Red Brick was set up in 2010 as a place for progressive debate around housing issues. Ten years in, after 800 blog posts, it has a new web location, a revamped design, a new editor, and there are ambitious plans to increase the number of contributors.
The challenge is the same: we stand for decent affordable housing for all but there are many and various ways to get to that goal and many people have a contribution to make to the debate. We scrutinise every step of Tory policy and almost always find it wanting.
Covid has exposed how weak our housing system is. Despite the fact that it costs a fortune, much of it is spent in the wrong ways, subsidising demand and not supply, supporting one tenure at the expense of the others, failing to meet the most dire housing need. Solutions are possible – Labour’s Manifesto for the 2019 Election contained many of them – but we have to work them out in detail and make sure the public is aware of them.
One thing seems certain: housing will be an even bigger and more desperate issue after Covid. More people are fleeing domestic violence, more people are facing rent arrears and eviction, social housing is being deprioritised even further. There may be huge disruption in the housing market as the financial implications work through. It will be a time where clear analysis, workable policy proposals, and effective campaigns are needed more than ever.
Red Brick blog is linked to the Labour Housing Group but is editorially independent. Ten years ago, we chose the strapline ‘The Place for Progressive Housing Debate’ because we welcome all contributions and, whatever our individual views, Red Brick has no factional inclinations.
Except we’re not very keen on Tories or Tory solutions!
We are happy to publish both sides of an argument and to enable all opinions to be voiced. However, we celebrate diversity, are steadfastly pro-equalities and against discrimination in any form.
I hope you will continue to read and value the blog so it can continue to contribute in a small way to progressive housing debate. It would be even better if you contributed – just pitch your idea to us, we’ll be happy to help you to put it together for publication.
Thanks to Chris Worrall, Sheila Spencer and Ross Houston from the LHG Executive for the work they’ve put in to make this transition happen. LHG shows signs of a real resurgence as a membership and campaigning body within Labour, which can only be a good thing.
Thank you for reading Red Brick over the last decade and I hope you will continue to do so for years to come.
Rose Grayston
Rose is editor of Red Brick. She has worked to develop and win support for solutions to the UK’s housing crisis as Expert Adviser to Matthew Pennycook, Minister for Housing and Planning, as a Labour activist and founding member of Open Labour, and through roles at Shelter, the New Economics Foundation and Generation Rent.
Steve Hilditch
Founder of Red Brick. Former Head of Policy for Shelter. Select Committee Advisor for Housing and Homelessness. Drafted the first London Mayor’s Housing Strategy under Ken Livingstone. Steve sits on the Editorial Panel of Red Brick.
Much as in the UK, the past few weeks in Australia has seen housing policy innovation and emergency expenditure on a remarkable scale. State governments that have historically treated street homelessness as a low priority issue have suddenly found tens of millions of dollars to create pop-up accommodation or book rough sleepers into hotel rooms. Since March literally thousands have been rescued into temporary shelter.
Similarly, panicked by the vision of abrupt mass unemployment triggering a new homelessness crisis, state governments across the country have legislated evictions moratoria.
Federal government has also bolstered the ability of households to meet their housing costs, through the crisis by temporarily doubling the rate of the normally miserly Jobseeker unemployment benefit, and introducing a temporary Jobkeeper wage subsidy to help struggling employers retain staff.
But the need for such short-term fixes also highlights the entrenched failings of Australia’s housing system. This crisis has laid bare five major vulnerabilities.
The need for short-term fixes highlights the entrenched failings of Australia’s housing system. Read how this crisis has laid bare five major vulnerabilities in the latest #redbrickblog
1. Street homelessness has become a significant problem
Before the pandemic, street homelessness in Australia was affecting about 8,000 people on any given night, as indicated by census data, and up 20% in the last five years. But this is almost certainly an underestimate.
Recent UK research showed the number of people sleeping rough in any given year was five times as many as captured in census-type snapshots. There’s no reason to think it’s much different in Australia. And many more people are on the fringe of street homelessness — couch surfing, for example.
2. More than a million pushed into rental stress
Australia’s second housing system vulnerability is the body of people – far larger again – living in insecure and unaffordable rental housing. Even before this current crisis, unaffordable housing costs had pushed around 1.3 million into poverty. After paying rent they didn’t have enough money left for essentials like food and electricity.
Now many of these renters will have lost jobs or work hours. Government schemes like JobKeeper and JobSeeker will temporarily help only some — temporary migrants and many casual workers are excluded.
Measures like the moratorium on evictions are welcome (provided they prove robust). The same goes for mortgage pauses by the banks, which might help property owners avoid having to sell if tenants can’t afford the rent.
But these are only stopgap efforts.
3. A shrunken social housing sector
The third vulnerability is the shrivelled state of Australia’s social housing, a sector only a quarter the size of its UK counterpart. With virtually no new construction for most of the past 25 years, stock levels have flatlined. Proportionately, it has shrunk from 6% to a meagre 4% of all housing. More importantly, relative to population, the number of properties let by public housing agencies and community housing providers has halved since 1991.
Across most of Australia, waiting lists for social housing are huge. In most jurisdictions the sector lacks the capacity to offer long-term housing to all the rough sleepers and others currently in hotels. Other than through emergency unit acquisitions or head-leasing of privately owned properties, it is hard to see how this will be possible.
4. A mountain of debt
Australia’s fourth housing system vulnerability is the scale of housing-related debt. If the pandemic-induced downturn persists and unemployment stays high, this could make the recession much worse.
In the early 1990s household debt equated to about 70% of disposable household income. In March 2019, the Reserve Bank of Australia warned the debt-to-income ratio had risen to 190%. The increase was mostly due to increased borrowing to buy homes and investment properties.
Even before the pandemic, one in five mortgage holders were struggling to meet repayments. If large scale unemployment were to force mass property sales, this could compound the crash as homes flood the market. Given that Australian banks are more highly exposed to residential property than their counterparts in other OECD countries, this also poses a wider financial risk.
We know from the GFC experience in the USA, Ireland, Spain and elsewhere that a sharp fall in property prices can have severe and long-lasting economic consequences that worsen inequality. In the USA, vulture landlords stepped in to buy up large numbers of distressed properties and create rental property empires. Renting from owners of this kind is not an attractive prospect.
5. An unbalanced housing system
Australia’s housing system is vulnerable to shocks because – much more than in the UK – it is unbalanced, our fifth system frailty. Residential construction depends almost entirely on private developers building for sale to individual buyers.
These buyers are highly sensitive to the outlook for property values. The resulting herd mentality magnifies booms and slumps – a particular problem when they are totally dominant in the market. A magnified downturn can bring residential construction to a grinding halt. And while quick to shed labour, construction is slow to re-employ because of risk and long project lead times.
Construction normally employs more than 1 million Australians with a range of skill levels. It generates many more jobs through the building materials supply chain as well as in real estate, property management and financial services. This helps to explain why the traditionally antagonistic Master Builders Australia and the building union CFMEU have united in a call to government to invest in building 30,000 social housing units as part of Australia’s post-COVID recovery.
The need for a national strategy
Australia’s housing system needs more than a one-off crisis boost. The pandemic policy jolt is an opportunity to put Australia’s housing on more stable footings through a Commonwealth-led bipartisan, long-term, national housing strategy.
