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Donkey con

It doesn’t matter how many times you call a donkey a horse, it’s still a donkey.
Grant Shapps announcement of the so-called ‘affordable homes’ programme boasts that the programme will spend around £1.8billion on producing 80,000 ‘affordable homes’ of which 63,000 will be for ‘affordable rent’ and 17,000 for ‘affordable home ownership’.  Shapps says that “The new Affordable Rent model, which will be the principal element of the Programme, will make public subsidy go further while enabling local authorities and providers to target support where it is most needed.”
The implication from the announcement is that there are NO homes for social rent (ie at target rents) in the programme.  Social rented housing and targets rents are not even mentioned.
Shapps’ announcement, and the listing of the 146 organisations who will receive funding from the Homes and Communities Agency (including 26 councils), is more remarkable for what it fails to say than what it does say.
There is NO information about the rent levels that the ‘affordable rent’ homes will be let at.  This could be up to 80% of market rents although we know that many bidders have gone for a mix of rents to try to keep the rent of larger family homes down, but this crucial information has not seen the light of day.  Housing website 24 Dash claims that the average rent will be 72-73% of market rent and that Mr Shapps is claiming that the average in London will be 65%, but the figures are not published.  These averages represent enormous rent increases for tenants of new homes compared to the previous regime.  They will intensify the poverty and employment traps and increase the housing benefit bill.
There is NO information about how many re-lets of existing stock will be let at ‘affordable rent’ levels instead of social rent or target rent levels to pay for the programme – the key policy that will lead to a large net reduction in the number of homes being made available from the exisiting stock for rent at genuinely affordable rents.
There is NO information about which bids were refused and why.
Classically, the information is stage managed to look good, to resemble a thoroughbred policy, building a good-sounding number of ‘affordable homes’.  But new subsidy is now only available for what is really ‘intermediate rent’ and low cost home ownership.  I have been an advocate for intermediate housing over the years as a parallel programme to social rent, but make no mistake: this policy is about ending social rent new build and gradually chipping away at the existing stock of homes for social rent.  It has a few enthusiasts but they are the usual suspects in the housing association and local authority worlds who have wanted to stop providing housing for the poorest for some time.
There is no doubt: the policy is not a horse, nor even a mule.  It is an ass.

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Open and shut case: it's CCT all over again

In the middle of the phone hacking scandal David Cameron found time to launch his White Paper on ‘Open Public Services’ (see the Cabinet Office website).
This document contains more warm words than you can count about the benefits it will bring to individuals and communities, but it is remarkably reminiscent of the proposals
for the NHS: when you strip away the verbiage, it is about putting most public services out to tender to any willing provider, extending the purchaser/provider split, and reducing the role of public bodies to that of commissioners.  As the paper says: “the principles of open
public services will switch the default from one where the state provides the service itself to one where the state commissions the service from a range of diverse providers.”  In the real world, it means more private companies running more public services, the process otherwise known as privatisation.
The implications for housing are not entirely clear.  ‘Housing management’ is identified as one of the services where the government will consult about how to open up the service to more local commissioning.  There is no specific mention of councils who still directly manage their housing stock but there may be serious implications for them further down the line as the plans develop.
There is a specific reference to arms length management organisations (ALMOs).  They are given as a good example of how public sector providers could be given ‘autonomous status’ and become like housing associations.  We covered some of the options available for ALMOs recently on Red Brick, but although the White Paper talks a lot about improving accountability and empowerment, more importantly it raises the spectre of ALMOs being forced to become ‘autonomous’ even when this is against the express wishes of the tenants.
One other reference to a housing-related service concerns Supporting People, a service
which is already largely commissioned but where the future emphasis is planned to be on the development of personalised budgets.
There are three principle fears about the White paper and none are addressed in it.
First, that this will follow the same route as Thatcher’s Compulsory Competitive
Tendering regime but with more soft soap – it is bound to involve compulsion but the likely mechanisms for achieving compliance are not made clear.  Classic Cameron.
Secondly, there is no reference to the need to undertake an EU procurement for services, which is a major issue when considering the future direction of ALMOs.
And thirdly, there is no linkage to the size of future budgets and the cuts – new rights for individuals and communities will only be worth the paper they are written on if there is the money to back them up.

