable Rent’ when they become vacant. The desperate attempt to keep up the headline number of ‘affordable homes’ being built is at the expense of ever more social rented homes being removed from the stock. It is a disgrace but it is also a con. What used to be called ‘intermediate rent’ levels under Ken Livingstone – sub-market homes targeted at key workers – is now the main offer to people on very low incomes in acute housing need (assuming they are not diverted into the private rented sector first).
Now, to give Johnson a little credit, he has realised the error of the Government’s ways in relation to ‘Affordable Rent’. So he has edged back towards the Livingstone categorisation of affordable rented homes into ‘social rent’ and ‘intermediate rent’ but without admitting it. In the new programme (2015-18) 40% of the affordable homes he hopes to provide will be shared ownership and 60% will be ‘Affordable Rent’. But the AR component will be split into two: half of it (ie 30% of the programme total) will be capped at 50% of market rents and the other half will be pushed up to the top of the range, ie 80% of market rents. He regards the former as being targeted to vulnerable people, downsizers, tenants affected by regeneration, or people on benefits; and the latter towards people ‘in work’. This division is a nonsense due to the very low incomes of many people in work. Rents at 80% of London market rates are so high that they push more and more people in work onto housing benefit, so they face very high marginal rates of tax and benefit withdrawal – the very opposite of ‘making work pay’.
To be helpful in the extreme, it could be argued that the ‘capped’ programme is vaguely equivalent to social rent. Johnson’s own analysis concludes that there is a need to build 16,000 homes for social rent a year for at least 20 years. So what will his strategy deliver? He claims it ‘seeks to deliver 45,000 affordable homes over 3 years’, or 15,000 a year. Of these, 30% will be at ‘capped’ rents, around 4,500.
So Johnson’s strategy fails before it starts. Instead of the needed 16,000 social rented homes, on a generous interpretation he will provide 4,500 homes for ‘capped affordable rents’.
The strategy makes much of how many affordable homes Johnson has delivered so far. And here lies the second trick. It takes a long time to finance, plan and build homes. Johnson inherited Ken Livingstone’s 2008-11 programme, funded in full by Gordon Brown’s Government until 2010. It was a big part of Labour’s National Affordable Housing Strategy. This one Labour programme delivered a huge slice of what Johnson now claims as his achievement – 11,500 homes in 2008/09, 12,600 in 2009/10, 12,500 in 2010/11, 15,400 in 2011/12, and as many as 6,800 in 2012/13, 5 years into Johnson’s mayoralty. Nearly two-thirds of these homes were for social rent.
Johnson’s main programme, cunningly called the Affordable Housing programme, took 3 years to get running. It produced 265 affordable homes in 2011/12, 671 in 2012/13, and 1,582 in 2013/14 (11 months up to end of February). Around 560 of these were for social rent.
So there we have it. Johnson’s fine strategy is a cover for a total failure in delivery. Most of his claims to have produced affordable homes turn out to be the achievements of Ken Livingstone and Gordon Brown. His own programme has been characterised by delay and confusion and failed delivery. When some supposedly affordable rented homes come through, we find that they are at unaffordable rents. And when he announces his new strategy, with a fanfare, a whole five years into his mayoralty, we find it plans for an even more serious  deficit of homes at social rents or their equivalent into the future.
Fail, fail, and fail again.

Given reports of the difficulties councils face in replacing houses they are forced to sell, shouldn’t the right to buy be curtailed before it does even more damage?
A survey by the LGA reports that four out of five councils are finding it hard to replace on a one-for-one basis the houses they’ve sold through right to buy. There is a range of obstacles. For nearly three-quarters, the biggest problem is that they can’t finance enough replacements from the capital receipts they’re able to keep. There are various reasons for this and the arrangements are complex, and this is why the LGA is calling for the restrictions to be dropped in an amendment to the Deregulation Bill now going through parliament. The government is of course unlikely to accept this amendment, because it would prevent them getting a share of RTB receipts to help bring down debt. But what’s more important, a tiny reduction in debt or ensuring that the RTB doesn’t result in a loss of rented housing stock?
One of the virtues of the UK Housing Review, extolled in Red Brick on various occasions, is that it provides the data on which we can take a long-term view of policies like RTB. The 2013 edition showed that, across Britain, RTB sales since 1980 had reached over 2.5m homes. It also showed that total receipts from those sales were slightly under £50bn. In other words, the RTB has been a prolonged fire sale in which houses and flats have been sold at an average price of only £20,000. This might be excellent value for buyers, especially when many of them later sell the property to a private landlord, but it represents dreadful value for the public sector. Even if more recent sales are likely to have produced higher average receipts, it’s hardly surprising that a combination of high new build costs and being forced to share the receipts with the Treasury means that one-for-one replacement is extremely hard to achieve.
We all know what the consequences have been, and one of the most important has been the impact on social rented stock. Back in 1981, across Great Britain this stood at over 6.5m dwellings (councils and associations added together). It’s now fallen to 4.8m, even though we’ve been building an average of 35,000 new social rented homes per year over the intervening 33 years. In other words, successive governments’ building programmes have made up less than half of the loss in stock: it’s hardly surprising that we’ve got such a huge backlog of housing need.
Supporters of RTB will of course protest that the houses haven’t been ‘lost’ they are still there. And even if they hadn’t been sold, the tenants who bought them would likely have used them for the rest of their lives in many cases. Both of these points are true, but the failure to reinvest means that we now have a much smaller social stock to meet the needs of those on low incomes (quite apart from the ambition we might have had to continue catering for middle-income households in social housing, as was the case before 1980).
Ending the right to buy may not be an election winning strategy (although it seems to have done no harm in Scotland). But three reforms would curtail its worst effects. One would be to restore maximum discounts and other safeguards to what they were before 2010. This would be a perfectly reasonable move, given current demand for social housing. The second would be to ensure that all receipts are used for new building, if necessary dedicating part of the HCA’s budget to the (possibly fairly small) grant that would be needed to top up the receipt. Of course, Red Brick would add to this a third reform – that borrowing controls on councils should be eased or preferably removed.
An indication of the potential that would be released by fairer rules is given by other responses to the LGA survey. They confirm replies to a recent one by ARCH which show that councils are currently planning to build 4-5,000 houses per year. LGA suggest the potential with different rules could be extra output of 48,000 units over five years. There is now a run of studies in the two years since council housing became self-financing that point to the extra capacity waiting to be unleashed. If the government’s review of the role of councils in housing supply, confirmed this week, doesn’t take up this challenge, will Labour’s Lyons Review?