Shirley Porter, responsible for the ‘Homes for Votes’ scandal in the 1980s – what the Law Lords called ‘a deliberate, blatant, and dishonest use of public powers’ that amounted to ‘political corruption’ – would never have been brought to book if new Audit proposals by the Tory government had been in place during her reign in Westminster in the 1980s.
Some people think that the Tory Party has never forgiven the Audit Commission for the tenacity they showed in bringing their brightest council star Porter to justice and causing huge embarrassment to the Thatcher/Major governments. The Tories nationally never apologised for what was done in their Party’s name.
Now Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps have proposed ending the right of electors to raise ‘objections’ to the local authority’s accounts with the council’s official Auditor. They say it is ‘outdated’ and ‘over-burdensome’ on council tax payers – well, not in Westminster, where £12m was recouped from Porter (and it should have been £40m, the amount set by the Law Lords in their judgement). Removing the right to object is contradictory to both their localism policy and their repeated statements that they wish to devolve power not just to local government but to the people.
Porter’s gerrymander in Westminster would not have been exposed if it had not been for outstanding work by opposition councillors and others in the community who were concerned about the council’s housing policy as described here and here and here. But it was the process by which local electors could raise a formal objection to the council’s accounts that ensured that an initially sceptical Auditor was required to look into the matter; investigations that led to the most damning report ever issued about a local authority. Moreover, it was the independence of the Audit Commission standing behind the Auditor that ensured that the case was brought to a conclusion – and it took more than a decade. There was a lot to withstand – political pressure to have the matter dropped, a personally offensive campaign against the Auditor, and criticism of the high cost of the forensic enquiry (dawn raids on city hall, tens of thousands of documents and dozens of interviews) and the court cases.
Pickles’ and Shapps’ proposals are contained in a CLG consultation document on the ‘Future of local public audit’. It sounds dull but there is a lot in this consultation of concern to anyone with an interest in local government and its probity.
The consultation paper says that “The right to object to the accounts was first introduced more than 150 years ago, at a time when the auditor was the only individual to whom an elector could raise issues of concern.”
But in Westminster, less than 25 years ago, the council wouldn’t listen to the accusations that there was gerrymandering going on, the government wouldn’t listen, and the Tory party certainly wouldn’t listen. The only route that worked for local people was to raise an objection to the District Auditor, who took a serious and independent view of his role in tackling improper behaviour. This right should be retained.
Category: Uncategorized
It’s a complicated business, housing. Those poor souls at the Policy Exchange and their pollsters YouGov apparently can’t tell the difference between social housing and council housing. Despite generating alarming headlines (‘Public backs limit to social housing areas’ – thanks, Inside Housing) a glance at the detail of the poll (and the base data, entitled ‘Fairness’ presumably with a touch of irony) shows just a little confusion. Although the discussion in the Policy Exchange report ‘Just Deserts’ is about social housing, the actual questions asked were about council housing. Just as well they didn’t wander into the fantasy world of ‘Affordable Rent’?*
Strange questions they were too. “People should not be offered council houses that are worth more than the average house in their local authority” Agree or disagree? Despite requiring considerable knowledge – what is the average, how do council houses compare in value, might there be a different answer for housing associations, does this ever happen in reality? – the question is really quite leading. So no surprise that a majority say they agree. It tells us very little about public attitudes to council houses, and nothing whatsoever about public attitudes to housing association properties to rent (because they weren’t asked about that).
And the second question was “People should not be offered council housing in expensive areas” Agree or disagree? Also rather leading and confusing.
This selection of questions tells me more about Policy Exchange and the point they wanted to make in the first place. I suspect they know – and if they don’t, YouGov should – that if you ask positive questions about mixed and balanced communities you get very different answers. But that wouldn’t fit PEx’s obsession with contradicting the pro-equality conclusions in The Spirit Level, would it?
*PS I’ve started calling ‘Affordable Rent’ SCARE tenancies – standing for So-Called Affordable REnt. Will it catch on?