A key part of this should be routine social housing construction on a scale that at least keeps pace with population growth. That’s up to 15,000 homes a year – around five times the current number. This may sound ambitious, but it’s below the levels regularly achieved between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s.
And this doesn’t have to mean a return to the post-war approach when state authorities provided public housing. Not-for-profit community housing organisations can now take on the major new supply role.
But we do need a post-war level of ambition. Government has two immediate roles to play in linking housing to a post-pandemic recovery.
The first is to help avoid a house price crash that will deepen an economic slump. Co-ordinating action with mortgage lenders could help minimise repossessions and avoid a glut of discounted properties on the market. Governments may also need to take on distressed projects from private developers. The New South Wales government has already flagged such action.
The second immediate role for government is to support residential construction as the motor of economic revival by investing in social housing as the central plank of a stimulus package. Government-owned sites and developer-owned landbanks can be used to kick-start activity more quickly than other major infrastructure projects. Community housing providers – especially some larger faith-based players – also have shovel-ready sites.
These should be the prelude to a national housing strategy, something that has been – remarkably – absent in Australia since 1945.
A key strategic objective should be to diversify both housing supply and demand. Alongside a greater role for community housing providers, this could include a build-to-rent sector commissioned by institutional investors to build market rental blocks as long-term, income-generating assets. This development – currently impeded by tax inequities – would benefit tenants and the economy, by smoothing the boom-bust cycle of residential construction.
As we argue in our recentbooks, a national housing strategy must also thoroughly overhaul national, state and territory tax settings. Many of these have greater housing policy impacts than any spending program.
Reform of this kind – especially to phase down the vast and untargeted tax subsidies enjoyed by small-scale landlords, and to replace stamp duty with a broad-based land tax – could make Australia’s housing system both fairer and more efficient. It could dampen the speculation that fuels rising prices and debt, while raising the revenue needed to provide decent, affordable housing for all Australians.
This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in The Conversation (Australian edition). Read the original article here.
Hal Pawson
Hal Pawson is Professor of Housing Research and Policy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He retains a Visiting Professor position at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh where he was based until 2011. He is also an associate of Sheffield University’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a Managing Editor of the international journal, Housing Studies. His latest co-authored book ‘Housing Policy in Australia: A case for system reform’ was published in 2020.
One of the biggest changes in housing over the last 20 years has been the huge, unplanned growth of the private renting sector (PRS). But its unfettered growth has come at a price – which is paid for by some of our newly lauded key workers in the NHS and care sectors and the vulnerable – who are sacrificing their life chances, trapped in insecure, unstable, expensive accommodation.
Can Germany, which has the largest PRS in the EU, offer some lessons on a better way of doing things?
The PRS has grown enormously in the UK. It has doubled to 4.7million – i.e. 1 in 5 households – over the last 20 years, and in England it now houses more tenants than the social housing sector. It is a diverse sector with accommodation ranging from high end to housing of last resort. It is no longer a rite of passage for the young and transient – it is a sector that millions will live in for life.
It houses those who are unable to afford to buy, including many key workers and those in ‘Generation Rent’, and many families who in previous years would have qualified for social housing. The difference is they can be charged four times as much for a private rent as a social rent in areas like London. Sometimes for a neighbouring flat on the same council estate! And unlike their neighbours who rent from a social landlord, private tenants in England have to live with the threat of losing their home on the whim of a landlord as they have Assured Shorthold Tenancies.
The PRS was never designed to fulfil such a major role in UK housing and it needs to change to meet the real needs of our communities.
The picture is very different in Germany. Germany has the largest PRS in Europe – 40% of households rent and this rises to 70% in major cities. Renting is affordable and mainstreamed – not stigmatised.
Overall Germany has a better PRS. ‘Better’ in the sense that it gives tenants greater security of tenure, more affordable rents, higher standards and a stronger voice to advocate for their rights and represent their interests. And it is ‘better’ as a sector that supports and incentivises good landlords for the long term, thus improving local housing provision and sense of community. Crucially, Germany’s local government is stronger and better resourced and this helps Germany to build twice as many homes, including affordable ones, as the UK.
Obviously we cannot transplant another country’s housing system onto our own. Not least because each country’s housing market has grown in different cultural, historical and political environments. However, I found 5 factors that offer some important and transferable lessons for the UK. These are:
Stable and secure tenancies – We all value a stable and secure home – never more so than in the current lockdown. Yet, notwithstanding the current temporary ban, most private tenants in England can be evicted with 2 months notice for no reason, and this will apply after the ban. In contrast Germany, and most of the developed world, have secure, open ended tenancies where the grounds for eviction are based on breaking the rules eg rent arrears etc. Scotland introduced open ended tenancies in 2017 with no reported adverse effects on landlords or supply – so why not England?
Tools for regulating the PRS – Rent levels are more affordable and stable largely because they are regulated. There is data transparency – everybody knows the average rent in their area as they are published in a comprehensive local Rent Index (Mietspiegel). This information is used to help regulate rents effectively. It means rents in Berlin are typically 50% of equivalent lets in London.
A stronger voice for tenants –Tenants have greater access to advice and advocacy through a national network of self-funded tenants associations (Mieterverein). This also gives tenants a strong political voice and more power.
Better support for landlords– One of the surprises in my research was that landlords were as supportive of the German rent regulation system as tenants. They find it provides transparency, encourages good tenants and a more stable long-term rental stream. The system also provides more incentives to good landlords through tax breaks and subsidies.
Growing the supply of affordable housing – a strong local vision translated into building affordable homes and communities – To ensure the PRS works well it needs to be underpinned by an adequate supply of affordable housing. Local Government in Germany is better placed to drive this as it has more powers and is better resourced than councils in the UK. I looked at 3 cities in Germany and found that each had developed its own different, but effective, housing strategies to provide affordable housing and support mixed, vibrant communities in their local areas. The result – stronger neighbourhoods and overall more housing built. Since the end of the 2nd World War Germany (West and East) has built twice as many homes – 30 million compared to 16 million in the UK.
These are all things we can learn from and implement in the UK.
Most economic and social changes occur after times of war and crisis. After 1945 Britain introduced massive changes, such as the NHS and welfare system. After the 1st World War the Government introduced the Wheatley Act, which led to extensive council house building programmes. Changes we have reason to be grateful for today.
When we come out of this national Coronavirus crisis we will need to rebuild a better Britain – a new normal.
The current crisis has exposed the unfairness and fragility of our current broken housing system. We clap for the NHS, care and other key workers every week. But the average wage for a nurse is £25k pa. So with London rents averaging £1450 per month this would eat up 84% of their take home pay. They can get a handclap but they struggle to afford a decent home.
It’s good to see the G15 group of large housing associations joining together on the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ initiative to tackle this. And good to see London’s Deputy Mayor Tom Copley convening a housing taskforce to tackle the challenges Covid-19 poses.
Let’s make fixing Britain’s broken housing system and building homes fit for our new heroes and heroines a priority. So that it serves everybody fairly and establishes the building blocks to a healthier, happier and better-housed society.
