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The ‘Warehouse' of Mum and Dad

I still have loads of junk in my Mum’s house. It fills the shed in large boxes and tumbles out of less used cupboards. And it seems I’m not alone. According to the Telegraph:

“Now the younger generation – not wanting to mess up their own, often small, living space – are increasingly relying on the old family home to store their share.”

In my case, I’d have to say that the remaining junk is due to my own lack of organisation and a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
But this amusing life-style story (planted as insurance company PR by the looks of it), reflects a reality about housing for the younger generation:
Far more people find themselves renting and sharing with friends for longer than in the past -because buying’s impossible, there’s little chance of social housing and the cost of private rents means several people sharing is the only option. And, as the article suggests, the homes younger people are renting or buying are getting ever smaller – the newest are the smallest homes in Europe. 
It’s no wonder, when parents finally get rid of their kids from the family home (at an increasingly later age), that half their stuff stays behind.
So it may be a pain, when you’re pottering at home in your retirement*, to constantly come across boxes of CDs of angry teenage music, old tennis rackets and bin bags full of WWF magazines 1990-1994 (Sorry Mum – they’ll be worth something on eBay one day), but it’s nothing compared to the pain many have of trying to afford a decent place to live.
 
*To avoid the risk of unfairly characterising retirees, my co-Blogger spends his retirement making up for my lack of posting, running the London Labour Housing Group and fighting the good fight. I think he’s busier than ever.

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The moving target for boundary changes

The Tories are moving forward their plans to gerrymander equalise the number of constituencies. The aim is to have the same number of registered voters in each constituency. Of course this will mean vastly different numbers of people in each constituency: those who aren’t registered will be invisible to this process. And those who aren’t registered are disproportionately the young, the mobile, people who rent, lower income groups – basically Labour leaning groups.
Consequently, it is due to remove more Labour seats than Tory seats, though recently it seems the hapless Lib Dems may be on the sharp end.
One thing the Tories haven’t considered and perhaps the Boundary Commission either, is how they equalise constituencies in the south east when housing changes bite. High ‘affordable’ rents, cuts in housing benefit and the introduction of the benefit cap will cause lots of people to leave expensive areas and move to cheaper ones. The Boundary Commission is going to be playing catch-up from the start, trying to equalise constituencies as significant numbers of people are forced to move.  
One report already has 82,000 people leaving London for the surrounding towns and that’s ignoring the movement within London which is due to lose 5 seats in the review. When Central London’s larger less well off families end up in outer London and surrounding south eastern towns, how will the Boundary Commission keep tabs on them?
If they don’t, it’s important the Labour Party does, or people already uprooted from their communities will continue to find themselves disenfranchised. Local Labour parties should try to engage with people early, tackle the concerns that new arrivals (from anywhere) can bring and, importantly, get them registered to vote.
With many less well off voters heading out of central London and with real reasons to be angry with the Tories, perhaps MPs in places like Enfield, Barnet, Thurrock, the Medway Towns might regret supporting their party’s housing and benefit reforms.
It’s possible that even the gerrymandering won’t be enough to help them.

