Cover Story: Monumental failings or deliberate design?

The house that ministers made

With welfare reform, Ministers appear to be rather more concerned about the lifestyle ‘choices’ of the poor rather than focused on fixing Britain’s broken housing market. That’s ironic, given it’s not the poor that got us into this mess, but the policy failings of politicians these past 30 years 

By Mark Cantrell

First published in Northern Housing 

WE'RE hearing a lot about choices these days. Choices and consequences, not to mention duties and responsibilities; there’s a strong whiff of a new moralism in the air and much of it appears to concern the much-derided ‘denizens’ of the country’s social housing estates.

If we’re hearing a lot about choices and consequences, we’re also hearing much about the abysmal state of the housing market; the two are not entirely unconnected. Crude as it may sound, there is some truth to say there are aspects of today’s housing market that are to all intents and purposes dysfunctional by design.

David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation (NHF), has already called the housing market “dysfunctional” – “failing, even failed” – and that applies across all tenures. Writing on his blog back in August, he was moved to make the impassioned plea: “How bad does it have to get before the nation comes to its senses and realises that our housing market is n a complete mess? How bad does it have to get before we understand that housing is absolutely key to economic policy and economic growth? How bad does it have to get before housing finally becomes a political priority?”

The poor man has been banging the drum for years, the message simple but to the point: “build more houses” and his is not exactly some lonely voice in the wilderness. The political class just doesn’t seem to get it, but then again, maybe they do. That’s the problem.

“Over the last 30 years the failure to build the homes we need has left this country with a housing crisis which has resulted in a shortage of 142,000 homes every year,” said Grainia Long, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). “Housebuilding is currently at its lowest peacetime levels since 1924, if we do not do something to reverse this trend the impact will be far further afield than just a shortage of houses.”

Indeed. We’re already living with some of the implications of a failure to build sufficient homes; it’s one of the reasons that the social housing tenure has come to increasingly – but not yet exclusively – cater for the neediest and most vulnerable members of society. The shortage of social housing has helped to concentrate and exacerbate the many social ills – of worklessness and social exclusion, of poverty and benefit dependency – that currently provokes our politicians’ moral outrage.

For all the latest reform-minded hand-wringing about the plight of the poor, it’s not the alleged ‘lifestyle choices’ of ‘willfully’ workless benefit dependents that has brought social housing to its knees – nor did social housing tenants break the country’s wider housing market. Yet a casual observer might be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Housing professionals are well-versed in the very real social problems many of their tenants face; they are also wearily familiar with the casual quips about Shameless and the portrayal of social housing as a breeding ground for ‘feckless, workshy layabouts’. Such caricatures only rankle all the more, given the concentration of the vulnerable and the very needy within the haven of social housing; the collateral damage, one might say, of decisions made in the distant corridors and meetings rooms of Westminster and Whitehall.

At the time of writing, conference season has just drawn to a close. From the general thrust of much of the political rhetoric over welfare reform and social housing there is a clear re-emergence of the concept of the deserving versus the undeserving poor – and it’s a concept that is crossing party divides. Social housing is caught in the thick of it. Worse still, perhaps, the fate of the tenure, as much as the tenants, is up for grabs as the prejudices of the well-heeled work their way not only into policy – but legislation and practice.

Once again, work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith took to the pulpit to preach the sermon of welfare reform. The man who founded the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) seven years ago has raised eyebrows, expectations, and respect, for his efforts to get to grips with the host of complex and protracted social problems, but as his welfare reform programme progresses he has also provoked much disquiet over the potential implications. Duncan Smith the social realist is clashing with Duncan Smith the politician now that he is back in the business of government, leading to some rather dystopian portrayals of the sector’s inhabitants, especially in the wake of the Summer riots.

In his speech to the party faithful in Manchester, Duncan Smith spoke of the “steady rise of an underclass in Britain” that is characterised by “chaos and dysfunctionality” and “governed by a perverse set of values”. Moreover, he spoke of a “damaging culture” that “generates growing pockets of deprivation”.

Were it not so tragic, it might be amusing for the crass irony of it all, for his words might equally well describe the prevailing political culture and policy decisions that have combined to shape the catastrophe that is today’s housing market. A lot of the problems are the result of what might be called the law of unintended consequences, not to mention old-fashioned human fallibility, but it
would be disingenuous to dismiss elements of deliberate intent these past 30 years that have accumulated to land us in this mess today.