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Tenants' complaints: another hurdle to jump

On Friday the chief executives of the National Housing Federation, TPAS and Shelter had a letter published in the Independent (go here and scroll down) concerning an aspect of the Localism Bill that has not so far attracted much attention: tenants’ complaints.
Specifically, the Bill’s new arrangements for making complaints to the Housing Ombudsman will prevent tenants from being able to complain directly: in future they will have to get a referral from an MP, councillor or a ‘designated tenant panel’.  The authors of the letter say this will be disempowering, costly and bureaucratic, causing delays and ‘red tape’.
Under current arrangements, tenants can only take a complaint to the Ombudsman if they have exhausted the landlords’ own complaints process, which can often take many months in itself.  They then have to go through the Ombudsman’s own filtering process (they decline requests to investigate complaints in many cases) and then wait for an investigation and report.  Many MPs and councillors are highly accessible to their constituents and no doubt would do the job as quickly and conscientiously as they can:
others are not, do not deal with correspondence effectively and sometimes do not even have ‘surgeries’ for tenants to attend.  We do not know what processes a ‘designated
tenant panel’ might adopt and there is a danger that they will not be very independent of the landlord.
Either a councillor or MP will just pass the complaint on, which is a complete waste of everyone’s time, or they will act as a filter of some kind, either refusing to pass it on for their own reasons or making their own enquiries, which will require the tenant to explain the matter all over again, including revealing their personal details.  Tenants may well feel that MPs and councillors are not always neutral when dealing with such matters, especially a complaint against the council as landlord*.
There can only be one motivation behind this process: to reduce the volume of complaints going through to the Ombudsman because it will be under-resourced for the job it should be doing.  But the procedure will put additional burdens on MPs and councillors that they are often not geared up to handle, and will undoubtedly act as a disincentive to tenants to take their complaint forward.
An effective complaints process is one mechanism for ensuring the accountability of landlords.  It is therefore encouraging that the NHF, as the landlords’ trade body, is opposing this change.  Good landlords welcome complaints, pursue them properly and seek to learn lessons from them.  There has already been a damaging reduction in regulation and independent inspection of service quality in the housing sector.  Making it harder for tenants to complain to the Ombudsman will make it easier for poor landlords to ignore their tenants.
*The Bill creates a unified service for investigating housing complaints, transferring
responsibility for council housing from the Local Government Ombudsman.

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Landlords from hell: doing nothing is not an option