The Welfare Reform Bill, currently in Committee Stage in the House of Commons (follow the debates here), contains many provisions which will have a profound effect on the housing opportunities of people on low incomes in the years to come.
One of the changes that has attracted little attention is designed to tackle under-occupation in the social rented sector. From 2013 housing benefit will be reduced if the household is of working age (the limit is rising from 60 to 65) and is deemed to be living in accommodation which is too big for their needs. An ‘underoccupying’ claimant will lose a proportion of their HB, which will no longer meet their current housing costs, with an average loss of £13 per week.
The government’s own impact assessment estimates that 670,000 social tenants will be affected, around one-third of all HB claimants in the sector. In the north, between 40-50% of tenants will be affected, in London around 20%. This is an extraordinary number of people.
Affected tenants will face a ‘choice’: make up the shortfall from their other income, take in a lodger, or move to smaller accommodation in either the social or the private rented sector. Even if only half of those affected decide to move, pity the poor landlord in the north when 1 in 5 of all tenants knock on the door asking for an urgent move to smaller accommodation. In London, additional transfer requests from 10% of tenants would swamp the housing allocations system.
Nearly 4 in 5 of those affected currently ‘underoccupy’ their homes by just one bedroom. They are hardly evil – most people with one spare bedroom do not recognise themselves as underoccupiers, and often the last bedroom is small anyway – but they will lose £11 per week on average. Over recent years policy had moved strongly towards recognising that the real challenge in underoccupation is to tackle cases where there are 2 or more spare bedrooms, where there is most to gain. Under the new rules, a family of 6 with 2 sons and 2 daughters living in a 4 bedroom property would be deemed to be underoccupiers, and would receive the arbitrary HB ‘fine’.
The loss of an average of £13 per week might not be noticed by the Cabinet of millionaires, but this is a huge sum of money to anyone on a very low income. The policy’s only chance of success will be if there is a supply of smaller homes to transfer into. Yet the government’s impact assessment admits that there are simply not enough smaller housing association and council properties available.
The policy is the opposite of the ‘moral hazard’ – where people are insulated from the consequences of their own actions. In this case people will face the consequences of the government’s actions with no reasonable course of action open to them to avoid or pre-empt or respond to the change in policy. It is coercive and in a nasty way: if they cannot move, they will face deliberate impoverishment with no way out.
Will the policy achieve its stated aim and save any money? Labour shadow welfare reform minister Karen Buck thinks not. Tenants who are unable or unwilling to move will fall into rent arrears, with the risk of eviction (and loss to the landlord) triggering the costs associated with a rise in homelessness. The government thinks that some will move into the private rented sector, where rents are higher even for smaller properties, so the cost will go up not down.
And in a final irony, the policy will not even address, indeed will avoid, the biggest single issue in the underoccupation debate – which is what to do with underoccupiers of retirement age whose family has moved on.
For our previous post on the Tories’ market solution to underoccupation, click here.
One of the more offensive acts of this government has been to put the Equalities Act 2010 up as a topic for debate on its ‘Red Tape Challenge’ website.
Housing organisations have been at the forefront of promoting good policy in equalities and diversity for many years – the latest evidence being CIH’s publication this month of its guide to delivering housing services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender customers – and should be ready to make the case for the retention of the Act in its entirety, together with its supporting regulations.
The 2010 Equalities Act – summarised here – pulled together the previous diverse strands of discrimination and equalities law into a coherent whole and added new duties and responsibilities. It harmonised the legislation to provide a single approach wherever possible.
Extensions included the new duty on public bodies to consider socio-economic disadvantage when making strategic decisions, wider definitions of discrimination, harassment and victimisation, stronger duties to help eliminate conduct which the Act prohibits, to advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between people who share a relevant protected characteristic and people who do not, the use of positive action, amendments to family property law to remove discriminatory provisions and additional statutory property rights for civil partners.
What has caused so much offence is that all the other topics posted on the Red Tape Challenge website seem to involve changes to regulations whereas the equalities topic invites comment on the entire Act, which is of course primary legislation only recently passed by Parliament.