More and more people can’t buy a home, whether because prices have left them behind, or they can’t get a deposit, mortgage finance or both; private sector rents are bubbling up beyond the means of low and middle income groups; and social rented and council provided homes are tightly rationed after years of sell-offs and decline in replacement newbuild; some five million are on the waiting lists for a social or council home and cannot get one; and for years not enough new homes across all tenures have been built to meet a growing demand.

Now, under the direction of current Government policy, the ‘pincer move’ of welfare reforms and the introduction of the new Affordable Rent programme seems likely to price out the very people who need affordable housing, even when the allocation process is opened up beyond those in direst need to favour those who are working. One is tempted to suggest that politicians do have a sense of humour after all. Yet there is nothing remotely amusing about the implications of a steadily worsening housing crisis.

Faced with the scale of the problems, the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (Z2K) wants to see a Royal Commission on Housing to address the “intrinsic inequality” in the provision of housing, which it says produce “poor, sometimes even disastrous, social and economic outcomes”.

“It is apparent that the UK has a financial crisis of its own making... None of the rise in the price of houses or rents is the responsibility of housing benefit claimants, but they are being punished for the errors of successive governments by the requirements to pay that balance of rents above arbitrary caps on housing benefit out of means tested wages or unemployment benefits, or be threatened with eviction or consequent misery,” said the organisation.

“There has to be something wrong with 30 years of housing policy which produces a huge bailout of the banks, a consequently severe public finance deficit, a very large housing benefit bill, five million people in over-crowded housing and five million on local authority waiting lists, the lowest output of housing in all sectors for 70 years – and then asks the poorest citizens to pay rents they cannot afford.”

Z2K is part of the Pro-Housing Alliance, along with the organisation Housing Justice and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH). In September, the Alliance published a report into the housing crisis that said the housing conditions in Britain are among the worst in Western Europe. The report, calling on the Government to make major reforms of housing policy, also included a supplement on London’s housing problems – described as “bleak”.

“Housing has been one of the biggest casualties of the Government’s massive cutbacks to public expenditure with some of the most vulnerable members of society paying the heaviest price for the financial crisis brought on by the banking community,” said Dr Stephen Battersby, president of CIEH and Chair of the Pro- Housing Alliance. “I fear that we are also moving to a situation where unscrupulous landlords proliferate as better landlords move up-market. Councils will not be in a position to control and regulate this effectively. This is not a problem that is going to disappear conveniently.”

The Alliance claims that the lack of genuinely affordable housing, the cuts to local authority housing services, and “short-sighted” welfare reforms are combining to create “real hardship, misery and ill health” for some of the “most vulnerable” people in the country. This, one might say, is the flipside of the new moralism emergent among the current political class. Be that as it may, the Alliance is calling for the construction of 500,000 new “green and affordable” homes per year for the next seven years, including the re-use of empty properties, reform of land supply and taxation, and rescinding changes to housing benefit among other measures.

“The lack of a coherent housing policy for the past 30 years has created an expensive housing market with a shortage of affordable housing,” Dr Battersby added. “Too many people are paying too much for their accommodation relative to incomes, too many properties pose a risk to health and safety and the cost to the NHS of treating housing related illness is way too high. Housing is fundamental to public health and well-being and the Government needs a completely new way of thinking about housing.”

The Alliance report warns that without urgent action, the deteriorating housing situation holds bleak consequences, especially for the capital, with increased overcrowding, rising homelessness, rising rents, all of it exacerbating social inequalities and fostering a divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Clearly, this carries implications not just for community cohesion – but for public order. As Orr has said of the housing crisis: “It doesn’t have to be this way. It is not inevitable.”

No, it isn’t. And that brings us back to where we started. The housing crisis is rooted in choices; the solution to the housing crisis is also rooted in choices. The question is will politicians ever choose to resolve the issue?

Back in September, Orr picked up on the theme of choices during his session at the NHF Conference and Social Housing Exhibition in Birmingham. Making his case for more money to be made available to build more homes, he asked how might this money be made in a time of financial constraints? His suggestion: not building an aircraft carrier, say, or simply by making the choice to invest in housebuilding rather than grandiose projects such as High Speed Rail. “There are always choices,” he said. “Every Government always, whatever the financial environment, has an opportunity to make choices.”

