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By Monimbo
Each year the UK Housing Review maps the recent past and future prospects for public expenditure, focussing on housing.  What does it tell us about prospects for housing investment if there is a change of government?
If you listen to the Chancellor, you’ll have the impression that the last Labour government was profligate with public money.  But in fact, as the last edition of the Review shows, Total Managed Expenditure as a proportion of GDP was lower under Labour than under the Tories for the first seven years, and only rose above it by about one percentage point for four further years, until the economic crisis pushed spending up in 2008/09.  In effect since then governments have been struggling to reduce expenditure as (in the same year – 2008/09) government borrowing and government debt both shot up as a proportion of GDP. Looking ahead, while borrowing is now forecast to fall fairly sharply, the trajectory for gross debt is that it will continue to grow.
New projections will be set out in the next edition of the Review, due out shortly, but I wanted to speculate about the position that a new government will be in, after the 2015 election.  On present forecasts, in 2014/15 spending will be running at a higher level (as a proportion of GDP) than at any time over the period 1997/98 to 2007/08.  In fact, if we compare public spending (always as a percentage of GDP) across recent governments, the last Labour government turns out to be the least profligate, even compared with the Thatcher-Major governments.  This is shown by a useful graph from Colin Talbot’s Whitehall Watch blog.
Public spending as percentage of GDP under different governments (1965-2015)

The obvious point to be made about this graph is that, since the economic crisis, GDP has fallen, and so spending as a proportion of GDP has risen, quite apart from the extra spending resulting from the crisis itself.  However, the Review’s table 13 also shows that actual spending, in constant prices, was lower in the years 1997/98-2007/08 than in any year since.
I don’t want to suggest that the next government won’t face harsh challenges and hard choices.  But the figures do underline the point that Labour in power achieved much without historically high levels of spending, until hit by the economic crisis.
One of the challenges in housing must of course be to restore some balance between bricks and mortar investment and spending on benefits.  Looking back on a typical pre-crisis year under Labour, 2004/5, of total expenditure some 56 per cent was allocated through Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL) and the remainder through ‘annually managed’ budgets, a large share of which is benefit spending.  The Budget 2012 showed that DEL is expected to fall to just 47 per cent of total spending by 2016/17, a significant shift away from departmental spending programmes, of which of course housing is one.
It is probably wrong to make too much of these comparisons, but in terms of the potential for boosting social programmes such as housing, they do suggest that priorities within public spending from 2015 may be as important as actual levels of expenditure.

I suspect most people who read Red Brick have not been invited to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland this week. Forum members are, after all, (according to WEF’s website) typically ‘one of the world’s foremost 1,000 enterprises with a leading role in shaping the future of its industry or region, a solid projected growth potential and a turnover of a minimum of US$ 5 billion’.
According to Larry Elliot, Davos was put on the map by Thomas Mann with his book The Magic Mountain about a sanatorium treating people with incurable sickness.  He draws some interesting comparisons between the book and next week’s inhabitants – who will include, mingling with the Forum’s members, Angela Merkel, David Cameron and George Osborne.
Will Hutton in the Observer derided the Forum’s theme of building a more resilient and dynamic capitalism.  As he notes, stagnation in the world’s economy has coincided with profits as a share of GDP in most western countries reaching record highs, along with executive pay, while real wages for the vast majority have been falling. Nothing will change at Davos, he comments, because  the system already works so nicely in the interests of the super-rich – and against the interests of the 99.9% and the broader economy.  The attendees are the very people that have destroyed capitalism’s dynamism.
Hutton says: ‘I was stunned to read in a recent IMF working paper, with the hardly catchy title Income Inequality and Current Account Imbalances, that the whole – yes the whole – of the deterioration of the British current account deficit between the early 1970s and 2007 could be explained by the rise in British inequality.’
In its report published to coincide with Davos, ‘Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All’ Oxfam calculates that the increasingly vast fortunes being made by the world’s richest 100 billionaires, who are accumulating at an unprecedented rate, not only drive up inequality but actively hinder the world’s ability to tackle poverty.  Astonishingly, they calculate that the world’s poorest could be lifted out of poverty several times over should the richest 100 billionaires give away the money they made last year – around £150 billion.  Just closing tax havens could yield an additional £118bn in additional tax revenues.