To find out more and read the report – Private Rented Housing: a broken system in Britain? Lessons to help fix it from 3 cities in Germany click onhttps://www.morehousing.co.uk/
Mo Corcoran started in housing as a tenant and community activist in the area where she was born – Waterloo in London – including being a chair of a local housing co operative and a member of the successful Coin Street campaign in London’s South Bank.
She went on to work professionally in housing, rising up the ranks from being a front line housing officer to become Head of Housing in the Audit Commission where she ran the housing inspection regime.
She has also taught on the housing and community studies degree at Birkbeck College and served on several housing association boards. She currently continues to serve as a board member and works as a London Blue Badge Tourist Guide, specialising in tours on social history, housing and the suffragettes.
It seems likely that one of the groups that the Coronavirus pandemic is going to hit hardest is private tenants. The government’s commitment to do ‘whatever it takes’ appears not to apply to them.
One of the biggest policy fanfares since the crisis began was their trumpeted ‘ban on evictions’. It was a triumph of spin over substance because all they did was was extend the normal period it takes to evict tenants for arrears, adding in a rather soggy new ‘pre-action protocol’. People quickly grasped that this would just store up problems for a later avalanche of cases – unless the policy is extended, the avalanche will start at the end of June. It is an inadequate policy response to the huge additional housing problems being created for private tenants by rampant unemployment, reduced hours and furloughing at 80% wages.
While we wait for the ‘eviction ban’ to be extended or otherwise, an unknown number of private tenants are unable or significantly less able to pay their rent, including those on housing benefit or Universal Credit which only meets part of the rent. Given how high rents are, their debt will rise rapidly and quickly become unmanageable. For many there is little prospect of relief: the economic crisis arising from Coronavirus could last years not just the few months of lockdown. A survey for Shelter estimated that 1.7 million private renters fear losing their jobs this summer. This is a timebomb, not just for tenants but also for landlords and, if homelessness results, for the State.
In the absence of any new policy from government, Labour’s new Shadow Housing Minister Thangam Debbonaire set out a ‘five point plan’ to tackle rent debt. This involves 1) extending the pause to evictions, probably to six months (when other measures should be in place); 2) offering more legal protection to people who got into arrears due to Covid; 3) allowing tenants ‘at least 2 years’ to pay back any arrears accrued during the crisis; 4) giving tenants greater protection from bankruptcy due to arrears; 5) making improvements to Universal Credit to help people pay their rents.
Of course it is right that avoiding evictions should be the top immediate priority. The government seems likely to extend the ban beyond the end of June, but it has not said so yet. The weakness of Labour’s position lies in ‘two years to pay off debt’. This is not a holding position that can be addressed later: the debt is being incurred now and the issue must be tackled now before it is too late.
The policy has not gone down well in many Labour and tenant circles and there are calls for Labour to back a suspension of rent payments to mirror the mortgage holiday. If postponing rent simply creates debt for the tenant, cancelling rent passes the cost on to landlords. As a slogan, ‘make the landlords pay’ has an attraction on the left. I have never supported private renting as a tenure for people on low incomes, but making the sector even more volatile by denying landlords rental income will create conflict and more landlords will look to either remove tenants by any means or to escape from the sector. Good, some people will say to the latter, but this would not be the planned contraction I would like to see, and chaos will have bad outcomes for tenants. And there is an argument that government will end up paying anyway because it would be contrary to human rights legislation to deprive landlords of their legitimate income.
Two principles should guide Labour’s response. First, private tenants should not be left in debt due to Coronavirus. Second, and related, it is the responsibility of the State to ensure that tenants have the means to pay their rent and not become homeless. Some are arguing that Labour should only propose pragmatic policies that the government might accede to. But Labour’s analysis also shapes and informs public and media opinion, and at the moment Labour’s message seems to be that private tenants should have to repay their Covid debts.
So, what policy would help tenants pay their rent NOW rather than slide into debt? Housing benefit used to do this and could do it again. It is a known system and would not have to be invented from scratch like the government’s job protection schemes. HB should pay 100% of people’s rent within reasonable limits by removing the freezes, caps and other restrictions. For those on Universal Credit the system would have to be amended to incorporate the principle of paying 100% of rent through the housing component. It could cater for people put out of work completely, people who face reduced hours, and people who are furloughed at 80% of previous income.
Reinventing housing benefit would mean: Landlords would get paid, there would be no crisis of evictions, no explosion of harassment, and no long term threat to supply; Tenants would avoid large debt and its terrible consequences; and the State would help people in genuine distress due to the Covid crisis and avoid future homelessness. The cost would fall to government and they would be doing ‘whatever it takes’. Labour is halfway to the policy already with its proposals to reform Universal Credit.
When housing benefit was introduced – by the Tories in the 1980s – they accepted the principle that the State should take responsibility for ensuring that tenants can pay their rent whatever their circumstances. This was not through generosity, but part of their ideological shift towards the marketisation of housing: reducing subsidy to ‘bricks and mortar’ (which kept rents low) necessitated increasing income support to enable tenants to pay much higher rents. It was the policy known by the shorthand of ‘letting housing benefit take the strain’. Their deregulatory approach led to the resurgence of private renting that has carried on ever since. It is a free market system but with huge costs for the taxpayer. But it is suited to helping in the current crisis.
Cameron and Osborne, even more right wing than Thatcher, hated the idea of a benefit that covered all of the rent. Under austerity, an endless series of restrictions, caps and freezes forced millions to use a large slice of their money for other things, like food, to pay their rent. Many couldn’t do it, so eviction from a private tenancy has become the most common cause of homelessness. But these policies can all be reversed, and it is not an extreme or fanciful position to call for HB to take the strain.
The idea is not dissimilar to that proposed by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in the USA. She has proposed cancelling rent and mortgage payments with landlords and mortgage holders having their losses covered by Federal Government. That solution fits the USA – where 31% of Americans could not pay rent this month – but the housing benefit approach fits the UK circumstances better. The principle that it is the State’s responsibility is the same.
Labour’s policy must be driven by a simple rule. The poor paid for the global financial crash. They must not also be made to pay for the global pandemic.
Steve Hilditch
Editor and Founder of Red Brick. Former Head of Policy for Shelter. Select Committee Advisor for Housing and Homelessness. Drafted the first London Mayor’s Housing Strategy under Ken Livingstone.
Alison was President of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). She is a Board Member at Saffron Housing Trust, Colne Housing Society, TPAS, and is a co-founder of SHOUT. Her previous roles include being Chair of Colchester Borough Homes and the NFA. Alison is a former member of the Labour Housing Group’s Executive Committee.
I’ve spent the past few years talking to the social housing sector about domestic abuse, why it’s an issue for them, and what they can do about it. The starting point for any discussion is usually that an average of two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales, a figure that hasn’t really budged for years. Or, it hadn’t until a few weeks ago. Since the lockdown started domestic homicides have soared, and the number of reports of abuse made to the charity Refuge has increased by 49%. This pattern is being repeated around the world; domestic abuse is itself reaching pandemic proportions and we must make sure that social landlords play their part in tackling it.