Channel 4’s ‘Landlords from Hell’ Dispatches documentary on Monday showed people with no options being forced to live in the most appalling conditions in private rented housing, in one case with a sickeningly violent landlord masquerading as a charity.
The shocking thing was that it wasn’t shocking to anyone who has worked in the lower end of the sector over the last 30 years.  When I worked there in the 1980s, I can recall a house being discovered by environmental health officers in Haringey which had 50 people living there in shifts.  The growing housing shortage is clearly making things worse, and it is inevitable that the housing benefit cuts will make the scramble for the cheapest and worst homes even more intense.
Anecdotal evidence tells me that there are fewer environmental health officers and housing advisers working in the sector than there were then, and the Chartered
Institute of Environmental Health’s journal EHP regularly reports cuts in posts and services.  Back then, in boroughs like Haringey and many others, programmes like Housing Action Areas meant that the poorest areas were identified and additional powers taken for small areas of particular housing stress.  Local teams of housing advisers (who understood tenants’ rights) and environment health officers (who understood property law and enforcement) worked together to go systematically from house to house dealing with bad conditions.  Although landlords sometimes responded by ending a tenancy, it was the council and not the tenant that was responsible for action being taken, making it clear to the landlord that getting rid of the tenant was no way out, thereby making tenants feel less vulnerable.  Picking up a small number of homeless people as a result of a large programme of intervention was seen as a price worth paying.  The method was carrot and stick – grants were available to help with the works, but we would not shy away from compulsory purchase when it was necessary.
Things seem to have got worse over the years despite many changes in the legislation and
the introduction of the health and safety rating system.  The service and enforcement of notices seems to be as complex and bureaucratic as ever.  The sector has grown but resources, especially the number of housing environmental health officers on the ground, seem less, and it is less common to have local teams who get to know the landlords and develop relationships with them.  The system seems to have reverted to responding to tenant complaints rather than planned programmes of inspections focusing on the riskiest properties.
A system that puts tenants at risk – of eviction, and occasionally of harassment – if they
complain will never work effectively.  It is interesting that the CAB’s advice on getting repairs done starts with the warning:  “Trying to get a repair done may put a tenant at risk. People with limited security may face eviction if they take action against their landlord.”  This is the central conundrum in dealing with bad conditions in the private rented sector.
Labour’s proposed reforms following the Rugg Review were a start but are now abandoned, and the current government’s laissez faire attitude is seriously deficient. Anyone watching Grant Shapps’ interview with Jon Snow would spot the complacency and, frankly, lack of concern.  There is nothing wrong with emphasising that most landlords are good, and that most tenants are satisfied, but this is no excuse for failing to have a strategy to tackle the bad landlords and the bad properties.
Private renting is the last great unmodernised industry, run by amateurs and too often
driven by the dream of the quick buck.  The landlords’ organisations seem far more responsible and less defensive than they used to be: they also support action against rogue landlords and support the professionalisation of the industry.
There seems to me to be a great opportunity – rising demand, good returns, a flat property
market – for radical reform that will benefit tenants and landlords together.  Taxation of private renting needs reform to encourage investment in repairs and improvements.  I would argue for a stronger measure of security of tenure and the abandonment of the worst aspects of the local housing allowance changes as well.  But the way forward for private renting must be based on proper regulation against a clear code and standards, a professional service, clear contracts between service provider and consumer, and swift intervention that is driven by council inspection and not tenant complaints.  Just like any
other industry that has a major impact on people’s lives.

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Official: Cameron claim rejected: Benefits Cap will mean families with 4 children will have to leave London and the South East

On the same theme as Tony’s post yesterday – the government’s cover-up of the damage housing benefit cuts will do – this post is from former Greenwich Councillor Pete Challis.  And below is an extra note from me on the evidence from schools in Westminster.
“No one will be made homeless: Cameron calls for calm over housing budget cuts” ran the headline in the Daily Mail on 29 October 2010. Similar stories appeared elsewhere. ‘David Cameron insists housing benefit reform won’t create homeless’ ran the Metro headline quoting David Cameron as saying ‘I don’t think it will be necessary for anybody to go without a home’
Yesterday’s Observer provides the full text of the letter from Nico Hislop, Private Secretary to Eric Pickles written to the Prime Ministers Private Secretary in January 2011.
It reveals “Finally, our modelling indicates that we could see an additional 20,000 homelessness acceptances as a result of the total benefit cap. This on top of the 20,000 additional acceptances already anticipated as a result of other changes to Housing Benefit. We are already seeing increased pressures on homelessness services.”
The latest homelessness figures (June 2011) confirm that advice. The number of homeless households is rising again.  Homeless acceptances for the year 2010/11 are up 10% but for the quarter January to March 2011 they are up 18 per cent compared with the same quarter in 2010.
The letter also reveals that CLG officials believed that families with 4 children receiving benefits will not be able to live in London and the South East.
The letter discusses the advantages of removing child benefit from the calculation of the cap and describes the benefits of doing so as:
‘The homelessness and child poverty risks set out above would be reduced – for example families with 4 children would be able to live in most parts of the country outside London and the South East.”
Charities have warned that new limits on housing benefit, now due to start in January 2012, will leave large swathes of the capital “no-go” areas for the poor. London Councils found that In seven of the most expensive local authority areas – Camden, the City, Hackney, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Tower Hamlets and Westminster local private rents are higher than the benefit cap throughout the borough.
In Kensington and Chelsea, of 2,771 households currently receiving benefits to help pay private rent, 2,047 will face a shortfall – 89.7 per cent. Of those, more than 900 are either aged over 70, or have young children.
Research by Homes and Property suggests that there are no 2, 3 or 4 bedroom private rented properties available in Kensington and Chelsea at rents that would fall within the cap and the Evening Standard reports that ‘Thousands of schoolchildren in parts of central London could be forced to move because of housing benefit cuts’.   11,800 children will be forced to move school resulting in outer London boroughs having to find extra primary school places. Assuming 300 children per school, if all the children are of primary school age, the equivalent of nearly 40 extra primary schools will be needed.
 Steve Hilditch adds
The damage to Westminster school children
A briefing note to primary school heads in Westminster from the Strategic Commissioner for Children’s Services in May has revealed the full extent of the disaster the Local Housing Allowance cuts could have on Westminster’s children.