So, next time you hear anyone say that austerity is inevitable, we’re all in this together, etc, etc, just remember the super-rich bankers, industrialists, media magnates and politicians living it up in Davos.  And our message to them should be simple: there is a better way.

Hundreds of years of animosity between Newcastle and Sunderland, from the Civil War onwards, is now largely focused on the rather bitter Magpies v Mackems football rivalry.
It’s pretty unusual for a lad from Newcastle, who has followed the football club for over 50 years, to give any credit at all to anything that comes from Sunderland.
But today it’s a well done to the Gentoo Group for coming second in the national league table of all employers for its inclusion policies for lesbian gay and bisexual staff (LGB) in the Stonewall 2013 Workplace Equality Index (WEI).  Gentoo has been in the ‘top 20’ for five years but this is believed to be the highest position ever achieved by a housing organisation.
Stonewall’s WEI is a tool for employers to measure their efforts to tackle discrimination and create inclusive workplaces for lesbian, gay and bisexual employees.  Around 400 employers entered this year, using Stonewall’s criteria as a model for good practice.
Julie Kelly, Assistant Chief Executive of Gentoo Group said: “This is a fantastic result for Gentoo. It is immensely important to us that we value difference in our staff. One of our values is ‘Give us all you’ve got’ and to do this you need to be comfortable being yourself.
“We aim to make a real difference to the way people live their lives and if our staff are able to bring their whole selves to work and live authentic relationships, they can give us 100%. This is not only a great result for us as a Group, but also great news for our customers. Our result sends a clear message to our staff and customers and we are proud to be leading the way.”
The Index is based on a range of key indicators which include a confidential survey of lesbian, gay and bisexual employees.  This consistently revealed that the satisfaction levels of gay staff were highest at the top-ranking organisations in the Index.
Gentoo has an established staff network group, B-GLAD, for lesbian, gay and bisexual employees which has clear links into the formal structures so that it can influence policies and practice, as well as providing advice and support to colleagues and raising awareness.
Honorable mentions also go to Metropoltan, who were 10^th this year, St Mungo’s who were 24^th, and Genesis, 37^th.  Your Homes Newcastle also made it into the top 100, showing that the north east is doing something right.  15 Councils were included in the top 100.

By Monimbo
After Eric Pickles showed that he doesn’t understand housebuilding statistics, it was hardly surprising that he was wary about quantifying the extra housing demand that might result from Bulgarian and Romanian migrants.  He was challenged as strongly on this on the BBC’s Sunday Politics as he was about housebuilding performance, and his defence was that he couldn’t comment on the likely result of these countries’ citizens gaining ‘free movement’ in 2014 until he was more confident about the projections.  Unfortunately, in trying to avoid another statistical trap set by the persistent Andrew Neil, he ended up looking even more like a beached whale. Let’s see if we can help him to refloat.
First of all, his best line of defence was that many people have already been able to come here from Bulgaria and Romania since they joined the EU in 2007. Admittedly, they have had to qualify under various categories, notably the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme.  Some categories of migrant already have housing rights.  So the position of Bulgarians and Romanians in 2014 will not be directly comparable with that of Polish and other ‘A8’ nationals who were able to seek work in the UK for the first time (in many cases) in 2004.
Second, he could have said that many potential migrants have already gone to places like Germany, where admittedly there have also been strains on public services.  He might have argued that Germany has been a much more popular destination than the UK, given that less than 100,000 Romanians and less than 50,000 Bulgarians have chosen to move to the UK so far.
The problem with helping Eric with any further arguments is that they open up uncomfortable issues that the government prefers not to face. While it was fair game to point out that Labour miscalculated (by a long way) how many Poles and other A8 nationals would come here after 2004, he’d need to admit that it is extremely difficult to guess how many people might use their freedom of movement in a year’s time, when perhaps most of those people haven’t even thought about it yet. While Labour’s 2004 estimate was badly wrong, no one at the time knew quite what the effects of EU enlargement might be.  Furthermore, Labour did learn from its 2004 experience, putting tighter restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian immigration after 2007 with the aim of taking some of the pressure out of the system before those countries gained full freedom of movement.