It has taken the lockdown to persuade the Government to agree with a coalition of homelessness charities, the women’s sector, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the NHF and many more, that survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence should automatically qualify for priority need when applying for housing. Good news, but too late for too many women who have had no choice but to return to their abuser rather than face life on the streets.
It is hard to completely disentangle domestic abuse from the wider housing crisis. Acute housing stress means that people often start living together far earlier than they would if there were other, affordable options. And when a relationship breaks down lack of alternative accommodation means people are forced to stay together. Labour’s commitment to a massive programme of social house building will help but there is so much more we need to do. And many women and children do not have the luxury of time.
Work done by the domestic abuse charity Safe Lives for the Sunderland social landlord Gentoo (2018) estimates that approximately 13% of all repair jobs, and 21% of repairs spend, could be attributable to domestic abuse. This shows the business case for Councils and Housing Associations stepping up and making domestic abuse their business. It’s shocking that most victims of abuse first come to the notice of their landlord when they are themselves reported as a perpetrator of noise nuisance. Just think about that for a minute. And almost two thirds of women with significant rent arrears are experiencing abuse in the home. Domestic Abuse really is a housing issue.
The work of the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance has been key to the understanding of the relationships between physical, emotional and financial abuse and the housing system. They have free resources on their website and their eight stage accreditation guides landlords through a whole range of issues from case management to dealing with perpetrators. The CIH #MakeaStand campaign has hopefully shone a light on the issues for the sector, DAHA accreditation will make sure that local authorities and housing associations adopt the very best practice.
Rose is editor of Red Brick. She has worked to develop and win support for solutions to the UK’s housing crisis as Expert Adviser to Matthew Pennycook, Minister for Housing and Planning, as a Labour activist and founding member of Open Labour, and through roles at Shelter, the New Economics Foundation and Generation Rent.
Steve Hilditch
Founder of Red Brick. Former Head of Policy for Shelter. Select Committee Advisor for Housing and Homelessness. Drafted the first London Mayor’s Housing Strategy under Ken Livingstone. Steve sits on the Editorial Panel of Red Brick.
Ten years ago this month, the new National Tenant Voice (NTV) appointed Richard Crossley* as its new chief executive, appointed the National Tenant Council and its board, and started business.
Sadly, it was to be very short-lived, as the general election swept Labour and its dynamic housing minister John Healey MP out of office and installed the Tory/LibDem government with Grant Shapps in charge of housing.
One of Shapps’ first acts was to axe the new-born NTV to save a miserable £1 million a year. Shapps, who could have invented double-speak, ludicrously claimed he wanted tenants to have a stronger say in things. But he saw the NTV as a waste of money as he laid waste to the social housing regulatory system, also abolishing the Tenant Services Authority and the Audit Commission.
The shadow National Tenant Council gathers for its first meeting, 2010.
The NTV had a long gestation and I had the privilege of independently chairing the Communities and Local Government department’s project group, which brought together a majority of tenants with all the other key housing bodies and the civil servants to find a way of meeting the common goal of strengthening the voice of tenants within UK housing. It was a complex process because we wanted the new organisation to have the status of a non-departmental government body, and the rules for establishing one were suitably complicated and not easily adapted for an organisation which would be run by tenants and not appointed by government.
The idea for the NTV as an integral part of the new structure for social housing regulation arose from an earlier report by Martin Cave which was broadly welcomed and accepted by government. The project group conducted a major consultation exercise involving 16 regional meetings with over 1000 tenants, collecting over 160 written responses. There was a huge and occasional fractious debate about the precise role and function of the NTV but the consultation broadly supported the project group’s proposals.
A lot is said about social tenants, and others who live on social housing estates, much of it based on ignorance. Tenants are stereotyped and stigmatised, especially in the media but also by some politicians and housing professionals. By grasping the opportunity presented by the NTV, there is a chance that the authentic voice of social tenants may at last be heard as citizens of equal worth. The NTV will be a voice for change and over time it could help transform the culture of social housing – and thereby improve the lives of nearly 10 million people.
From the introduction to ‘Citizens of Equal Worth, The NTV Project Group’s Proposals for the National Tenant Voice’, Report to Communities and Local Government, October 2008
The NTV’s vision emphasised that it would be a resource for tenants (which included leaseholders and shared owners) of social landlords, an independent organisation that would be accountable to tenants, with clear values of inclusion, accountability and transparency. It would not replace the existing national and regional tenant representative organisations, but would be a business-like support organisation working for all tenants whether in existing organisations or not. It would not in the first instance cover private tenants, but the plan was to consult about if, when and how it would extend its remit.
The key roles of the NTV were
advocacy – helping tenants collectively to speak for themselves to put their views to government and other bodies, placing particular emphasis on seeking and promoting the views of tenants whose voices are rarely heard.
Research – identifying the impact that policies have on tenants and discovering the views of a wide range of tenants on policy issues.
Communication – providing good information to tenants and developing a two-way dialogue with them.
Support – for the existing representative tenants’ movement to help it to develop and strengthen.
The working group and ministers believed that it was important to have a significant number of tenants involved in the governance structures of the NTV – to build its base, to encourage diversity, and to draw more people into policy discussions. It therefore had a National Tenant Council of 50 tenants to consider policy issues and a board of nine tenants and up to 6 independents to take legal responsibility for and to manage the organisation. An arm’s-length accountability committee operated an open recruitment process for the organisation.
Over the last 10 years it has become clear to any observer that the decision made by the incoming Tory government to scrap Labour’s regulatory structure, including the NTV, was a short sighted knee-jerk mistake. Whatever Labour was in favour of, the new government was against. Despite the best efforts of some social landlords and many tenants, since then the voice of tenants has become weaker when it needed to be much stronger. The government (and much of UK housing) took its eye off the ball of maintaining and improving the quality of services to tenants.
It took Grenfell to open the eyes of much of the housing world, the government, and the public to the fact that tenants were not being listened to and their interests were not being served as they should be. Now, once again, there is some acceptance of the need to hear tenants’ voices and to ensure that social landlords are monitored and regulated effectively (as all housing providers should be). But forward movement is even more glacial than the process ten years ago.
Ten years ago, the structure of regulation, with the NTV, was much closer to the right answer for social housing than anything we have now.
The NTV is a wheel that is waiting to be reinvented.
*Richard Crossley was the Chief Executive of the NTV.
Richard died in 2014 of a rare cancer. You can read my appreciation of his life and his work for tenants here.
Labour, Housing, Co-operative Party activist, campaigns to replace feudal UK leasehold housing tenure with the modern co-operative Commonhold system. Vice-Chair Beckenham CLP. http://getcommonholddone.co.uk/
The government has been accused of being unclear in its communications around Coronavirus. But this headline appears on the Ministry of Housing website; ‘Complete ban on evictions and additional protection for renters’. Poor communication or a straightforward lie?
The policy is actually to ‘suspend new evictions’ until after the crisis, initially 3 months. So, Minister Robert Jenrick’s statement that ‘no renter who has lost income due to coronavirus will be forced out of their home’ is a short-lived commitment.
They call it a ‘radical package’ which it plainly is not. They fail to address basic questions about possession proceedings that are already underway. Surely no-one should be evicted in the current crisis.
