By guest blogger Monimbo
Take a clutch of housing policies for which this government might like to be remembered: rewarding work, mobility for tenants looking for jobs, creating ‘flexible’ tenancies, allowing councils to set local lettings policies and decide who qualifies for housing, setting ‘Affordable’ rents and assessing potential tenants’ incomes, and cutting waiting lists. Apart from all being championed by Mr Shapps, most of these policies are now embodied in the Localism Act and all of them depend crucially on councils’ allocations processes if they are to be put into effect.
Tag: Allocations
A horrible cough and cold picked up in Liverpool meant a weekend with a box of lemsip, a
Henning Mankell novel and watching lots of football without feeling guilty. It was an error to switch on the computer and risk my temperature going even higher because the name Grant Shapps appeared in several places.
We are used to the parade of statistics about social housing claiming to show that it is
full of benefit dependent scroungers, caused so we are told by the policy of allocating housing according to housing need. Having set up the Aunt Sally to throw sticks at, the Tories are feeling confident enough to take more steps in their campaign to end social
housing. Westminster has elbowed its way to the front with their apparently reasonable new allocations policy giving significantly higher priority to employed people. Shapps was quick to congratulate them, saying that he plans to extend the policy nationally.
Westminster’s cabinet member for housing, Jonathan Glanz, said the scheme “acknowledges and rewards” people who are “contributing to the economy…. We have
got so many people not working that it gives worklessness an attractiveness as a way of life.” The ex-Guardian journalist David Henke has shown what the implications of rents policies might be in changing the the social composition of Lady Porter-land – a long term ambition of the Council – and Guthrie McKie, Labour’s housing spokesperson, said: “The Council is shifting its housing failures on to the most vulnerable people in our community. Due to its failure to provide sufficient social housing, the Council is doctoring its allocation policy… The Council is hell-bent on turning Westminster into a ‘no go’ area for the poor and low-income families.”
Shapps popped up in several papers, including the Telegraph where he said: “Up until now, access to council housing has too often been blocked for hard-working families who do the right thing. So I’m determined to end the something-for-nothing culture and replace it with a system that actively recognises individuals who work hard and play by the rules.”
A conspiracy theorist, which I am normally not, might see a link between this and the other housing story given major prominence in advance of the Tory Party Conference – giving new impetus to the Right to Buy by massively increasing discounts. The link is that people on benefits are highly unlikely to exercise the Right to Buy.
It has been a feature of council housing since the RTB was introduced in 1980 that, as council homes are bought by tenants who work, the proportion of remaining tenants who are economically inactive rises. Many buyers still live in the same home on the same estate with the same social composition, and others have sold on to new occupiers who could afford to buy them out. But the headline statistics show that council tenants are less likely to be in work, therefore more reform is justified because the tenure has failed.
Shapps’ thumbs were itching to tell us all about it on Twitter: “The right to buy is back” proclaimed The Great Builder. And he provided a helpful link to a CLG webpage of questions and answers.
You might think given everything that has previously been said about council tenants that there is no-one left, apart from Frank Dobson, with anything other than housing benefit to live on. But to justify the new RTB policy the Government has to employ reverse spin: suddenly there are plenty of tenants earning money through work who may have a bit to
spend. CLG tell us that “38% of social tenants are well-off enough not to need Housing Benefit and over 800,000 tenants are in full-time work. Nearly 60% of social housing tenants who are couples with children do not claim housing benefit. Therefore many social tenants will be able to meet the cost of the mortgage after allowing for the discount.”
Pass the lemsip. Perhaps Kurt Wallender has the answers.
Ed Miliband and Caroline Flint have suggested that being employed should be a factor in social housing allocations. It has been suggested that this is an effective ‘message’ to the ‘squeezed middle’, which I commented on in a previous blog. But, whatever the message it conveys, does it stand up as a housing policy?
Guest blogger Sheila Spencer takes up the debate.
There’s been some debate within the Labour Party, at senior levels, and on the pages of Inside Housing, about giving priority to people on the basis of their employment status, and it seems to me that some people are missing the point a bit. Ed Miliband, for example, has pledged to make it easier for voluntary workers and the employed to gain council housing, to fit with the idea that the welfare state should reward those who contribute. But what about those who can’t yet contribute in this way?
I know that some councils have already adopted this policy: Manchester, for example, gives extra priority on the basis of someone in the household being in work or contributing
to their community. Manchester’s allocations policy says that the idea of this is to encourage people to access work. But the person in work has to be employed for 16 hours or more, and must have been in work for at least 9 months in the last year – so it is not
encouraging people to move into work, just giving priority to those who already have work.
It seems to me that this puts those who are out of work and without anywhere to live at a considerable disadvantage. If you are homeless, you are fairly unlikely to be able to get a job until you have an address; and if you are living in temporary accommodation, in most cases the housing and support costs stop people from being able to take on a job whilst they are living there. So this policy puts an additional barrier in the way. It’s really
a Catch 22 – you don’t have priority to get rehoused because you’re not working, but you can’t apply for work because you won’t be able to afford to have anywhere to live in the meantime.