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Time to say goodbye

Love it or loathe it, the Audit Commission Housing Inspectorate will be missed after it closes operations this month.
I have a long list of irritations with how it went about its work. Number one is probably the poor quality of some of the inspectors, who sometimes failed to follow their own guidelines about transparency, feedback and having ‘no surprises’ in their conclusions, or imported their own views about how something should be done and turning it into a supposedly objective judgement. Having experienced inspection outcomes that were both significantly higher and significantly lower than the service being inspected justified, I’m left with the nagging feeling that some were preordained and that political fixing could make a difference. Some services seemed to get stars simply because of their previous reputation and sometimes there seemed quite a gap between the evidence and the conclusion.
All of this would be denied by the AC of course and the upside of its achievements comfortably exceeds my annoyances. Most importantly, there is evidence that after decades of flatlining, housing management standards really did pick up and improve during the period that the housing inspectorate was active. The first series of inspections of housing association services burst the balloon that their chief executives had been blowing up about the quality of their own services. Shining a light into a few dark corners brought significant improvement to the sector, in both councils and housing associations. The weight given to the experience of tenants increased as the regime was refined and improved. The set of KLOEs (key lines of enquiry) that the AC produced was a brave attempt to provide a template for a good service, even if they were then rather slavishly followed. Whilst the industry of pre-inspection consultancy prospered, the ideas of regular service review, external challenge and constant improvement became endemic, driving service improvement and a focus on tenant satisfaction.
There were a couple of areas where I am happy to own up to just being wrong in my early views on the inspection regime. One was that the traffic light system was superficial and trivialised important judgements – in fact it was a great success and an effective communication tool. Second that introducing the link between inspection outcomes and funding in the ALMO programme wouldn’t work. In fact it was a great motivator and became an important driver of service improvement and tenant engagement, helping to restore the credibility of council housing.
Maybe I’ll be wrong again but my view even before the Election was that the inspection element of the new TSA regulatory regime risked not being comprehensive and rigorous enough to keep standards improving and that some organisations would slip back into bad old ways. Since the Election, the changes made by this government convince me that it will be far worse than that. Even if the TSA (whilst it exists) and the HCA, as the new regulator, ensure the financial viability and probity of the sector, they will be toothless tigers in relation to service quality. I would welcome the emphasis on local tenant scrutiny if I didn’t know that it will be hopelessly under-resourced and open to manipulation by landlords of all types wanting to talk a good service instead of delivering one.
One of many challenges facing landlords will be to put sufficient effort and resources into making tenant scrutiny work and to maintain the tradition of external rigorous challenge based on the methods developed by the Housing Inspectorate. I hope they will but I fear they won’t – and the industry will take a step backwards.

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Shapps’ Eviction Proposals Are Bad News for Average Earners

The idea of evicting social housing tenants on higher incomes emerged in Westminster, based on some very dodgy statistics about how many tenants earned over £50,000 and £100,000.  It appears that after years of saying soial housing had too many poor people, now the Tories say it has too many rich people as well.  I suspect they just don’t like social housing.  Now that Grant Shapps has taken up the attack, it has become a national story.  The original story was broken by the Leader of the Labour Group on Westminster, Paul Dimoldenberg.  In a guest blog, he accuses Shapps of tabloid-style reasoning.  No surprise there then.
So Grant Shapps MP thinks it is a ‘no brainer’ to evict Council and Housing Association tenant families who between them earn £100,000 a year. He reckons that there are 6,000 such families across the UK who he says are rich enough to be able to buy their own home and should be evicted so that they can make way for a family who is in more serious need of a home.
Well, I certainly have a number of serious concerns about this proposal which has emerged out of the blue without any consultation or thought to the consequences.
In typical tabloid-style reasoning Mr Shapps raises the spectre of RMT trade union leader Bob Crow who earns £130,000 a year but still lives in a council house in north London. Interestingly, Mr Shapps can name no other high-earning individual or family to make his case and his argument rests entirely on the personal circumstances and choices made by Government ‘hate-figure-in-chief’ Mr Crow.
But the facts of these so-called ‘high-earning’ Council tents are a million miles from the isolated Bob Crow example.
A more typical ‘high-earning’ family is the one living in Grant Shapps’ constituency in a 2-bed Council or Housing Association flat where the parents both have middle income jobs earning £25,000 each and their daughter and her fiancee, again both earning £25,000, are saving for a deposit on their first home. Does Mr Shapps really think that this family is ‘rich’?
Does Mr Shapps really expect Council and Housing Association tenant families like this to reveal their incomes if it means that, by doing so, they will be evicted if they are thought by the Government to be earning too much? And how many people will decide not to work overtime or go for promotion if it means that they will creep over the £100,000 threshold and face eviction?
If Council and Housing Association tenants have to reveal the income of all family members living in their home, will it include the state pension of an elderly grandparent living with them? And will the meagre earnings of the teenage daughter with a Saturday job also be required to be included, too? Real life is very different from Mr Shapps’ easy headline grabbing and ill-thought out policies. So far he has failed to answer any of these points.
Or will local Councils and Housing Associations be told to make assumptions about their tenants’ income and then to evict those families who they estimate to be ‘wealthy’?
Mr Shapps says a family with a combined income of £100,000 should be able to buy a home of their own, but this will be different across the UK. In London, the South East and South West, a young couple with a combined income of £50,000 and living in a Council flat with mum and dad will not be able to get on the home-ownership ladder if that family is told to move out and buy their own flat. They will end up in private rented accommodation paying a lot more in rent.
And how did this £100,000 figure come about? Was it the result of research or is it a convenient figure that will guarantee tabloid headlines?
Posted on 6 June 2011.  Later Paul added:
Housing Minister Grant Shapps’ plans to evict Council and Housing Association households with a combined income of £100,000 unravelled today on the BBC Radio 2 ‘Jeremy Vine Show’ when he contradicted statements he made over the weekend and now claimed that his new policy would mean that families with four or more people on average incomes would not be evicted if their combined household income is more than £100,000.