Pickles could also help himself by getting properly briefed on dealing with the media on these issues.  He seemed blissfully unaware of the build up of media pressure prior to the 2004 EU enlargement.  In his book Immigration under New Labour, Will Somerville says that in February of that year the Sun ran 45 articles on immigration, over half of them about EU expansion.  The Daily Express joined the feeding frenzy, claiming on its front page that ‘1.6 million Gypsies’ were ready to ‘flood in’.  It’s hardly surprising if Pickles’ obfuscation on Sunday provoked press reaction.  If he continues in the same vain, he can expect much, much worse.
Given that the interview was mainly about housing, he might have thrown Neil off course if he’d said (correctly) that while nationals from the new EU countries are entitled to housing assistance few of them use it initially, getting private lodgings (often provided by employers).  Instead he set himself another trap, by seeming to agree that his department had some preliminary figures and had started looking at the effects on housing – but then he wouldn’t say what they might be. He also suggested that he would issue an estimate once he could confidently do so. By this stage he was clearly flailing, digging himself deeper into the sand.
The reality is that ministers are collectively trapped by an immigration policy which they’ve trumpeted on every possible occasion and which is going to backfire.  While they’ve succeeded in reducing net migration, mainly by cutting student numbers, it only needs a small extra influx from Bulgaria and Romania to turn that round and start pushing the figures up again.  There’s nothing surprising about this: at least Labour could claim in 2004 that everyone was taken by surprise by the extent to which Poles, in particular, used their new rights.  That argument won’t hold in 2014.
It would also help, of course, if Pickles’ department was still estimating housing needs and had robust plans to tackle the severe housing shortage which he had to admit exists.  Instead we have ministers who seem to think that almost insignificant measures like New Buy will solve the problem, and anyway can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.
On one thing Eric was right: when he said he needs to be ‘reasonably confident about the figures’ he could have been starting to write his ‘to do’ list for his next interview.  He must be hoping it’s with someone who is not as conversant with the facts about housing and migration as Andrew Neil proved to be.

It’s a common complaint that housing issues get very little coverage in the British media.  Sometimes it seems even worse when it does get some air time.  So this was a relatively good weekend.
Of all the TV interviewers, Andrew Neil seems to do some prior research before his interviews and isn’t immediately befuddled by a few well-rehearsed stats thrown into the argument by the interviewee from a crib sheet.
Today on Sunday Politics, Eric Pickles looked at a chart (check here on i-player, about 27 minutes in) put up by Neil, sourced from the official ONS statistics, which clearly showed housing starts declining since the Coalition came in.  No, said Eric, they’ve gone up.
Neil couldn’t believe his eyes or ears, and deserves an accolade for not only doing the work beforehand but also pressing the point as Pickles became increasingly obscure in his answers, ultimately being made to look a fool.  In one extraordinary moment, Pickles said: ‘I’m not going to go onto a prestigious show like this and not know what I’m talking about.’  Well, Eric, yes you did and no you don’t.
Impressively, subsequent tweets show that Andrew Neil really had done his homework and knew, for example, the difference between the stats for starts and completions and the stats for new housebuilding as opposed to increases in the housing stock (which also take account of conversions and demolitions, for example).
Eric seemed very relieved when Neil moved on from housing starts and the impact that east European immigration might have on housing demand (dunno, I’ll let you know later, said Eric) to whether the Government is going to end fines for leaving the wrong rubbish in the wrong bin.
Similar obfuscation about housebuilding figures helped make housing the dog that didn’t bark during the London mayoral election last year. Affordable housing has collapsed, the figures show. Oh no it hasn’t said Boris Johnson, we’re going to build record numbers. And there was no challenge as he switched from starts to completions, and from history to the future, from housebuilding to affordable housebuilding, whichever suited his case the best.  Eventually, the figures become meaningless, the media couldn’t be bothered, and there was no accountability for performance.