So far, no additional measures have been introduced to enable tenants to pay their rent, whether they are in work with reduced pay, laid off from work, or already not working. So, the best that can be said for the policy is that it will defer possession proceedings from starting and will therefore delay eviction. Protection from eviction during the crisis is of course important (although some people have noted that the Courts may well be closed anyway), but what is needed is a policy to prevent tenants being forced into arrears during the crisis, for which they may be evicted afterwards.
Landlords with buy to let mortgages have had the ‘mortgage holiday’ policy extended to them. This is something they can apply for and the devil might be in the detail. But if a landlord qualifies for a holiday, no arrangements have been announced to make sure the benefit of this is passed on or at least shared. Landlords who qualify will of course need to catch up with their mortgage afterwards, although many will add the 3 months to the end of their term, which might be 20 years away. It could be that tenants who pay rent will essentially be creating a short-term cash-flow boost for landlords. Meanwhile, those tenants who cannot pay will accrue arrears, which they may not have the income to repay, and might face possession proceedings when the crisis is over.
At that point the policy falls apart entirely. There will be a strengthened ‘pre-action protocol’ before possession proceedings – engagement between landlords and tenants to establish a repayment plan and to ‘resolve disputes’, during which landlords should ‘reach out’ to tenants to ‘understand the financial position they are in’. Almost unbelievably, “The government will also issue guidance which asks landlords to show compassion and to allow tenants who are affected by this to remain in their homes wherever possible.” I have little belief that the protocol will work in practice as intended. And it not a criticism of landlords – Twitter is full of both good and bad examples of landlord behaviour, that’s how the sector works – to say that NO policy should be determined by hoped-for ‘compassion’ rather than rights and obligations in law.
In practice, many tenants may be saved by the fact that landlords will see value in hanging on to existing tenants even if they get into Coronavirus arrears. Given the broadly-based reduction in incomes and hence savings that is likely over the next few months, one predictable market correction might be a reduction in rents and the costs of starting up new tenancies. Under these circumstances, keeping a tenant on an existing contract might be an attractive option.
Given that the Chancellor was talking in terms of hundreds of billions of pounds in loans for businesses, the government should be pushed into actions like those taken in other countries to guarantee incomes, putting money directly into the hands of those who are affected by the crisis to enable them to maintain the basics of existence. I would argue that the same should apply to the biggest cost of all, housing. Affected renters must be enabled to pay their rent through direct support from government, not the goodwill of landlords (private and social) – although that is also to be encouraged.
I’m not expert enough to know the best detailed mechanism for achieving the aim of enabling people to pay rent, I assume it’s a mix of entertaining new emergency housing benefit claims, changing Universal Credit rules (paying it immediately, guaranteeing that the housing element will cover all of the rent), and relaxing current policies like the bedroom tax (otherwise how are people to obey the government and ‘sleep in the spare room’ if they get Covid19?). But the purpose of policy must be to enable people to pay their rent during the crisis and to avoid the debt which will create a crisis later. Even the awful Iain Duncan Smith has called for benefit rates to be increased.
Jenrick’s performance as Housing Minister during all this has been exceptionally poor and uncaring. Homeless people and tenants have been inconvenient afterthoughts with half-baked inadequate policy responses. Some loose change for rough sleepers, nothing that I have seen for people living in temporary accommodation (eg extra rooms), no workable special arrangements for people living in shared accommodation or overcrowded housing.
Of one thing I have no doubt: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would have risen to the challenge – indeed they are doing so in opposition – in a way that Johnson is incapable of doing. Because today’s Tories have not learned the lesson that was learned by the Victorians – as we are reminded by Jules Birch
Go back a century and more, and it was public health concerns about infectious disease spreading from insanitary slums that led to the rise of council housing and the birth of the welfare state in the first place.
If the Coronavirus is as bad as some are predicting, this lesson will have to be learned all over again.
As the government publishes the required legislation, keep in touch with commentary via the excellent @nearlylegal twitter feed and blog and of course @insidehousing
Labour, Housing, Co-operative Party activist, campaigns to replace feudal UK leasehold housing tenure with the modern co-operative Commonhold system. Vice-Chair Beckenham CLP. http://getcommonholddone.co.uk/
The Competition and Market Authority (CMA) is about to take legal action against housing developers on behalf of leaseholders who were mis-sold their properties by leading housing developers. Such a move is unprecedented and if fully supported by all progressive opinion in England and Wales would be an important step in abolishing and not merely “polishing up” the antiquated leasehold tenure system in England and Wales.
The CMA has wide powers to require business organisations to remove unfair contract terms from consumer contracts and can apply to court for an injunction to prevent their continued use.
The CMA is concerned that leasehold “homeowners” have been unfairly treated and prospective buyers misled by housing developers.
These concerns include:
Ground rents: homeowners having to pay escalating ground rents, which in some cases can double every 10 years. This increase is often built into contracts, meaning people can often struggle to sell their homes and find themselves trapped.
Cost of the freehold: the CMA has seen evidence that people have been misled about the cost of converting their leasehold to freehold ownership. When buying their home, some people were told the freehold would cost only a small sum, but later down the line this price had increased by thousands of pounds with little to no warning.
Misleading information: not being told upfront that a property is leasehold and what that means. Some developers are failing to explain the differences between leasehold and freehold when directly asked, and some tell potential buyers that there is no difference. By the time people find out the realities of owning a leasehold, including the regular charges to be paid, they are often unable to pull out of the purchase, or would face significant difficulties if they tried to do so.
Unreasonable fees: being charged excessive and disproportionate fees for things like the routine maintenance of a building’s shared spaces or making home improvements. If people want to challenge such charges, the process is often difficult and costly, meaning few people decide to go through with it.
In some ways the CMA intervention is surprising. A 2014 report by the CMA into the leasehold housing market gave it a clean bill of health. Cardiff Trading Standards has already settled a mis-selling case against Persimmons one of the biggest housing developers. An out of court settlement meant that the company agreed to give freehold title to leaseholders who complained that they had been sold leases instead of full ownership of their properties.
The truth is that the CMA has been sat on by the powerful all-party House of Commons Select Committee in its bi-partisan critical inquiry into the leasehold system in March 2019. The leasehold lobby is increasingly influential. The Facebook page for the National Leasehold Campaign now has over 17,000 followers and growing. The All Parliamentary Group on Leasehold reform currently stands at 153 members.
The CMA have correctly picked up that some leaseholders will come within the scope of the 1988 Housing Act. Where ground rents exceed £250 per year or £1,000 per year in London, a leaseholder is classed as an assured tenant. This means, for even small sums of arrears, leaseholders can be subject to a mandatory possession order.
Unfortunately, the CMA have given the solicitors involved a clean bill of health. Builders required prospective purchasers to use their own solicitors who failed to tell their clients that they were not in fact buying a freehold property. It is remarkable that this conflict of interest is compatible with professional conduct rules. These solicitors are now subject to negligence claims by fresh lawyers.
This pending enforcement action is embarrassing for the Government who had persuaded housing developers to sign up to a voluntary code of practice in order to “limit” the damage of toxic leases. There are links between housing developers and the Conservative party.
Unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, England and Wales has the leasehold tenure system. This originates from 1066. William the Conqueror seized all the land after his invasion. He leased land to his barons in return for services. They in return leased land to their supporters in return for services. This ultimately led to the freeholder and tenant relationship.