That is not to say that the other topics are unimportant – the website reads like a list of all the things where more not less regulation is probably needed (eg Major Hazard Industries, Biodiversity, Pensions).
It is worth a look at the comments contributed to the Red Tape website on equalities. It is pleasing to note the relative lack of hateful comments (compared to many website discussions on this topic) and the many positive and supportive comments.
So what is the government up to? The equalities website says that the government’s approach is as follows: “We do not want public bodies to have to show people these things: how they worked out whether their rules and services were fair; what they looked at when they checked that their rules and services were fair; who they involved when they were working out their equality goals; how they were going to check whether they had met their goals. We will not make public bodies tell us how they will work out how they are going to check that they are meeting their goals. This is because it will not help public bodies make equality better.”
Accusations of ‘red tape’ and ‘box ticking’ are often little more than a back door attack on the purpose of the regulations themselves. I suspect this is exactly what is happening on equalities. The whole housing sector should be watchful.
I branched out my blogging career this week, and published a post on the excellent Southern Front. A lot of attention has been paid to what happens in London as the housing changes kick-in, but more needs to be paid to the impact on the areas where people will move to. There will be inevitable pressure on services as poorer families move to Basildon, Hastings, Harlow, Grays. But there will be a great deal of rapid demographic and social change in local communities and in the past Labour has not always articulated well people’s worries about such changes. Full post below:
Migration from London is a housing time bomb for the South
David Cameron tried to make electoral headway last week with his much publicised speech on immigration. But migration isn’t just about foreigners. In the next few years, towns in the south and east are going to see far more new arrivals from London than they will from overseas, as the government’s housing policies push poorer families out of the capital.
From Boris Johnson to Polly Toynbee, there’s been plenty of coverage about what will happen to London when social housing and benefits changes bite – the end of mixed communities in the capital.
Too little attention has been paid to what happens in the places where people move to: the towns and districts around London, which are some of Labour’s key battlegrounds in winning back the south.
People have an instinctive aversion to the overblown rhetoric which some have used to describe these changes, such as ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’ or ‘final solutions’. But nevertheless, we should be clear on the scale of what’s going on.
London Councils, the body representing the 32 London Boroughs, undertook a study using DWP’s own figures showing that London would see 82,000 families forced out of their homes because of the cuts to housing benefit in the private sector. That’s the equivalent of every household in Basildon and ten thousand more on top, packing their bags and hitting the road.
That’s just in the private rented sector. In social housing, the government is pushing housing association rents up to 80% of the market rate. That makes social housing massively more expensive in London than in surrounding towns and counties. To take one example: 80% of market rent for a three bed social home in Bethnal Green in Tower Hamlets is £416 a week, which is £238 more than in Harlow or £256 more than Crawley per week.
Many families in need of housing will find their only choice is to get on a waiting list outside of London or rent privately in south eastern towns.
These new arrivals will be the families on the lowest incomes, placing greater pressures on shrinking public services in towns around London. There will be even greater pressure on social housing. Campaigners know the importance of housing as a source of anger and frustration across key seats in the south, and how easily it is linked to issues of race and immigration. These problems may get a lot worse in the coming years.
Families moving out from London will disproportionately be from ethnic minority groups. Anyone familiar with the BNP’s campaigns across the east and south east will know that the campaigns were made credible by something that people did see around them; a rapid increase in ethnic minority families. This was, in many cases, the result of people being re-housed temporarily out of London while major regeneration schemes (for example in Canning Town) began or while they waited for social housing to become available in their home borough.
That will now take place on a far larger scale but this time, with no right of return.
This will be a big challenge for activists, councillors and candidates. We need to raise early the concrete concerns about new pressures on housing and public services. We should put the Tory MPs and council leaders on the spot: do they think these policies are right? Have they lobbied their government for resources to manage the change? What provision are they making for housing, schools and health?