The other encouraging bit of media coverage this weekend was some fairly straight reporting of what Ed Miliband said on the regulation of the private rented sector – see the Guardian, the Metro, PoliticsHome, and Daily Mail for example.  Like Andrew Neil, he gave the impression that he’d researched his topic and taken note of the detailed work done by Jack Dromey on the policy.  So here for posterity is the key bit of Ed’s speech:
Ed Miliband

Jonathan Primett from Chatham wrote to us recently, complaining about rogue landlords at a time when the private rented sector is growing fast in our country.  Today I want to respond to him.
Britain is in danger of having two nations divided between those who own their one homes and those who rent.  If we are going to build One Nation, people who rent their homes should have rights and protections as well.
That’s about rooting out the rogue landlords.  Stopping families being ripped off by letting agents.  And giving new security to families who rent.
So we will introduce a national register of landlords, to give greater powers for local authorities to root out and strike off rogue landlords.  We will end the confusing, inconsistent fees and charges in the private rented sector.  And we will seek to give greater security to families who rent and remove the barriers that stand in the way of longer term tenancies.

We should rejoice that today marks the point at which the Coalition is half over.  From now on there will be fewer days of suffering ahead of us than there are behind us.  As Cameron and Clegg do another relaunch, it is salutary for a housing blog to look back at the Coalition Agreement and see how what they have done compares to what they promised.
This is easier said than done, because the Agreement had little to say about housing and nothing to say about many of the more controversial policies they have pursued in power.  And that is the root of my central criticism of the LibDems – if the Agreement is what they signed up to, with no obligation to support other policies not contained therein, why did they subsequently embrace enthusiastically so many Tory policies that were not in the Agreement and diametrically the opposite of what was in their own Manifesto?  Were they weak or stupid?  It must be one of those.  More than in most areas, housing policy has been developed according to a private agenda within the Conservative Party and the LibDems have chosen to go along with it when they could have taken a much more oppositional stance without breaching the Coalition Agreement.
Some of the policies included in the Coalition Agreement have been pursued, such as: scrapping regional spatial strategies; reform of the housing revenue account; bringing empty homes into use; increasing the right to buy.  And there are others where progress is more debatable: continuous improvement of energy efficiency; creating new community trusts to provide homes for local people; ‘maintain the green belt’ (remind Planning Minister Nick Boles about that one).
What is astonishing is the lack of mention of a long list of policies the Coalition has since pursued: the ending of new homes for social rent; the creation of the ‘affordable rent’ tenure at up to 80% of market rents; the 60% cut in public housing investment; flexible tenure; the bedroom tax; reducing the homelessness safety net; cancelling Labour’s plans to regulate the private rented sector – to name but a few.  It is also worth mentioning that the Agreement does not even mention the phrases ‘housing benefit’ and ‘local housing allowance’ and the word ‘cap’.  Nowhere is there any reference to the overall benefit cap.
There is no doubt that the LibDems would have been well within their Coalition rights to oppose or to refuse to support these policies but were too feeble to do so.  Indeed, LibDem Minister after Minister – in CLG and DWP – stood up to defend them and to support policies that are wholly contradictory to historic LibDem policies or even the new and excellent LIbDem housing policy adopted at their last conference.
The reason for being so disappointed with the LibDems is that it was well known before the Election that a private housing agenda was being developed by the Tories with the help of leading figures in the housing world: in particular, the infamous Localis pamphlet set out clearly the direction the Tories would take towards market rents and the denial of rights to social tenants.  The LibDems should have known what was coming and had a clearer strategy for resisting it.
There is a general belief that the Coalition will be brought to an end before the General Election so that the Conservative and LibDem parties can develop distinctive policies during the campaign.  No doubt at that point the LIbDems will revert to their previous and current policies, which on paper are excellent and attractive.  But the real measure will be ‘what did you do in Government?’.  The Coalition has been disastrous for housing policy and the LibDems have been fully complicit.  Whatever the paper policies, they should not be trusted again.

Becoming a Minister is a funny business. You have to forget everything you have ever previously said on the topic you take responsibility for and become the mouthpiece of the Government.  You then have to parrot all the stuff that has previously been said by your predecessors, even if it means defending policies with which you have previously disagreed.