They do indeed. Margaret Thatcher chose to implement Right to Buy, offering tenants the opportunity to buy their homes at massive knock-down prices. She also chose to bar councils from building replacement stock, thereby ensuring numbers dwindled and that those remaining had to be ever-more tightly rationed. She also chose to use a welfare benefits system never designed to cope with mass unemployment to ‘warehouse’ the people ejected from work during the era’s painful process of economic restructuring and recession. In doing so, her government sowed the seeds of [alleged] trans-generational worklessness and ‘welfare dependency’ that today so vex Duncan Smith.

Moving onwards, Tony Blair chose to accelerate a programme of mass stock transfer that further depleted the availability of council housing and massively boosted the housing association sector. In itself, no bad thing, but – no disrespect to the NHF and its members – the cards were deliberately stacked against councils by political choices made for political reasons.

Not every successful stock transfer represented an enthusiastic endorsement of the process, it must be said, but a resigned acceptance by councillors and tenants alike that it was the only realistic path open to them if they were to obtain the necessary investment in the stock. The unprecedented degree of funding largesse available to housing associations for Decent Homes and capital investment in Labour’s time is in stark contrast to the starvation diet that was granted to council landlords.

Meanwhile, the problems associated with the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) were long ignored, even as the system steadily deteriorated the position and state of council housing, in the drive to promote the concept of home ownership. Building enough homes to meet need was long neglected; the rest could take care of itself. And it did, in its way, finally culminating in the crash that brought the whole economic house down in 2007.

Finally, Gordon Brown ‘got it’: he chose to make housing a priority, setting in motion the end of HRA, opening up the prospect of a new era of council housing and made his grandiose claims of three million new affordable homes. A desperate, albeit failed, gambit to win him an election, maybe, but for a while it raised the prominence of housing out of the backrooms and into the heart of Cabinet thinking. Now David Cameron has promised a new “Tory housing revolution”. The promise, made at conference, is to be fleshed out in a Housing Strategy document to be published shortly that will detail the latest round of ministerial choices. The cautious anticipation wonders if finally Ministers understand the scale of the problem and are to finally decide to do something about. Time will tell. For now, the sector and the nation remain trapped in the morass created by the failed policies – the choices – of Ministers past.

The last “Tory housing revolution” gave us Right To Buy 1.0; David Cameron’s is due to give us Right to Buy 2.0. What goes around, comes around as the saying goes, and this time the proceeds of selling off the two million or so remaining council homes will go towards building new “affordable homes”. The Prime Minister has promised a ‘one for one’ ratio, but critics say the numbers don’t
add up; after the discounts the capital receipt will be insufficient to build a replacement home.

Another failed policy in the making, then? Maybe, but don’t expect the Prime Minister to reveal all his cards at the first hand. Right To Buy 1.0 is considered the most successful post-war privatisation. The scheme achieved its objectives: it massively boosted homeownership, proved popular (even ‘Red’ Ed approves), and it massively depleted the available stock of council housing. On its own terms, then, mission accomplished. Cleaning up the long-term ‘collateral damage’ was somebody else’s responsibility.

So we come full circle. Today’s dysfunctional housing market stands as a monument to failure but what is perhaps rather more worrying as we contemplate the possible consequences of the Coalition’s choices and policies – quite possibly it stands as a chilling monument to success.


First published in the combined Northern, Midlands and Southern Housing magazine, October 2011. It was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 19 October 2011.

Cover Story: Are we slumming it tomorrow?

Shacked up in a slumdog future?

House prices are falling but the barriers to home ownership are as strong as ever. Private rents are rising to record levels, while incomes are stagnant, and there’s just no room at the social housing inn, writes Mark Cantrell. It all begs the urgent question – just where are we going to live?

  First published in the July/August edition of Northern Housing

CONSIDER the future: at some critical juncture in the past it all went horribly wrong – and now the slums have arisen. The ramshackle aggregations of corrugated iron and scrap timber structures encrust the outer reaches of our towns and cities. The less fortunate huddle in their cardboard cities festooned in abandoned subways and foetid alleys.