  • 5,214 households or 80% of LHA cases will be adversely affected by the introduction of the caps.
  • Some of the largest shortfalls will be in larger size/family size properties. For example the current LHA rate for a 3 bedroom property in the Central London BRMA (Broad Rental Market Area – which includes most of Westminster) is £700.00 per week. The new caps mean that a maximum of
    £340.00 will be paid by housing benefit. This is over a 50% reduction in housing benefit for families in this size and larger accommodation.
  • Even making assumptions about some landlords reducing their rents, the analysis shows that Westminster could potentially lose 17% of primary school age children and 11% of their 11 to 13 year old pupils.
  • There is however variance between wards; Maida Vale
    could potentially lose 43% of their primary age school population and Bryanston and Dorset Square 34% of their 11 to 13 year old pupils.
  • There could be further school losses from boroughs outside of Westminster, which makes up 18% of the total school population in Westminster.  If they were to also have the same losses then same proportion of the Westminster resident pupils lost could potentially be applied, suggesting that schools could see a 17% reduction in their pupil population.  This would equate to a potential loss of 1,541 (over 6 school years), which averages at 257 pupils per year.
  • Families may move out but continue to send their children to Westminster schools (not least because they may not be able to get a school place in their new area.  Journey times are not known.

Westminster Council is writing to all affected claimants suggesting what action tenants can take in line with the Government’s views:

  • Try to negotiate a lower rent with their landlord;
  • Seek to make up the shortfall from income or savings;
  • Apply for a Discretionary Housing Payment.

The council has been awarded £1.1m from the national Discretionary Housing Payment Fund for 2011/12.  As the briefing states, “Because of the number of households affected and the scale of the benefit reduction (around £40m over a full year) it is clear that only a small number can be assisted.”
There is a huge risk to schools as a result of this.  Funding is based on a headcount of pupils, schools losing pupils will then lose their funding next year.  On the scale shown here, the whole future of a number of schools in Westminster is thrown into doubt at the same time as some outer London boroughs will have to find a large number of extra places.