And, we must also be the first to articulate people’s legitimate concerns about the nature, speed and scale of change in their community. We didn’t do that in the past as part of the immigration debate and neglected to address the feelings people have about change they can’t control and the sense of powerlessness that can create. We can’t afford now to be caught flat-footed on an issue that the right and far-right can capitalise on.
At the same time, we need to be advocates of those forced out of London and make them part of the campaign. Active local Labour parties are well placed to see first where new families arrive, what their needs are and how best to engage with them. We should help foster through local institutions, community and faith groups the integration of those moving into south eastern towns from London – any separation will only breed distrust.
In the south, Labour should tackle this issue head on and make it a key campaign which unites existing communities and those leaving London. It should be a campaign against a Tory government’s market fundamentalism that thinks nothing of uprooting tens of thousands of people from their families, neighbourhoods and jobs and forcing them into areas and communities which are not well placed to receive them.
The Tories seem to have invented the New Homes Bonus in a panic when they realised that stripping away Labour’s regional infrastructure for housebuilding would leave them with no policy at all, see our previous comment here. But the NHB is proving even more bizarre than we predicted.
Yesterday, Shadow Housing Minister Alison Seabeck published her research on the distribution of the Bonus, showing the wild variations in payments across the country. The research, confirmed by the House of Commons Library, shows that Richmondshire, in William Hague’s constituency, qualifies for a New Homes Bonus of £56,449 for adding just nine homes to their housing stock, whilst Scarborough is entitled to just £7,356 despite adding nearly three times as many. For each additional home, Richmondshire will receive 2033% more in New Homes Bonus money than will Scarborough.
Rather like the general cuts to local authorities, the richer parts of the country do better than the poorer parts. The 10 least deprived local authorities in the country receive over 20% more in NHB funding for each new home than do the 10 most deprived authorities. This matters because in future years the bonus will be funded by ‘top-slicing’ the main council formula grant – so some of the country’s most deprived areas will lose out on grant in order to pay large bonuses to wealthier areas – and by 2016 the cost will be £1.2bn each year! Research by the National Housing Federation indicated that the net impact of this policy will see the North losing £100m in funding each year.
Here are Alison’s examples:
|
New Homes Bonus ‘Losers’ |
New Homes Bonus ‘Winners’ |
||
|
Local Authority |
NHB per Home |
Local Authority |
NHB per Home |
|
Scarborough |
£294.24 |
Elmbridge |
£2,080.05 |
|
South Lakeland |
£496.96 |
West Berkshire |
£2,082.19 |
|
Preston |
£783.84 |
Three Rivers |
£2,122.85 |
|
Barrow-in-Furness |
£972.08 |
Chiltern |
£3,694.00 |
|
Burnley |
£990.37 |
Richmondshire |
£6,272.16 |
Red Brick was not the only one to comment on the government’s social mobility strategy. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian also had a lot to say on the subject, but reserved much of his venom for council housing, saying: “It’s security of housing tenure that impedes economic migration and ossifies divides.”
This annoyed our guest bloggerMonimbo, who writes:
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins appears to place most of the blame for Britain’s lack of social mobility at the doors of social housing, and the security it provides (6 April). This is by no means the first time that social housing has been blamed for society’s ills, but Jenkins excels in attaching so much prominence to security of tenure and the availability of housing benefit. Yet his own article shows some of the perversity of his argument. While calling for more mixed communities, he decries the fact that a well-paid trade union leader can still occupy social housing. Isn’t Bob Crow an example of the kind of person needed by the ‘integrated mixed communities’ that Jenkins says he wants?
But the real problem is the fault he finds with security of tenure. Whereas private tenants can be evicted after six months, social tenants can only be evicted through the courts, though of course they can and do move of their own accord. It is ironic that most proponents of reducing security, which is a highly valued feature of social housing, would never dream of applying the same remedy to themselves. Take secure tenure away and the result would be many more of the nightmare situations which Jenkins describes. Yes, these conditions do exist in some unpopular estates where tenants vote with their feet and there is little sense of community, but these are in a minority. Just consider the impact of higher turnover on the local state schools which he mentions, if pupils living in their catchment areas were forced to move regularly in the interests of ‘mobility’.