Occasionally, the powers-that-be take steps to clear the sprawling eyesores that blight the more important cities; it’s electorally beneficial to be seen to be tough on squatters, but the operations are fraught with difficulties. These British Slumdogs often resist the clearance of their homes. The bulldozer crews need costly police escorts, riots often ensue, and even successful clearances are fruitless in the final analysis. All they do is shift the problem around. It’s an ugly and divided future – it’s the endgame in the failure to resolve today’s housing crisis.

This scenario must seem rather sensational but then these are sensational times. Even so, it remains outrageous, doesn’t it, to suggest that Britain will descend from being a predominantly home-owning nation to one that is blighted by the kind of slums seen in Latin America or India. In fact, it’s not only outrageous – it’s downright crazy. It can’t happen here. It won’t happen here. After all, it’s not as if the British Isles has the climate to make a self-made shack in any way habitable, but people have endured the hardships of cardboard cities before now, so is a homegrown favela really all that fanciful? A shack has got to be better than a cardboard box.

Behind all this speculative satire, however, there lurks a serious point. People need a home, but as the sector is painfully aware there is an under-supply of homes across all tenures. The latest Homes & Communities Agency (HCA) investment framework aims to deliver 170,000 new homes over the next four years, but with the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) projecting an annual household growth in the region of 245,000, and with five million people already languishing on waiting lists for a social home, it’s patently obvious that the country is barely even playing catch up.

Consider the markets

Despite the catastrophic bursting of the house price bubble – an economic boil that had to be lanced sooner or later – issues of affordability and accessibility have not got any easier. It’s a painful paradox.

Prices have fallen since the 2007 pre-crash peak, falling some 10 per cent by 2009, but the barriers to home ownership remain strong. Average prices continue to fall, outside of London, but it is doing little to encourage flow in a stagnant market.

The latest figures from the Land Registry House Price Index show an annual price decrease of 2.5 per cent, though the monthly change from May to June is zero. The average price of a home in England and Wales is now £161,479. For house sale completions, the most up-to-date figures show that there was a seven per cent drop in April 2011. The lack of activity has prompted RICS to describe the market as in stalemate, but for first-time buyers this stalemate might as well be ‘checkmate, game over’.

Earlier this year, the Halifax bank lamented the decline of the first-time buyer in a report it called ‘Generation Rent’ that indicated 64 per cent of non-homeowners it surveyed believed they had no prospect of ever owning a home.

The theme was quickly taken up by other organisations. Shelter, for instance, has warned of a generation of people “priced out” of owning their own home. Mortgage lending has increased, however. Gross lending has risen by 16 per cent from May’s figure of £10.8 billion to reach £12.6 billion in June, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML). This is the highest monthly total since July 2010, but the figures are still three per cent lower than June 2010. So, the banks do seem to be slowly losing their reluctance to lend.

“The UK economy continues to experience disappointing economic growth, strong consumer price pressures, falling disposable incomes and an uncertain jobs market. This backdrop weighs negatively on purchase decisions,” said Bob Pannell, the CML’s chief economist. “By contrast, landlord activity appears to have picked up recently and, with evidence of strong rental demand, this should help to underpin activity over the coming months.”

Meanwhile Sarah Webb, [then] chief executive of CIH, has said: “We already know that the deposit barrier means more people are becoming part of ‘generation rent’ whether they want to or not. As demand for housing continues to massively outstrip supply the cost of renting a home is also increasing... more and more people are struggling to meet their housing costs, let alone save for a deposit.”

The CIH predicted in its UK Housing Briefing Review that up to 100,000 first-time buyers will abandon the market this year alone. Where are they going? The private rented sector. Unsurprisingly, landlords are cashing in on rising demand.

“Tenant demand continues to reach ever higher peaks – and there simply isn’t enough rental property coming onto the market to match it,” said David Newnes, LSL Property Services’ estate agency managing director. “Despite several new deals on the market, securing a big enough mortgage remains a tall order for the average buyer. The climbing cost of living and renting is impacting how much renters can save for their deposit, and demand will remain high in the short-term.

“In the long-term, there is an even smaller chance of a significant slowdown. Just 102,570 new homes were completed last year – at a time when the UK ’s population increased by half a million. This trend shows no sign of slowing. Excess demand will be driven into the private rental sector driving rents up further. Landlords thinking long-term will do well.