For the LibDens in coalition with the Tories this must be an excruciating business.  Some of those who have been sacked from Government have revealed exactly how awful the Government is looking from the inside, notably Sarah Teather’s denunciation of the Government’s deliberate strategy to demonise benefit recipients.
Poor old Don Foster is the latest to make the transition onto the dark side, picking up the housing junior brief from dumped fellow LibDem Andrew Stunnell in the last reshuffle. It is now poor Don’s turn, as a previously decent human being, to defend the increasingly indefensible record of the Coalition on housing and homelessness.
But I was still surprised when Foster had the opportunity of an article in the Telegraph that he chose to go for an old favourite: red tape.  This is normally the last refuge of people who have nothing of any importance to say on anything serious.  Evidently he has been entrusted with slashing the Building Regulations and he is, he says, going about it with zeal. He was ‘shocked to find out about the layers of additional standards and red tape, slapped on top of each other by the last government’ as if the regs were only invented in 1997.  But he cites an alarming precedent for the approach he is going to take: ‘Just as this government turned over 1,300 pages of technical planning rules into a 50 page, sensible and intelligible framework I’m determined to do the same with buildings standards.’  And he believes he can do this without compromising safety.
Well, we’ll wait and see but, as the Government’s planning policy unravels before our eyes, it would be bad news to see building regs reduced to 50 meaningless and contradictory pages like planning guidance was.  And it is serious stuff: detailed rules on fire safety, electrical and gas safety, contaminants, insulation, ventilation, hygiene, drainage and refuse disposal are not to sneezed at.  Areas where a bit of red tape is justified by appalling practice in the past.
On New Years Day I was ruminating on how hard it would be for Labour to enter a coalition with the LibDems after the next Election given how hostile some LibDems have been to Labour over the last 2 years.  One friend said that if Labour didn’t win outright ‘it would have to kiss a lot of frogs’ to form a Government.  I hadn’t quite seen the likes of Don Foster like that before.  However, it appears that there are two very different forms of the fairytale.
In one version (Wikipedia says the ‘Americanised’ version) the frog is indeed turned into a charming Prince by a kiss.  However, the original Grimm Brothers story has the frog’s spell being broken when the princess throws it against a wall in disgust.  Speaking personally, when I watch some of the LibDems in Government, I prefer the latter option.
Happy New Year!

Not even the New Year yet and there is another dire warning about the housebuilding collapse – this time from one of the Government closest thinktank friends, Policy Exchange.  In between Xmas and the New Year is an unusual time to publish a report, but I guess they know what they’re doing.
Their report is exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s called ‘Planning For Less’ and it concludes that the abolition of Regional Spatial Strategies (and therefore regional targets for housebuilding) has resulted in local authorities planning for 270,000 fewer homes than before.  PEx say that the Government’s expectation that abolishing the RSSs would lead to more homes being planned has proved profoundly wrong.
Well over half of all councils have used their new powers  to scale back previous plans.  And worse – the report shows that the cuts in planned housing figures are highest where the need to build is greatest.  Targets have been cut by over 8% in the south east and by more than 18% in the south west.
In response to the report, DCLG made the obvious point that the targets set under the RSS system were not being met anyway, inferring that it doesn’t matter that the targets have been slashed.  PEx say emphatically that it does matter: ‘the lower figures chosen by local authorities are important in political terms. They are seen by many local people, councillors and MPs as more legitimate than regional planning figures, or other figures imposed by the centre.’   The new figures, they argue, will act as a ceiling and will  give succour to those who wish to resist development.  The development process will be the same – just with smaller numbers in it.
The abolition of the regional structure is the disastrous result of political dogma, and was done just as the RSSs were beginning to have an impact (any system would have been overwhelmed by the financial collapse in 2008).  The maintenance of the regional system in London – where the mayor has the powers – illustrates a contradiction in the Government’s approach.
Regional targets were only ever one part of the answer but they reflected detailed assessments of need and demand and set the benchmark and expectations for what should happen in each area.  Of course targets in themselves do not improve the economic circumstances within which builders are operating, nor do they impact on developers’ decisions on whether to use or sit on their land bank.  These are the areas where the Government should now be focusing its attention.  Instead they pursue failed policies like the New Homes Bonus – which seems to be being used by most councils to fill holes in their budgets rather than helping with housing development.