If Jenkins is unconvinced, let him ask about the effects of the highly mobile population that tends to occupy many council properties that were sold under the right to buy, and are now owned by absentee landlords. In many cases, these are rented out to transient workers who move in and out and have no stake in the area. Often poorly managed, they can be the focus of local problems and yet local authorities have fewer powers to tackle them than they do with households in secure tenancies.
While Jenkins is right to say there are not enough mixed communities, he doesn’t say how ending security of tenure would remedy this. Nor does he recognise the intense pressure put on social landlords since the 1980s, through the failure to build enough homes and the need to concentrate ever poorer families in those available. He calls social housing ‘subsidised’ but which tenure isn’t? – the last government spent over £1 billion annually subsidising home owners, for example, while council housing rents now pay about £100 million in surpluses back to the Treasury.
For half a century council housing catered for a range of income groups, and many of those struggling to become home owners would welcome it now – if there was sufficient available. Of the 1.7 million households on council waiting lists, many are private tenants with very limited security. Government figures show that fewer than one in five social tenants would prefer to be a homeowner; the number preferring to be an insecure private tenant is of course far lower.
The links between bad housing and ill-health always seem obvious to anyone who has worked in the housing sector. Although controlling the spread of disease was a major factor in the surge of interest in the housing conditions of the working classes a century ago, even the advent of ‘joined-up policy making’ in modern times has failed to establish the case that spending on improving housing could be an important factor in preventing ill-health and reducing the requirement to spend on health care.
If your job involves being in and out of other people’s homes you tend to see the effects of bad housing daily but it still seems to be a poorly evidenced area of policy. It’s good then that there has been more interest in this topic recently.
A recent report by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology pulls together a lot of evidence from multiple sources and shows in particular the importance of the Decent Homes programme. Conditions linked to non-decent housing include: cardiovascular diseases; respiratory diseases; rheumatoid arthritis; depression and anxiety; nausea and diarrhoea; infections; allergic symptoms; hypothermia; physical injury from accidents; food poisoning. The report also points out that “Proposals to stop providing social tenancies for life may also decrease security of tenure which could lead to an increase in mental health problems”. Overall, the report says, the detrimental effect of poor housing costs the Health Service over £600m a year.
Yesterday, Shelter Cymru published research conducted by themselves and the Building Research Establishment (BRE) which estimated that poor housing costs the NHS in Wales around £67m a year. It calculates the costs to the NHS of treating accidents and illnesses caused by problems in the home such as unsafe steps, electrical hazards, excessive cold, damp and mould. If you include other disbenefits of poor housing, such as children’s poor educational attainment and reduced life chances, the wider bill to society is estimated to be even greater at around £168m a year. Shelter say this is the first time a definitive financial cost has been placed on poor housing, emphasising that the economic case for improving bad housing in Wales is as strong as the moral case. They also point to the progress made in housing under Aneurin Bevan, when housing policy was firmly located in the health department.
The report estimates that the payback time in health care savings of bringing all housing up to acceptable condition would be 22 years, but that in some areas it would be much less, for example investment in addressing dangerous stairs would be paid back in 5.7 years.
Taking the argument one step further, the resident-controlled housing association WECH has done ground-breaking research showing the beneficial effect that empowerment can have on well-being, thereby reducing ill-health. Their research shows that, although WECH residents experience high levels of deprivation, they are happier and more engaged because they collectively own their estates and feel a much stronger sense of belonging to their neighbourhood.
As Labour embarks on its housing policy review, it will be important to avoid a silo approach to housing policy. The external benefits of housing investment deserve to be at the top of the agenda.
It looks like Boris is going to be able to boast that he hit his target of 50,000 affordable homes built over the course of his term.