In a bizarre example of ‘policy making on the hoof’, Mr Shapps told BBC Radio 2 listeners that

  • The £100,000 income threshold only applies to individuals and couples with a combined income of £100k
  • Other family members’ income (e.g. children, granparents) will not be counted

However, Mr Shapps’ claim that this new policy would mean that people with high incomes would move out and allow people in housing need to take their place, was immediately in tatters when he revealed that if the high earners paid the market rent then they could continue to live in their Council or Housing Association property as now.

Mr Shapps failed to spell out how Councils and Housing Associations would gather the information on ‘high earning’ tenant incomes or how much the Town Hall bureaucracy would cost to set up, run and police. Mr Shapps also failed to answer how he would stop high earning individuals declaring that their income was £95,000 or stop the two person household declaring that they earned £45,000 each in order to dodge having to pay market rents.

By introducing a new policy of letting high earners stay if they pay market rents, he will provide very few new homes for people in housing need. And much of the extra cash generated by increased market rents will go topay for an army of Town Hall snoopers whose job it will be to set up a new bureaucracy to find out tenants’ income and enforce the new red-tape regime introduced by Mr Shapps.
Last month, Westminster’s Housing Cabinet member Philippa Roe claimed that the Council wanted to increase rents for high earners by “a little bit more”, but now Grant Shapps has revealed the truth and tenants will face a 400% increase in rents as they go from their current level of around £110 a week to market rents of £450 a week or more.
The answer to local housing shortages is to build more homes for social rent, not to divide the community and set middle earners, the low paid and high earners against each other. Giving Councils like Westminster Council the power to set their own rent levels will mean that Council rents will go up for everyone, not just those on over £100,000.

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Helping first-time buyers isn’t (mainly) about mortgage lending

This is an addition to my previous post really about how we get ‘generation rent’ into homeownership, if indeed we should. There’s a paradox that the measures you take to ensure ‘responsible’ lending from banks are the measures which prevent more first-time buyers form getting a property. Opening easy credit again could be seen as one answer to the problem of younger people being unable to buy.
That would be the wrong lesson to draw from the financial crisis and its aftermath.
There are some people at the moment who can sustain a mortgage but to whom banks won’t lend. But that’s not really the issue. Looser lending may help in the short term, allowing some more people to buy a home. But in the long term, it’s cheap credit which fuelled the housing boom, drove up prices and locked most first-time buyers out. It’s not something we want to repeat.
As a colleague put it to me once: ‘house prices in Britain rise to the level of available credit in the economy’. More lending means higher prices.
That’s why the IPPR are right to say that there should be limits which ensure lenders act responsibly. I don’t know whether that’s a certain loan to value ratio as they suggest or something else. But, I do think the timing’s important. If limits like this are going to prevent another bubble, they need to be imposed before their effects bite, during a slack period. Once the housing market begins racing away, it’ll be difficult and unpopular to draw it back again with borrowing limits. Better that when it grows again, it does so under more sustainable rules.

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‘Generation Rent’ is beginning to get to the fundamentals