The RSS system may not have been very popular but it was based on a rational assessment of evidence.  What we are left with now is a system that is dependent on local political pressures and increasingly hysterical exhortations to build from Ministers.
There is a crumb of comfort for the Countryside Alliance wing of the Conservative Party, as the report concludes that ‘The widespread fear that the Coalition is set to concrete over the countryside with new housing is, in the light of (the) report, not borne out.’
The Government is floundering about, trying to talk up housebuilding whilst adopting policies that will reduce it further and failing to act on the real barriers to development.  It is one of the Coalition’s greatest failures.

Just like O Level French is enough to buy a pastry in Paris so an economics degree occasionally makes it possible to read a fairly dense economic text that opens the eyes.  So it is with an excellent essay on the London Review of Books called ‘Let’s Call It Failure’ by John Lanchester that focuses on austerity and the economic multiplier.
Lanchester’s conclusion – ‘the scale and speed and completeness with which things are going wrong are numbing’ – is probably of little surprise, anyone having a quick look round Britain today could probably conclude that.  But it’s the way he traces the Government pursuit of its objective to cut spending to bring the deficit down that is so enlightening.
Osborne’s aim was to cut the structural deficit from 4.8% to 1.9% after 3 years.  Despite nearly £60bn of tax rises/spending cuts, the figure is set to be 4.3% and that is only achieved by a lot of what in local government we used to call ‘creative accounting’ – counting the windfall from 4G telecom licences (not yet sold), transferring Royal Mail pensions assets and liabilities (assets counted short, liabilities counted long) and the transfer of interest on quantitative easing from the Bank of England.  Without these it would have been, guess what?  4.9%.
All that pain and no gain.  And a triple dip recession on the horizon.
Lanchester pins much of the blame on a misunderstanding of the economic multiplier and that GDP is a measure not only of the amount of money people spend but the velocity with which successive people spend it.  He traces a £10 note around the economy, being spent by one person then by the second person, then by the third.  When it has been through six pairs of hands the initial tenner has added £60 to GDP.  If instead the first person had put it in the bank, it would have remained £10.    Our economy is sitting on the tenner – and the multiplier was the core of Keynes’ economic analysis of what to do in a recession.
Our Government, backed until now by the IMF, has put a value on the effect of austerity of 0.5% – that is, for every £1billion of public spending cuts GDP would contract by £500m.  Good old IMF, having got it wrong in every poor economy they have ‘rescued’ over the last few decades – swingeing cuts, privatisation, one solution for every problem – now suggest the multiplier for cuts is twice as high and possibly 3 times as high.   In short, austerity is exactly the wrong thing to do because cutting public spending disproportionally depresses GDP.  And cutting the poor is the worst of all – more than anyone else, they spend their tenner and keep the velocity of circulation going.
And if you’d like more evidence of the deficit disaster, try this from a Conservative economic  commentator, Ramesh Patel, on Huffington Post.  Pulling no punches, he concluded: ‘The deficit myth is the grossest lie ever enforced upon the people and it has been sold by exploiting people’s economic illiteracy….. Cameron is playing the blame game to depress confidence and growth to justify austerity. Secondly, to use austerity as justification for a smaller state to gain lower taxes. Thirdly, to paint Labour as a party that can not be trusted with the country’s finances again. Therefore, we Conservatives will win a second term because people vote out of fear.’ 
Sounds like being in ‘deficit denial’ was the right thing after all.

A month ago, in the week that the new homelessness regulations came into force, I did a Red Brick piece on homelessness that I called ‘Hypocrisy and Doublespeak’.  The aim was to highlight the absurdity of the Government trying to take the moral high ground on homelessness – both Mark Prisk and his predecessor, Grant Shapps, having written stroppy letters to or about various councils and made pronouncements about their responsibilities – whilst adopting a raft of policies that they know will make it much worse.