In America, riots and the formation of the Anti-Rent Party in the nineteenth century lead to the abolition of feudal tenures.
A lease is a wasting asset. Once it runs out, a leaseholder becomes a mere tenant. Lenders are reluctant to lend on short leases. Leasehold do not own the land their property is built on. This is owned by the freeholder for which they pay a ground rent. The freehold title can be sold on a third party without the knowledge or consent of the leaseholder. If a leaseholder breaks the lease, the freeholder can exercise the nuclear right of forfeiture and if successful the leaseholder is evicted thereby losing any equity in the property. There are problems with high service charges and permission fees.
Leasehold reform is rapidly moving up the political agenda. The House of Commons Select Committee is launching an inquiry into the cladding scandal in residential blocks. The Law Commission is about to publish a report on how to develop the Commonhold tenure. Commonhold is a form of tenure whereby all the residents in a block own the freehold title. Each flat owner automatically becomes a director of the company that owns and manages the shared areas. There is no freeholder or ground rent. Commonhold is in effect a type of property-owning housing co-operative.
Surprisingly there are no accurate figures for the precise number of leasehold properties in England and Wales. Estimates vary from 4 million to 7 million properties. It is thought that two thirds are flats and one third houses. Of the 20 parliamentary constituencies with the highest number of leasehold properties, all of them are in London. 18 are held by Labour and 2 by the Conservatives. The 20 parliamentary constituencies with the highest number of leasehold houses are in the North-west of England. 10 are held by Labour. The other ten were won by the Tories in the last two general elections.
If all leasehold properties were converted to the Commonhold tenure over the lifetime of a Parliament as envisaged by the Labour Manifesto in 2019 this would lead to the biggest ever increase in the number of properties that are owned co-operatively. All sections of the Labour and Co-Operative Parties need to be seen to be campaigning with leaseholders if their votes are to be won.
Labour, Housing, Co-operative Party activist, campaigns to replace feudal UK leasehold housing tenure with the modern co-operative Commonhold system. Vice-Chair Beckenham CLP. http://getcommonholddone.co.uk/
On 12 February 2020, Hilary Benn, the Labour MP for Leeds Central, hosted a short but significant parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall on unsafe cladding in residential accommodation occupied by leaseholders. The debate looked at the development of Government policy to deal with fire safety in private blocks since the tragic fire at the Grenfell Tower block on 14 June 2017.
Leaseholders save up to buy their flat only to discover that the cladding is dangerous. Some of these purchases will have received assistance from the Government’s help to buy scheme. The Fire Brigade tells residents in the block that they must set up a waking watch 24 hours per day to patrol the block. If they do not do so, they must vacate the block. In one block in Leeds such a watch is costing each flat-owner £670 a month plus VAT on top of mortgage payments and service charges.
The leaseholder may then be asked to meet the cost of putting in a fire alarm. Then to their absolute horror they are asked to pay for the cost of replacing the dangerous cladding to make their home safe. They simply do not have that amount of money. Their flat becomes worthless and they cannot remortgage. The UK Cladding Group has reported insurance costs for these blocks going up from £40,000 to £200,000. Leaseholders run the risk of becoming bankrupt, and if they work for the police or are lawyers they will lose their jobs as well. They will become homeless. This is not a situation of the making of leaseholders. They are the innocent victims of Government policy.
In May 2019 the Government set up a fund of £200 million to support the removal of ACM style cladding from private residential blocks to protect leaseholders from bearing the cost. Leaseholders in blocks with other types of cladding were excluded. However local fire brigades do not differentiate between ACM and other forms of cladding that are equally dangerous. They take the view that there is no difference between different types of cladding if they were dangerous. In January 2020 Government Ministers were talking about loans to leaseholders to pay for cladding removal. This was a clear departure from the Government’s previous position that leaseholders should be protected from paying for these costs.
MPs from all parties and all parts of the country queued up to contribute to the debate. They reported problems with privately owned blocks in Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, London, Birmingham. Ellesmere Port, Ipswich, Newton Abbot and Glasgow.
14 MPs from London spoke in the debate. In Greenwich and Woolwich 20 privately owned buildings were found to have ACM cladding. Greenwich Council has found at least 24 buildings with high pressure laminate cladding. In many cases the property is no longer owned by the original developer. The new Labour MP for Putney, Fleur Anderson, reported 2 blocks in her constituency with cladding that is a mix of ACM and HPL. Her constituents have been informed that their liability will be between £50,000 and £80,000 per flat!
Scotland has an unusual problem. Even though there is no leasehold/freehold distinction north of the border, the Scottish Government has limited influence on the actions of mortgage lenders since this power is reserved to Westminster. The London Government has issued an advice note that deals with fire safety in buildings post Grenfell throughout the United Kingdom. Even though building standards are higher in Scotland than in England, lending organisations now require home inspection reports to reflect the new London imposed standards. Consequently, some leaseholders in Scotland who wish to sell or remortgage have found that they have been imposed with a nil valuation.
Sarah Jones, MP for Croydon Central, responded for Labour’s front bench. Nine in ten private blocks with Grenfell-style cladding are still covered in cladding. Government data indicates that 75 private block owners do not even have a plan to remove this cladding. Labour has for years called on the Government to legislate to ensure that building owners cannot pass costs on to innocent leaseholders. The Government cannot justify the distinction between ACM and other forms of cladding. In November 2019 fire swept rapidly through a student accommodation block in Bolton with fortunately no fatalities. The block had non-ACM cladding.
Ministers have failed to audit residential blocks, so the public do not know how many blocks are still covered in non-ACM but still dangerous cladding. According to Inside Housing the façade materials of 3,708 out of 5,320 tower blocks has yet to be established. The Government announcement in December 2019 that the height limit for removing ACM had changed from 18 metres to 11 metres means that potentially more blocks and leaseholders are covered. The Minister declined to answer the question whether the Government even knew how many blocks will now be covered by this rule change or why it took the Government over two and half years to make this decision.
Esther McVey MP responded for the Government as the then Housing Minister with the clear knowledge that she was about to be sacked from her position. Legislation is promised in a new fire safety bill. Discussions are pending with the Treasury to increase the size of the fund. The Government has failed to name and shame the freeholders of relevant blocks with unsafe cladding.
The situation is about to get worse for the new Housing Minster. Leasehold Knowledge Partnership are now pointing out that Government answers to Members of Parliament do not accurately reflected what is happening on the ground.
Why is this issue of political importance for Labour? John Healey MP, the Shadow Housing Minister, has pointed out that Labour has double digit lead over the Tories on housing. Amongst owner -occupiers the Conservatives poll better than Labour. If Labour can persuade one conservative owner-occupier to change their vote, this will increase Labour’s poll lead even further. The Tories are too close to the interests of property to tackle this issue effectively.
The difficulties that leaseholders face on cladding issues is separate from the problems that leaseholders living in houses face who have been mis-sold dodgy ground rents. There is an investigation by the Competition and Market Authority due to be released later this year. Many leaseholders live in parliamentary seats in the North of England that were once held by Labour. The National Leasehold Campaign Group Facebook followers has grown to 16,500 in less than 3 years.