After a long lie-in on Tuesday (I had a day off), I found myself surprised by the rarest of things – a front page housing story. Nope, not asylum seekers jumping the queue into council housing, or a big family in West London claiming 50k in housing benefit. But, a story about homeownership in the Independent and a serious one at that. It was followed-up with coverage by Sky and the BBC.
It seems people are waking up to something aspiring first time buyers have known for a while: if you haven’t got parental help, owning a home for most people is a distant prospect.
House prices and deposits for mortgages are so high that it feels (and indeed is) an unrealistic goal for people to achieve.
We either accept that many people will become renters in the long term and put renting on a more equal footing with owning your own home. That means greater security for tenants and ensuring higher standards, with better ways to enforce tenants’ rights. It also means providing renters with tax-efficient ways to build assets and save in the same way owner occupiers build value in their homes and benefit from prices rises.
Or, we need to do something to keep house prices lower compared to earnings, so younger people can afford them in the future. That means limiting the real-term rises in house value the older generation may be relying on – to fund later care perhaps or provide their pension. It means making homeownership once again the goal of public policy, but a reformed homeownership, which is about a secure place to live and not a financial investment.  
In both cases, it’s about transferring wealth from an older generation to a younger one, to those who own assets to those who do not – whether they are housing assets or take a different form.
The problem is what will convince the baby boomer generation to back reforms that do this? Only, I suggest, the realisation that their children will never realise an aspiration which the post-war generation came to take for granted. And that’s why this debate is a good thing, because at least it’s happening beyond the ranks of the housing professionals and creating wider awareness of stark housing choices.

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That vile word

I was once in a meeting of a housing association which was discussing buying land and developing homes in Stevenage.  “I’ve been there” chirruped the Chief Executive, “it really is chavland”.  I have been in plenty of other meetings where senior housing folk have talked about their clients in disparaging terms.  I can recall one Housing Director in the north responding to a presentation on the Decent Homes programme by saying “There’s nothing wrong with our houses, it’s the people that need fixing”.  Fortunately most people who work in the profession are more enlightened and have a more balanced view and a better choice of words.
As a fan (mildly obsessive) of EastEnders I get outraged by every story line that involves any character visiting a council estate.  They are always the same.  High blocks, lifts not working, rubbish strewn everywhere, hoodies gathered menacingly outside, drug dealers hovering, noisy music blaring, people shouting, and in the middle of it some poor EE character suffering terrible deprivations, and desperate to get back to the square where decent folk live (now there’s the joke).  I used to start talks by asking people if they knew where the Jasmin Allen estate was.  Invariably they knew it was a bad bad place where police only went in big groups because it was run by gangs and the residents appeared to throw rocks at them on every visit.  Everyone thinks they’ve heard of it and the penny eventually drops that it was in The Bill, and was fictional.  I believe the filming was done on an estate in south London famous for being visited by Tony Blair on his first day as Prime Minister. 
I was got going on this topic by Polly Toynbee’s piece on ‘the vile word’ chav.  How right she is that the use of the word chav is just one part of a sustained effort to ‘foster the loathing of a feral underclass’ thereby diverting public resentment about economic and social failure from the rich to the poor.   
Polly quotes Baroness Hussein-Ece – a LibDem Equality and Human Rights Commissioner no less – who tweeted: “Help. Trapped in a queue in chav land. Woman behind me explaining latest EastEnders plot to mate while eating largest bun I’ve ever seen.”  And then of course this week we have Iain Duncan Smith, hand wringing in public and in private getting his department to place stories in the media – and picked up endlessly by the BBC – about the ‘top ten’ most ridiculous stories told by some benefit scroungers. 
For this government (LibDems should look suitably ashamed, I expect it from the Tories) and their supporters this is all part of the softening up exercise for the cuts.  Everyone’s on the fiddle, no-one wants to work, they’re breeding like rabbits, they get subsidised housing and don’t even pay the rent, so we should take their benefits away from them.  Even decent politicians run in fear from the stereotype and feel it is necessary to back some variant of ‘welfare reform’. 
The outcome is that it is so much easier to make cuts that really hurt people.  We have blogged about some of these before.  The latest news this week, from the heads of Britain’s main charities dealing with mental health, concerns the ‘devastating effects’ welfare reform (ie cuts) is having on the mental health of hundreds of thousands of people.      
The long title of Owen Jones’ book ‘Chavs’ being published this week is ‘the demonization of the working class’.  That’s what is really going on and council tenants get the worst of the stigma.  Some politicians and housing professionals need to read it and begin choosing their policies and words more carefully.