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A price worth paying…

I’ve just read a measured and eloquent piece which demolishes the government’s claims for housing and welfare reform – a piece worthy of Red Brick – courtesy of Eric Pickles.
A formal letter from Eric Pickles’ Office to the Prime Minister details the range of problems with the government’s housing and welfare policies that casual readers will be well aware of:

  • Increases in homelessness
  • Increases in public spending to deal with homelessness
  • Fewer homes being built, especially family homes
  • The disproportionate impact in the south and on children

All the issues which ministers have denied point blank will be a problem. They have constantly claimed that criticisms of their housing policy are overblown, extreme or just untruthful. They have exhorted us to trust them, because they have thought through the impacts and have been satisfied that the effects won’t be as bad as everyone is saying.
How about this from Grant Shapps:

“People like me – who set up a homelessness foundation, worked with all the homeless charities, authored probably six of seven homelessness papers – don’t make changes without thinking through the impact of them on the homeless”

And true to his word, he (and Eric Pickles) had done a lot of detailed work to show the impact of their policies on homelessness. As Eric’s letter to the PM says:

“Our modelling indicates that we could see an additional 20,000 homelessness acceptances as a result of the total benefit cap. This on top of the of the 20,000 additional acceptances already anticipated as a result of other changes to Housing Benefit. We are already seeing increased pressures on homelessness services. … It is important not to underestimate the level of controversy that this would generate (likely to dwarf anything already seen on the HB only caps) and the difficulty of justifying this in policy terms as well as implementation.”

They know the impact of their policies, but they just don’t care. It is a price worth paying. Even after this letter  had come to light, we hear from Eric that “We are fully supportive of all the government’s policies on benefits.”
I believe him. They support the policies and they support the effects of those policies. The retoxification of the Tories continues apace.

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Jon Snow's 'shocking eye opener'

I doubt very much if he will recall it, but I met Jon Snow in 1973 when I organised a
conference on homelessness in London’s West End on behalf of Voluntary Action Westminster and he was the main guest speaker.  Jon worked at New Horizon Youth Centre but he was already a stunningly charismatic and committed man.  I understand
he has kept in touch with New Horizon ever since.  I have only come across him once since, when he devoted almost the entire Channel 4 News to a brilliant analysis of the Westminster Auditor’s guilty verdict on Dame Shirley Porter’s gerrymandering.
On the basis of these two little episodes I have taken it as read that he had a feel for housing issues as they affect people at the very sharp end.  He himself says that what he saw of poverty and homelessness in the West End in the 1970s has informed his life ever since.
Jon has now revisited the bad end of the housing market for a Dispatches programme which airs next Monday.  He calls it ‘a shocking eye opener’.
On his blog, Jon says;

This month I have spent hours in flats and houses in which you would not leave a dog for an hour. I have smelt the dank fungi that leaches its way across the walls of a two-bedroom flat in Rochdale and wandered between rows of garden sheds to the West of London in which rafts of men live two, three, and four, to a shed. At night you hear the voices in the dark, see the chinks of light through the boards, hear the clank of cooking pots as they prepare supper at the end of a working day.
It perplexes me that society can be so consumed with the state of education and health provision in Britain, and yet turn so active a blind eye to the true state of where people actually live.

At a time when it seems to be increasingly acceptable to blame the poor for their poverty and the homeless for their homelessness, and politicians line up to talk about housing benefit as if everyone was getting tens of thousands of pounds to live in luxury, the programme will show what life is really like at the bottom of the housing market in the worst of the private rented sector.
It is, says Jon, ‘a shocking and upsetting watch’.  And as the government rips the homelessness safety net to shreds and cuts housing benefit to the bone, lets hope it makes them feel just a little embarrassed.

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Housing Voice – raising affordable housing up the political agenda