The 2019 Labour Manifesto contained positive polices to abolish the leasehold tenure system over the lifetime of the new Parliament. Commonhold would be compulsory for all new builds. All high-rise residential blocks would be made safe.
Unfortunately, the problems of leaseholders, despite being a vote winner for Labour is hardly ever discussed at Labour Party Conferences. The Co-operative Party fringe meeting on leasehold reform at the 2019 conference was a welcome exception.
If Labour is ever to win another election, the new Party leader needs to come out positively on the side of the 5 million leaseholders in England and Wales. S/he must work collaboratively with senior shadow Cabinet figures. There should be an Opposition debate in the Commons on this issue as well as a party-political broadcast.
With over 580,000 party members, Labour should consider using the talents of these members to set up support groups for leaseholders in relevant areas such as the North West. The party needs to produce maps of where leaseholders live and in which parliamentary constituency. Work is needed to expose the links between the Tory Party and freeholders such as David Cameron’s brother in law. Sympathetic lawyers should be contacted to draft possible legal solutions.
Recently published is a book on non-profit organisations by a committed group of community workers; it includes two chapters by Charles Fraser, the first on his 20 years as CEO of St Mungos grappling with different governments to develop services for an unpopular group, single homeless people. His second piece criticises the role of large housing associations, suggesting changes.
Red Brick is delighted to re-publish the second of these chapters below.
Other chapters cover campaigns (Windrush, Women Refugees), community development, leadership and management and quality improvement. Contributors, all respected practitioners in their fields, include Patrick Vernon (Windrush Campaign), Marchu Girma (Women for Women Refugees), Sian Lockwood (CEO Community Catalysts) and Shaks Ghosh (CEO Clore Social Leadership).
Getting Back to Being Connected: How Housing Associations Should Change
by Charles Fraser CBE
Charles Fraser is the former CEO of homeless charity St Mungo’s. He led the organisation between 1994-2014 and has since retired after spending more than 30 years tackling homelessness and rough sleeping.
For 35 years after the war, the responsibility for building new homes on any scale rested with the private sector and local councils. The high point of council house building was reached in 1953, when 220,000 homes were built. 1978 was the last year when the total number of new homes built (private sector, council and housing association) reached 250,000.
While new public house-building was seen as the job of councils, housing associations had a different purpose. Social reformers and philanthropists had played a pioneering role in the 19th century in developing high-quality housing for the working poor; this provision was not that extensive, with the result that by the 1960s many households had no option but private sector landlords, some of whom were notoriously exploitative. A new grass-roots social activism emerged in response to this, where locally credible groups competed with these landlords in order to provide housing free from harassment and overcrowding.
They formed housing associations, and surfed the wave of determination to tackle the cruel human consequences of housing shortage which had been so vividly exposed in Cathy Come Home. They were close to the communities they served, as could be seen in their names (Notting Hill Housing Trust, Brent People’s HA, Paddington Churches HA etc). The cornerstones of their professional and emotional appeal were good quality housing, community engagement, hands-on management and human-scale accountability.
Thatcher government
A step-change took place in 1980 with the election of Mrs Thatcher and the introduction of Right to Buy: between 1980 and 2013, 1.6 million council homes were sold. More than that, they were not replaced – councils stopped building. By 2016 just under 8% of us were living in council housing (compared to 42% in 1979).
By the 1990s housing associations were being encouraged by government to assume the responsibility for building public housing, and, under political pressure to cut public spending, government also expected housing associations to compensate for reduced grant levels by borrowing private money – a precursor to the rather idiotic and lazy slogan of ‘more for less’, one consequence of which was to significantly curtail risk-taking.
Backing the housing association sector became ideological, but not just along party political lines: the Blair/Brown governments of 1997–2010 only built 7870 council homes. Housing associations did a reasonable job of delivering new housing, within the limits of available finance; but their supply was inevitably not adequate to the demand.
For decades Britain has produced insufficient housing to accommodate not just population growth but also the changing demographics of household composition. Politicians have been slow to understand the imperative of new housing supply, and ideology has held sway over action. It is widely accepted that about 250,000 new homes need to be built each year in England: since the turn of the century the average has fallen about 75,000 short each year.
Housing associations
It is now quite common to hear complaints about housing associations being remote, empire-building megaliths, interested much more in development than in management. But if housing associations are so unloved, why is this? There are, of course, a variety of reasons – a belief that size has not generated efficiency of scale but remoteness and an uninterested arrogance; instances of poor quality workmanship in new-build and then, critically, an unwillingness to take complaints seriously, take responsibility and put things right; an insensitive bureaucracy; and that old perennial, poor maintenance. Perhaps underlying all of these is a disappointment that they so willingly forfeited any sense of independence, and acted largely as sub-contractors to the local state, which swallowed up all the nomination rights to new lettings.
Some of the charges do justifiably stick. With their stupid ‘re-branded’ names and vacuous assertions about tenants/services/communities ‘being at the heart of all we do’, one is right to be unimpressed, even suspicious. But at the same time one needs to beware of a simplistic approach which equates ‘small’ with ‘good’ and ‘large’ with ‘bad’. It is not the fault of large housing associations that government abandoned its role of funding council housing. That withdrawal left a vacuum which housing associations have partially filled.
It was government which collapsed the grant rate, forcing associations to borrow privately. Avoiding a default became the absolute priority of the regulator so as to ensure that all the wheels didn’t come off the sector’s credibility with private lenders. Big associations do use their financial muscle to build new homes, and a good thing too – but isn’t that the least that they should be doing with financial muscle?
The problem perhaps lies in the fact that the sector (and the regulator) has allowed power and influence to flow from spreadsheets – the number of units; the asset base; and strong cash flows – rather than from successfully identifying what makes associations different from other housing providers, and then strengthening that. Tenants risk simply being viewed as rent-paying units.
At the same time there is far too little protest about the relentless cuts in government funding – down (for example) from £11.4bn in 2009 to £5.3bn in 2015 (a reduction of 47%!) –as well as cuts to ‘adjacent’ services (e.g. health and employment) which are so critical to the prospects and well-being of their tenants. The sector has lost any radical edge it had, and is felt by some to be too cosy with governments which do not put housing, or people, first.
Then Boris Johnson lobbed a pebble into the pond: when he campaigned to become Mayor of London, he struck a chord when he complained that the label of ‘affordable housing’ was applied too narrowly to housing for people on low incomes or state benefits alone and that, given the high cost of housing in London, it should be extended to (for example) young couples with a joint income of up to £60,000.
As the ‘cake’ was shared out more widely to address this hitherto unheralded example of housing need, it was inevitable that some resource would be diverted from building for social rent. The sweetener for associations – but not tenants! – was that ‘affordable rent’ was defined as a rental level up to 80% of market rent.
Funding models
I do not pretend to have an insider’s understanding of the funding models of large housing associations. Many of them seem to have raised money using very complex financial instruments: the business model is paramount. But there is an issue of mission drift: in 2015/16, out of almost 190,000 new homes built in England, only 6500 (3.6%) were for social rent, i.e. low-cost housing for people on low incomes. A year later the comparable figure was below 5400, or 2.5% of all completions.