There is one glimmer of light for people in temporary accommodation: many people are now getting involved in some way as a volunteer, as part of “meaningful activity” and tangible support to move on with their lives. But Manchester’s scheme seems to restrict the community contribution to the area you want to be housed in – expecting, I would guess, that this is as part of a neighbourhood or community group there. Again, this could exclude people who are not yet part of a community.
I prefer the schemes which give people an incentive for looking for work by awarding priority for rehousing, or priority for particular places, to those who have pledged to get into work, or training or education once they have somewhere to live, and which supports them to do so. So those who have only just got themselves into a position where they can look for work are able to do that with a steady home to live in. Isn’t that a responsible way
to look at offering social housing? And how can we justify rewarding people who take responsibility for their lives whilst excluding those at the bottom of the heap, and in effect, taking on policies which keep them there?
I think Labour has got into a bad place on welfare reform. It’s not just since Ed Miliband became Leader, it developed during the Labour years in government. I think it is driven by the overwhelming dominance of the Daily Mail agenda of wild exaggeration about benefit cheats and scroungers and how this feeds into opinion polls. We have not found a way to counter the hugely successful tactics of the right in turning public anger about failing economic performance into hostility against the poor and not the rich. Why is the country not up in arms against the bankers and the mega-rich – the people who run the system, benefit most from the system, who have lined their pockets in the most extraordinary way over the past decade and failed everyone else whilst they were doing it?
On Monday former political advisor to Tony Blair John McTernan was on Daily Politics. Commenting on Ed Miliband’s speech, he said that the Leader was ‘missing symbolic policies that indicate which side he’s on’, adding: ‘If he’s serious about saying if you get a job you should be looked at more seriously for council housing rather than simply council housing being for welfare recipients, I think that’s a big signal, it’s a signal that if you get on, if you better yourself, the state will be behind you, I think that’s a much more powerful signal than anything he’s said on policy before.’
This repeats a myth about council housing, which isn’t and never has been (but will be if Shapps gets his way) allocated according to income or employment status but according to defined housing need, it fails to acknowledge why most people receive benefits (unemployment, illness, disability, retirement) or to explain why they are somehow undeserving of a home. It accepts the ‘welfare recipient’ stigmatisation in its entirety. Like the use of the term ‘lifetime tenancy’ when there is no such thing, the term ‘welfare recipient’ carries a package of prejudices and negative images, and has become a classic stereotype. Even Andrew Neil seemed pleased with this contribution.
Ed Miliband’s speech was more balanced than the spin suggested, as Tony described in his earlier post, but it’s the spin that bothers me. He accepted that there was a ‘terrible shortage’ of social housing and that ‘it will be a key test of the next Labour government that we address this issue’. But the sterotype still crept in a roundabout way. ‘People who give something back to their communities – for example people who volunteer or who work’ should be given higher priority in allocations. But it seems to me to accept the media presumption about who lives in social housing and that there is something deficient about them compared to those that ‘give something back’.
More than half of social tenants are retired or economically inactive for reasons other than unemployment. Of the remainder, the vast majority are actually in work or full time education. People entering social housing are often enabled to work for the first time because rents are affordable and the transition to in-work housing benefit is managed better. The level of volunteering on some social housing estates is extraordinary, something we should celebrate, they put Cameron’s prissy big society full of lady bountifuls to shame. The vast majority of tenants are already ‘responsible’ just like the vast majority of home owners and private tenants are.
Ed makes the point that he wants to reward contribution and not punish people. But there is shortage and the people who get punished are those that won’t get a home as a result of a change in priorities – your grannie who needs sheltered housing, your cousin with a severe medical condition who can’t stay in a private bedsit in a shared house, your son or daughter who has had a breakdown and needs supported housing, your sister with 3 kids evicted from her home because she can’t keep up with the mortgage. None of them working and none of them able to volunteer. These are not tearjerkers, this is the real life business of allocating social housing.
John McTernan rightly said that Labour can’t win unless it is seen to represent a wider coalition of people. I am less sure about his view that we were seen as the party of lone parents and immigrants (lone parents and immigrants won’t agree). I think Labour came to be despised by a lot of natural supporters because of Iraq and because of Labour’s association with the rich – not the poor. We no longer looked like the party of ordinary Britain. The parties on yachts in the Med, the moth-like fascination with the wealthy, our soft line on the bankers and the undeserving rich. Not forgetting the mad in-fighting which diverted the government from the ordinary issues facing people.
We fall into the hands of the forces of darkness every time we play the undeserving poor game, every time we add to the negativity around ‘welfare recipients’ without explaining who they are. Every time we fail to challenge the belief that ‘the housing benefit bill was out of control’ rather than point out that rents have gone up and caseload has increased due to the resurgence of the private rented sector. If, as John McTernan seemed to me to be saying, you can only get the middle class on board by dumping on the poor, then the game is up for the left and every variety within it. But if he meant it when he said that we need to have policies attractive to people in the middle as well as at the bottom, then there is enough common ground to unite us all. Because Labour should be on the side of both.