This afternoon saw the launch of Housing Voice, an alliance of organisations promoting affordable housing. 
In a special post for Red Brick, the chair of Housing Voice, Lord Larry Whitty, explains the thinking behind the new organisation and what it hopes to achieve.
The current generation of young families face impossible hurdles as first time buyers.  Deposit requirements are at a multiple of annual salaries and the average house costs more than 10 times the median wage.  Banks and building societies are reluctant to lend. On top of all this more defaults and repossessions are threatened as the cushion Labour set up comes under attack.
The apparent benefit of low interest rates is pretty meaningless to those not already on a mortgage and will in any case soon end.
So what do those who in the last two generations would have been first time buyers by the time they were 30 do now?
Some stay and live with their parents.  Some live in overcrowded private rented accommodation.  But even in decent private rented accommodation in London and many cities the rents are soaring.
Social housing is not a realistic option.  With 1.7 household – 4.4m people already on social housing lists the chances of a young family getting social housing is pretty remote.
Yet new home completions is at its lowest level since the 1920s and the affordable housing budget has been hit by a 60 per cent cut.
All this when household formation is running at twice the rate of new home completions and accelerating.
These are classic indicators of near catastrophic market failure in all three sectors.
The Labour Government’s legacy on housing is not glorious.  Labour made serious strategic mistakes on housing almost from the beginning.  All the social housing capital went to refurbishment through the Decent Homes programme, rather than half of it going to new build. Right to Buy capital receipts weren’t recycled on any significant scale.  There was an obsession with transfer of social housing stock to RSLs or its management by ALMOs — with variable results for existing tenants and no increase in provision.  Rent restructuring contributed to social housing being predominantly for those on housing benefit without work.  Housing Benefit was not reformed.  Regional targets for new housing were set without the means to deliver them.  Various commendable schemes for partial ownership and partial equity foundered and affordable housing quotas on developments were only belatedly enforced.
All this has of course been aggravated by wider developments – the credit crunch, the atomisation of society as households form and re-form and get on average smaller, the effects of immigration, the failure of regional policy and the creakiness of our welfare system.
Unfortunately the Coalition’s policies simply aggravate the situation further.  The abolition of regional housing targets and regional spatial planning along with other planning changes is making new developments less likely. Capital controls will lead to restrictions on bank advances.  And in the social sector affordable rents, proposals to end security of tenure, caps on Housing Benefit driving lower paid workers out of central cities and a general political and media demonisation of social tenants are destroying the very idea of public housing.
This then undermines those councils and housing associations who want to engage in new build of social housing or to require higher proportions of affordable housing in all tenures in new developments.
All this is happening and hitting families up and down the country. Yet, in contrast to elections in the 1950s and 60s, when housing was always one of the top three political issues, housing has not featured significantly in public debate in recent elections. This could be because electors have regarded housing as a private issue and not communal or political one.  But the scale of need means that this is changing. A YouGov poll released today shows that people now see affordable housing as a bigger issue for them and their families than education or crime.
The poll also shows an appetite for fresh thinking, including requiring local authorities to ensure there is housing available in their areas to meet housing need that relates to local wage rates, for councils to build homes to rent and for the government to tax bankers bonuses to pay for new public housing.
We need to build on these findings – to provide a broad civil society voice calling for housing to be a top political priority and to provide a forum for new and fresh thinking.
That is why we have proposed a new organisation – Housing Voice – the affordable housing alliance.  This is a loose association of those interested in housing who want to try to ensure the Government and Opposition bring the issue further up the list of priorities and develop new policies and new strategies for delivering decent homes to the
people.
My first House of Lords speech was in favour of reform of Housing Benefit – under the last Tory Government.  As a Minister in DETR in 1999 I unsuccessfully argued for more social housing new build than as well as refurbishment.  Twelve years on our housing market is in deep disfunction.    Labour policies largely failed.  The coalition is seriously aggravating that failure.  We need new pressure to raise housing policy up the political agenda. And new ideas to help solve the problem.
That is why we are launching Housing Voice – as a forum for ideas and a base for campaigns.
If you would like  further details about Housing Voice please contact David Arnold on [email protected]

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The patchwork of irresponsibility

If top down targets ‘indisputably failed’ according to the housing minister what can we say about the emerging alternative?
More and more small local stories are coming out which show that for many councils local freedom means the freedom not to provide homes for their residents, especially those on lower incomes (as many predicted).  
Take this from the Basingstoke Gazette:

At a meeting of councillors last week, the ruling Tories called on officers to explore the “lowest possible” annual housing target after residents said too many new homes are built every year.