The Government is fully aware that homelessness will rise rapidly as a result of its housing and benefits policies and is making a concerted pre-emptive effort to lay off the blame – even accusing its best friends of ‘unacceptable and unlawful’ practices.  But both central and local government (at least in London) know that dispersal – councils discharging their homelessness duty by offering private rented accommodation in cheaper parts of the country – is inevitable and that the damage to families and especially children and vulnerable people will be immense.  Not quite the Xmas message the government wants to send out.
In the post I referred to the advice being given to local authorities by a consultant, Andy Gale, who was billed as being a speaker for the DCLG.  My view was that his advice was repugnant and that it revealed the real direction of Government policy on homelessness – deliberately removing the safety net and reducing homelessness acceptances through tougher application rules and processes (gatekeeping).
Patrick Butler of the Guardian had broken the story about Andy Gale but then became embroiled in a row with DCLG, who denied that Gale was anything to do with them.  Butler’s subsequent investigations revealed that Gale was ‘hosted’ by Newham council at DCLG’s request and with their funding to advise other councils on managing homelessness, raising questions over the veracity of an answer given by Mark Prisk to a Parliamentary Question by Karen Buck MP.  Butler tells more of the tale in his fascinating follow-up piece.
The story reinforces the impression that DCLG wants to encourage authorities to use gatekeeping methods to reduce the number of successful homeless applications but they don’t want to be seen to be doing so.  And their rather bullying tone reveals some anxiety to avoid being labelled as the real villains (which of course they are).
Interesting spats aside, the back story to this is the complete turnabout in homelessness policy over the last decade, since the high point of the 2002 Homelessness Act when it looked as if Government had finally put together a package of strategies, policies and duties that would tackle the roots of the problem.  Labour had made a number of important strides in its approach to homelessness: rough sleeping was being brought down, the long term use of bed and breakfast accommodation for families was being ended, and the number of new homeless households presenting to local authorities was falling.  But in the decade since, the failure of affordable housing supply has shifted us step-by-step from a liberal and progressive stance to a reactionary blame-the-victim position.  The Tories have even shifted people who become homeless from the deserving to the undeserving poor.
There was no single turning point but it is interesting to observe that the requirement to adopt a strategic approach to homelessness had a downside: it spurred creative minds into devising a range of new practices for dealing with homelessness, from genuinely important preventative work, such as family conciliation, to devices the purpose of which was to ‘discourage’ applications and to ‘divert’ people into courses of action other than presenting as homeless.  This was given a big push by the introduction of a well-meaning but muddled policy to cut in half the number of households in temporary accommodation over a five year period to 2010. Its in the math: if supply did not increase, the only way to meet the target was to cut demand and stop people coming through with a right to social rented housing.  Even though the target was backed by funding and lots of ideas for reinventing TA, in practice it put too much pressure on the system to achieve the unachievable.
Some of us at the time could sense a change in attitude to homelessness and saw dangers in the then Government’s proposals to achieve the target ‘by offering a wider range of preventative measures and increasing access to settled homes’.  This subtle use of language opened the door for those authorities that moved seamlessly from ‘prevention’ to ‘gatekeeping’: a number of authorities were already more hostile to homeless households and wanted to be able to allocate more of their limited number of social rented homes to other priorities.  The homeless also started getting blamed for concentrations of poverty and even anti-social behaviour on social housing estates.  The description ‘settled homes’ really meant the first national endorsement for greater use of the private rented sector.
In the years since, homeless households have faced more and more barriers to the simple process of presenting as homeless or being threatened with homelessness and being recorded as such.  The fact that numbers are going up again is testament to how hard the housing market is.  Progress into a social tenancy has become harder and harder and diversion into private renting is now becoming the norm.  And that’s where Mr Gale’s advice comes, because people like him make money from showing councils how to manage demand without breaking the law and deal with the politics as well.  The excellent Nearly Legal website has published Mr Gale’s briefing so you can judge for yourself.
Homelessness is a touchstone issue for many of us who cut our teeth in the campaign for effective homelessness legislation in the 1970s to end the era of ‘Cathy Come Home’.  If the way you treat the homeless is a measure of our civilization, the Barbarians are back in control.