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Generation rent

I was suitably riled listening to Grant Shapps on World at One at lunchtime today, failing to answer sensible points and questions about the housing market from Tony Dolphin and Owen Hatherley.  His ability to avoid any question and reply in ludicrous blandishments never ceases to amaze me. 
According to Shapps, house price inflation only occurs under Labour.  He must have been too young to remember the boom under Thatcher – and even worse the bust when home owners were abandoned with vast amounts of negative equity, a huge number of repossessions – and no government help.  At least when the bust came in 2007 – and never forget it was an international banking bust whereas Thatcher’s was home grown – the Labour government took a series of important steps to protect tens of thousands of home owners, and the tenants of home owners, from foreclosure and homelessness.  
Shapps simply fails to deal with the issues raised by two important reports today.  The first, the one that grabbed the headlines, was from the Halifax who coined the phrase ‘Generation Rent’ to show that people no longer feel that they will be able to buy and that half of 20-45 year olds now think renting is the norm, similar to much of the rest of Europe. 
The second, Tony Dolphin and Matt Griffith’s serious piece of work for IPPR, Forever Blowing Bubbles? takes a long hard look at housing’s role in the UK economy with a proper historical perspective.  It makes a series of recommendations for mortgage regulation and the importance of stopping borrowers from thinking that housing market is a one-way bet.  They also make a strong case for reform of the private rented sector to provide a real alternative choice for those who need to hedge their move into home ownership.  As they say, “tenure rights are weak and the sector is poorly prepared for larger families and their needs. The professionalisation of the sector is much needed to make it the natural choice for those who wish to sidestep the risks of the owner-occupied housing market.”
At one level it seems obvious, but they demonstrate the importance of looking at the housing market as a single entity and not two markets of different tenures, arguing for “reform of the PRS to make it a less destabilising influence in the UK housing market. As we have seen, BTL (buy to let)  investment has too often been speculative, volatile and a cause of pro-cyclical price pressures in the housing market. Worse still, it appears to have cannibalised existing housing stock, led to a weak response in total housing supply, distorted existing supply incentives to encourage the overproduction of small city-centre flats, and driven out large institutional investors by pushing prices up beyond sensible yields.”
Owen Hatherley, whose interesting article on home ownership and renting is also published today, put it to Shapps that people who could no longer afford to become home owners were left at the mercy of the unregulated and insecure private rented sector, and therefore faced no real choice at all.  And that secure public sector tenancies should be a genuine option.  Exit stage right for the Minister, off on another ramble about some excruciatingly complex shared ownership option he’s invented (effectively a cut-back and rebranded Labour scheme). 
The Government avoids the big questions in housing policy today, especially how the housing market – and the vast majority of people live and will continue to live in market housing – can be made to work for people on low and moderate incomes.  There is a real opportunity for Labour to build on these interesting reports and come to some radical but sensible and appealing policies of its own as the Housing Policy Review takes shape.

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Housing policy crossroads

In the week that the Labour Party issued its call for evidence for the Housing Policy Review, guest blogger Paul Lusk works through some practical issues that policy-makers need to address.
Housing is at a crossroads. There is an opportunity such has not existed for many years to put housing policy in the UK onto a practical footing – one where choices can be made based on value for money, not returns on financial manipulation.
First, take owner occupation. Tax privileges have fuelled a fifty-year bubble in prices whereby owners have bought homes for personal use and then stumbled on a gold plated pension plan which successive generations have bought into. Society will be wary of ever again repeating the conditions that led to the 2007 crash. Owner occupation remains a preferred form of tenure with the benefits of control and security. Its origins lie in Chartism and the co-operative building societies that were early fruit of British socialism. We on the left can be proud of this legacy, and cherish its continuation. But no longer can home-buying be a one-way street to apparently assured riches.  An over-sudden readjustment of house values to their real worth would be catastrophic. The only realistic option is a standstill in housing values for a generation. It may be two decades before the adjustment is complete, but it’s the only way forward. The owner occupation boom is over, and a soft landing is now underway.
Now on social housing: by completing finance reforms that the Brown government started (but failed to complete), the coalition is stabilising the council housing sector at a shade under ten percent of the national stock. There will no longer be artificial incentives to shift council stock to housing associations, so any transfers will be about the strategic benefits of transferring control, not about financial manipulation. The seventeen percent of housing in the ‘social’ sector will settle down split roughly half and half between councils and housing associations.
That leaves the sector that provides homes for market rental. The so-called ‘private’ rented sector (housing associations, of course, also like to think of themselves as ‘private’) now provides nearly as many homes as the entire social sector. It is mainly geared around short-term lets by very small landlords, many of whom have bought homes as a speculative investment. Its capacity to provide good homes meeting housing need can be overlooked. It is now time to address the potential for a private sector that attracts more professional managers to deliver longer term homes with a recognised role in meeting housing need.
We need to think clearly about the whole issue of ‘housing need’ and subsidised rents. Generally we on the left know that social housing does not equal welfare housing but we have been reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion – that creating more lettings in the social sector does not equal meeting housing need. The private and the social sectors both have a role to play in meeting housing need, if this means enabling people to access essential accommodation which they could not otherwise afford. We need to think about both short term and long term housing needs, and the risks of defaulting into restricting the future choices of people whose short term housing need has been settled by the allocation of a social home. We need to think about whether the buying power of the state is properly rewarded by the current system of housing benefit with its array of poverty traps.
We also need to revive a central idea in the Cave review of social housing – making it easier to decouple housing services from stock ownership. Actually this applies also to the private sector if is to be made stronger and more efficient. The tax system heavily penalises landlords who devolve housing management to external providers, including tenant co-ops. The Tenant Services Authority abandoned its plans to empower tenants to ‘trigger’ a change in managing agent for reasons that it always refused to discuss, but the logic of removing the barriers to this separation of powers is irrefutable. All groups of long-term tenants should have the right to choose their own manager.