 And Windsor and Maidenhead Conservatives are brazen in saying they want no social rented homes. Their election manifesto tells us they will:

 “Only support shared equity and staircased home ownership options for affordable housing delivery”.

 To give them their due, the Royal Borough does claim the construction of 157 shared ownership homes since 2007. Red Brick can only caution them that if such largess continues they should prepare for the stampede of first-time buyers heading their way.
A clear picture is emerging of a patchwork of local policies which add up in total to very few homes being built, especially for those on lower incomes.
 
I’m all for localism as it happens and believe we should live in a country where communities have greater local freedom to make their own decisions. I would echo Sam Elliot at the excellent ‘Unnecessary Role’ blog when he says:

“If we are an egalitarian party then not only are we fighting for equality of opportunity but we’re also fighting for equality of power (it says so on the back of the membership card). Isn’t part of that making sure that all communities have the ability to make decisions about their local area?”

 But, to offer a hackneyed quote from an almost as insightful figure (Spiderman):

 “With great power comes great responsibility”

We must oppose a localism which excludes the absolute responsibility to provide enough homes and enough affordable homes for your residents. The coalition’s localism is an invitation to do just that, leaving other areas to carry the burden.

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ALMOs come into their own?

Monimbo
A short while ago some commentators were tempted to write-off ALMOs, given the numbers of councils who’d taken housing management back in-house or – in a few cases – opted instead for stock transfer.
The key blow looked likely to be the cutting of finance for the decent homes programme, and – even more damaging – the government’s ending of Labour’s requirement that councils getting finance should have an established arms length management company with at least a ‘two-star’ performance.
In fact, announcements of the death of the ALMO proved premature.  Many have strong tenant support and indeed several now have tenant chairs.  A number of councils have recently extended their contracts with ALMOs, and two have set up new ones even though they no longer provide a route to extra funding.  And now a potential new lease of life has been provided – almost certainly by accident – as a consequence of one of the key features of council housing finance reform.
When councils become self-financing next April, they will gain a lot of financial autonomy but will continue to be subject to a cap on their borrowing.  As assiduous readers of Red Brick know only too well, this is because their debt is still part of public borrowing.
However, a new report from the National Federation of ALMOs offers three ways in which much-needed investment might be achieved, despite the cap, by authorities who have ALMOs (or decide to create them).
The essence of all three proposals is to reconstitute the ALMO so that is no longer exclusively owned by the council.  Indeed, the proposals offer an excellent opportunity for tenants to build on the strong role which they already have in most ALMOs, taking a larger ownership share and a bigger role in the governing board.  The ALMO could stay as simply the manager of the housing, as it is now, but as a result of its new constitution be able to borrow privately to supplement the council’s borrowing. It would do so on the strength of its income stream.  A second option is the same but with the added assets of
some transfer of land or (perhaps redundant) stock to the ALMO, to give it a partial asset base.
A third, and more radical, option is for the ALMO to take over the stock, but keeping a financial relationship to the council that wouldn’t exist in a conventional stock transfer.  The key here is that, instead of paying off the council’s housing debt, the new ALMO (now named a ‘CoCo’ – Community- and Council-Owned Company) covenants to pay the council’s debt charges over the long term.  This preserves the advantage of the cheaper debt which councils invariable already have, while creating headroom for new investment that doesn’t count towards the council’s borrowing ‘cap’, and ensuring that the council has a permanent interest in the ALMO’s performance and financial health.
In the next few months councils are going to be so preoccupied with getting ready for self-financing that none of these options are likely to be much explored.  However, one of councils’ key tasks will – for the first time – be to produce proper, long-term business
plans.  In many cases this will reveal the extent of the investment shortfall facing them if they have to stay within the borrowing ‘cap’.
One of the new ALMO options proposed this week, giving them the potential to invest more in stock improvements, regenerate estates, or even recommence new build, might then start to look very attractive, both to councils and to tenants.