It looks as if the profits from developments for sale on the open market are going to ‘affordable rent’ programmes rather than to social rent, and that people who need social rent housing are being left to the tender mercies of the private sector.
It is not completely fair to criticise all large housing associations for being in some ways unresponsive. Some have been genuinely innovative, and have sought new approaches to the rapidly evolving needs of their tenants. And yet, and yet … there is a problem. It lurks within the very terminology ‘housing association’. The term covers too many disparate types of organisation.
It is very hard to see what it is that links together a large association, a medium-sized one and a small specialist one – beyond a commonality of constitution and a common (but ‘one-size-fits-all’ and unimaginative) regulator. ‘Association’ is defined as ‘a connection or cooperative link between people or organisations’, or ‘uniting in a common purpose’.
It is increasingly unclear how that concept applies to housing associations – should there be a commonality of purpose between landlord and tenant? That seems to be increasingly rare. Customer care programmes and call centres may well have cut costs, but they are extremely impersonal, and entirely unaccountable. They only partly answer human-scale needs.
We seem to have forgotten that housing is not just about bricks and mortar, it is about people. In the early 1980s some London local authorities still had housing welfare officers, whose job it was to help new tenants deal with practical issues so as to aid their settling in.
That seems like a very distant dream today. Housing associations with their roots in the 1960s were not set up in order to build an asset base – they were a front-line, humane response to the abominations of landlords like Rachman, offering security of tenure and dependable housing management.
One of the great lies of recent times was the fatuous assertion by the DoE (as it then was) that it was ‘the department of place’ – all government departments are departments of people, and it behoves them to remember that fact.
Are housing associations private or public?
An interesting question is whether housing associations are private or public organisations. The answer varies, and will depend on the size and focus of each association. The reality, though, is that nowadays most housing associations are indistinguishable. They have lost local connectedness, which does not mean connectedness with an area on Google Maps, but with real people living in a locality. While it is true that the big associations re-invest their profits – sorry, ‘surpluses’ – into providing more units of housing, they behave in many ways like private housing companies. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, but it then becomes questionable whether they can justify their charitable status, especially since most of them pay their board members. It looks more and more as if ‘charitable’ describes their privileges, not their obligations.
The supported housing sector (‘supported housing’ refers to the integrated provision of housing with support, which can sometimes be so intensive as to border on care) has been struggling badly due to unsympathetic government and generally uninterested (and sometimes downright hostile) local government, but there is precious little show of solidarity between the different ‘wings’ of what likes to portray itself as a single sector.
Indifference does, though, seem to have been sanctioned – the regulator has failed to promote the wellbeing of small and medium-sized associations, and especially specialist supported housing providers. But then this is the same regulator which has consistently refused to countenance any nuance of designation, which in turn has led to the endless idiocy of small supported associations being exploited by their larger, property-owning ‘peers’, and of being assessed by the regulator against criteria which are patently irrelevant.
Perhaps this is not all the regulator’s fault – after all, it was central government which abdicated its responsibilities in 2003 by handing control of funding streams for vulnerable people to local councils, despite pretty clear evidence that they had a negligible track record in assisting the client groups which are covered by that rather unforgiving label. What started off as a ring-fenced fund of £1.8bn had by 2014 become an un-ring-fenced fund of £1.6bn.
Funding cuts
Many councils took proactive steps to cut the funding further. Nottinghamshire was one of the most celebrated and brutal councils: an SP budget of £27m in 2004 was cut by 65% in 2012; a further 35% cut was planned for 2014, leaving an overall budget of £8m in 2017. Derbyshire cut its budget by 81% over three years. These were by no means the only councils which, when faced with the need to save money, visited savage cuts disproportionately on those least able to fend for themselves.
Local government claims to be the natural strategic housing body, a claim which is tested by the fact that homelessness has risen by 169% since 2010. The great difficulty for the providers caught in these cross-hairs, of course, is that organisations which seek to support people who fall between the gaps in services are themselves likely to fall between the gaps in funding.
It is a cruel irony that supported housing should be cut when it saves money: the problem is that it saves money to the public purse, rather than only (or mainly) to its funder. Thanks to the embers of localism, the local tail wags the national dog.
These cuts matter, for two reasons. First, supported housing providers work with and on behalf of those whom mainstream housing associations choose to ignore; second, they maintain a close relationship with their clients, thereby ensuring the sort of connectedness and advocacy which the best housing associations once promoted more routinely.
By working with marginalised groups, however, these providers risk themselves becoming marginalised. We are frequently reminded of the benefits of communities, without seeing their drawbacks. I recall a colleague from a homelessness agency who sought planning consent for a development of six flats in central London, for which the council received 840 written objections!
Apart from the obvious disappointment in realising that 840 people had such strong feelings against homeless people that they were moved to put pen to paper, this does raise compelling questions about the validity of a planning system which is so immune to social progress. Is there a case for taking social housing developments outside the remit of the planning framework?
But of course communities rarely define themselves by what they are, and much more frequently by what they oppose. They are intrinsically excluding: and it is at least arguable that social innovation takes place despite communities, not thanks to them.
Connected organisations
This is why it is important to have organisations which ‘smell the cordite’, that is, which are able and willing to stand up to powerful interests on behalf of their client groups, and which are able to harness the talents and experiences of their client groups in themselves helping to shape the services they receive.
I am not trying to argue that ‘small is beautiful’. Just because an organisation is small does not mean that its connections to its client base are exemplary: on the contrary, small organisations are just as capable as large ones of being manipulative, ineffectual and self-important.
The important factor is the quality of their relationships with their clients, and then whether those relationships assist their clients towards Maslow’s notion of self-actualisation. At its best, that is the strength of the voluntary sector.
It is beyond doubt that there are sub-sections of the population who have been left behind. The cliché declares that ‘a rising tide floats all boats’ – not if they are holed below the water-line it doesn’t.
These sub-sections have been failed: they have been failed by public services; they have been failed by the market; tragically, they may also have been failed by their own families. The voluntary sector, in the form of specialist supported housing providers, may well represent their best (and last) chance of having a future.
And it is here that the large housing associations can have a valuable role to play. They should stick to what they do best – but they could and should offer more practical assistance and financial support to their more precarious colleagues in the supported housing world who are trying to maintain that connectedness with their clients in housing need (and ‘financial support’ does not mean clever wheezes to make a quick buck out of them!).
What matters is almost always that which cannot be counted. When George Peabody established the Peabody Donation Fund he declared that the aim of the organisation would be to ‘ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis, and to promote their comfort and happiness’. Promoting happiness would be a noble goal for today’s housing associations – but are any of them up to the challenge?
The leaseholder may then be asked to meet the cost of putting in a fire alarm. Then to their absolute horror they are asked to pay for the cost of replacing the dangerous cladding to make their home safe. They simply do not have that amount of money. Their flat becomes worthless and they cannot remortgage. The UK Cladding Group has reported insurance costs for these blocks going up from £40,000 to £200,000. Leaseholders run the risk of becoming bankrupt, and if they work for the police or are lawyers they will lose their jobs as well. They will become homeless. This is not a situation of the making of leaseholders. They are the innocent victims of Government policy.