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Is Social Housing Welfare? (2)

Picking up Tony’s theme in our last post, our guest blogger seeks to answer the same question.
Monimbo
In housing circles there have been debates for years about the ‘role’ of council housing or more widely social housing, and of course these were given a further boost byJohnHills’ report in 2007. Before the election, as readers of red Brick are probably well aware, think tanks were falling over themselves to redefine – and usually narrow – social housing’s role.
But recently there have been even more worrying developments – typified by the media castigation of Bob Crowe for living in council housing which Steve covered in an earlier blog.  Nothing could be more typical of the recent trend than the disgraceful article by Mary Dejevsky about fraudulent tenancies, which called for all council tenancies to be ended on 1st April 2013 at which point there would be a sort of moratorium and people (presumably by now waiting outside the front gates of their houses) would have to justify their entitlement to a continued tenancy.
As CIH’s Abi Davies has pointed out, while of course social housing is part of the welfare state, it is not ‘welfare’ in the sense that it’s only available when needed like a hospital emergency service.  There has always been ambiguity about these issues in the media, most of whose commentators probably know and care little about social housing, but the recent trend is marked by a succession of coded comments about the sector by ministers, which are then regurgitated in the usual exaggerated ways by the media to produce a general picture of tenants who want to live in social housing long-term somehow being abusers of the system. 
Steve has previously written about the misleading term ‘tenancies for life’, which is part of this slur campaign, when security of tenure is simply about proper consumer protection.  CIH is about to publish a book, Housing and Inequality, which reminds readers that housing policy is about people’s homes and the home is a key ingredient of people’s happiness.  This is something deliberately overlooked in current debate about security of tenure, the need for more ‘mobility’ and the issue of ‘underoccupation’.  It is almost as if there are two housing systems, one in which owner-occupiers with adequate and secure incomes have an almost unthreatened dominion over their homes, while the more than one third of households who are not owners or who have only a tenuous grip on ownership have to live with much less security and less right to regard their house as their home at all. 
The other slur is to describe council housing (in particular) as ‘subsidised housing’.  There are several issues here. One is that all tenures are subsidised – the last government spent about £1bn in its last year subsidising owner-occupiers, for example.  Of course social tenants pay sub-market rents, partly because of historic grants and subsidies and partly because social landlords are non-profit.  However, if someone shops at the Co-op, we don’t describe his shopping as ‘subsidised’, do we?
Let me make a positive proposal to address this particular issue, at least as far as council housing is concerned. In a year’s time (April 2012) council housing becomes self-financing, and this presents a golden opportunity to kick the ‘subsidised’ tag.  The Treasury is forcing councils to take on £6.5bn of extra debt, not currently in the system, to compensate the Exchequer for the profits (yes, profits) it would have made if council housing had still be on its books.
Let’s make a virtue of this necessity.  Every Labour councillor, every council, the LGA, trade bodies like ARCH and the NFA, the CIH, trade unions, the four national tenants’ organisations – all should plan to publicly celebrate on 1st April 2012 the fact that council housing will have paid off its historic debts to government.  From April next year it will no longer be subsidised, and in fact it will be making a modest return to reinvest in the homes it provides.  Non-profit, yes, but subsidised – no!