Of course, we can point out that many of those homes were in the pipeline from Ken’s days anyway; he stretched the length of his original pledge from three years to four years; and that much of the money came from the Labour government’s investment in housing during the recession. But, the claim will pass muster and get in the press without much criticism.
He’s got a problem however with the next four years as he prepares for the election campaign. It’s going to be very obvious that under this government affordable housing in London is going to plummet. Housing associations are putting in their bids now for how many homes they’ll build over the course of the next four years. By late this year, we’ll know the four-year programmes of London’s biggest housing associations, be able to add them up and see (I predict) a fairly grim picture for affordable house building in the capital.
The current profile for new affordable homes is in the graph below. The government’s programme won’t pull it out of this nosedive.
With supply only coming from housing associations, the Mayor will struggle to explain how he’ll increase those numbers and from where. And worse for a Mayor who made so much of family housing, we’re likely to see very few larger homes in those figures.
This will be an open goal for Ken Livingstone. And Ken will run heavily on the fact that the new ‘affordable housing’ isn’t actually affordable in many parts of London, especially where there is most housing need.
So, what will Boris do? He can campaign and lobby for more cash/help for London. He may seek to portray himself as the one who can get concessions from central government, in a way Ken can’t. Or, he can distance himself from the government, criticise the policy and join the voices showing the damage being done in the capital. He has plenty of form on this, but will a belated criticism work? The one thing I can’t see is him defending government policy and making the case for it.
The task for Ken will be to explain how he’d do better given the policies of the current government and the state of the public finances. And if he wins he’ll actually have to do something about it.
As one who rails against the constant mischaracterisation of council housing and council tenants in the media (and by some housing professionals), watching a serious but entertaining history of council housing was a joy.
Michael Collins’ ‘The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House’ not only traced the history of council housing from the building of the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch in 1893 to the demolition of the Heygate Estate in 2011 but did so through a riveting mix of analysis, archive footage and personal histories. It’s a highly recommended watch for anyone with an interest in housing, available on i-player.
I thought Collins made some excellent points in a thread running throughout the programme about the importance of creating neighbourhoods and not just estates of homes, what he called the sense of belonging, and his description of Aneurin Bevan’s concept of a classless new society based on council housing. His criticism of the government’s move towards temporary tenancies was all the more powerful in this context – it will destroy, as he said, the sense of permanence that gives people a reason to make an investment in their homes and estates.
Jimmy McGovern made the point forcefully – despite being a tenant, ‘it was our house not the councils, that’s why we looked after it…… Just because it’s a council house doesn’t mean it’s not yours.’ Tell that to the government and the modern providers who see tenants as transitory occupiers of their (the landlords’) homes.
I also agree with Collins that utopian architecture, government subsidies for high rise, and jerry building caused huge problems, helped spoil the reputation of council estates as places to live and failed the ‘sense of belonging’ test. I would also add bad housing management to the list.
Where I depart from Collins is in his analysis of the impact of the 1977 homelessness legislation. It is not accurate to say it ‘jettisoned policies that favoured locals’ or that it led to the rehousing of ‘itinerant’ people. The vast majority of people rehoused were on local waiting lists and qualified under local connection rules, and having worked as a senior manager in one of the boroughs with the greatest numbers of homeless people, I think his claims that the system was abused are wildly exaggerated.
Of course there were changes on the demand side – as home ownership became an option for many, and as private renting contracted – but for council housing these were less important than what happened to supply. Collins says rightly that Thatcher passed the ‘death sentence’ on council housing, but he does it only in passing. It was the collapse in supply, starting after the 1976 IMF crisis but hugely intensified under Thatcher, that changed the nature of council housing and ended Bevan’s dream. The sector was made to become, as some Tories acknowledged then and some still do today, a residual tenure moving rapidly towards the American model, and with the same consequences.
Nor is it all bad today, or even normally bad. There are millions of people happily living in council homes at affordable rents, with the security of tenure that helps give them that crucial sense of belonging. And there are millions more who would be only too delighted to receive an offer to join them.
See another blogger’s view of the programme – Jules Birch of Inside Housing – here.