“Home values have been dropping in recent months, and this has taken its toll on annual returns, but record high yields paint a prettier picture for prospective landlords, and matter much in the short-term as it is rent that pays the mortgage. As property prices bottom out and rental income soars, property investment is proving to be an increasingly lucrative long-term investment.” For landlords, things are definitely hotting up. Rents are bubbling upwards. In June, they hit a record high, according to LSL ’s latest Buy To Let index, coming to an average £701 per month in England – an annual inflation rate of 4.1 per cent – while in London average rents smashed through the grand barrier for the
first time, coming in at £1,006 per month.

James Scott-Lee, RICS UK’s spokesperson, said: “Although we are beginning to see more mortgages aimed at first-time buyers, many potential homeowners are still restricted from getting a foot on the property ladder, leading to increased demand in an already over-subscribed rental market. There has been a small uplift in supply but the imbalance between demand and availability can only mean rents will continue to rise.”

Can of worms

Winning streaks don’t last forever. Bubbles burst, as the housing market crash demonstrates in no uncertain terms, so what happens if – when – rents soar beyond people’s ability to pay? Sooner or later, it is all but inevitable that those priced out of home ownership will find themselves priced out of private rent. Where then will people go?

The Government’s welfare reform package also compounds the problems of affordability. In some parts of the country, London being – as ever – the prime example, households are already unable to rent in the private sector without State support. However, the proposed changes to Local Housing Allowance has raised fears that low and moderate waged workers will be effectively forced out of their homes to seek cheaper accommodation elsewhere.

Landlords have also suggested they may be “forced out of the housing benefit market”, according to a survey carried out by the National Landlords Association (NLA). The results indicated that faced with Housing Benefit reforms, over half of landlords would pull out of renting their homes to benefit recipients. Social housing, for all its efforts to deliver more homes, is in no position to provide safe haven to these potential hoards of exiles from the private market realm. There simply isn’t enough housing association or council homes for those that need them now, let alone those to come. To cap the problems of under-supply, the sector is caught up in its own maelstrom of change.

Great hopes are pinned on the new Affordable Rent model for the delivery of new homes, but while the sector has embraced the opportunity it provides to build, it is not to say that there are no misgivings about just how affordable this package may be in real terms. Average figures mask massive variances, but even so, consider the record rents quoted above and then reflect on just how affordable ‘Affordable Rent’ might actually be in practice.

This was a point raised by London Assembly Member Jenny Jones, following an assessment of the delivery model by the Planning & Housing Committee last month. Writing in the Guardian newspaper (26 July 2011), she asked who these “Affordable Homes” were for?

“Even if the average rent was set at 65 per cent of market rent, as the Mayor claims, this is substantially higher than social rent levels in most London boroughs,” she said. “There is obviously a demand for housing let at these intermediate rents. But London and Quadrant told us that 77 per cent of their residents earn less than £15,000 a year. The Mayor’s own research shows that some 14 per cent of Londoners in work earn less than this threshold, and that this group is in the most acute housing need. This new ‘affordable’ housing isn’t affordable for them.”

The HCA’s framework for delivering these new ‘Affordable Homes’ is part of a package the Government hopes will stimulate recovery and a solution to the housing crisis. Other elements include incentives for development, such as the New Homes Bonus, and assistance for first-time buyers. Even so, many of its elements do seem to involve a certain ‘whim and prayer’ aspect. One can almost see their fingers crossed behind their backs.

As for the rest of us, well...

Back to the future

By now, one can no doubt see where all this is going. For those who can’t afford to buy, or to rent privately, or – if it so transpires – to rent socially in the future, then just where are they going to live? It’s not just a rhetorical question but one of increasing urgency for millions of people. Sooner or later, matters must come to a head and what then?

Shanty towns might be pushing it. Empty properties, whether residential or otherwise abound, and the illegality of squatting is hardly likely to deter the desperate any more than it does the recalcitrant. Beyond that, as both Shelter and Jon Snow’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme indicated, old-fashioned slum landlordism remains waiting in the wings. All told, it bodes ill for the future.

Over in Israel, people are protesting against the country’s high housing costs by taking to the streets and establishing tent cities in public squares to emphasise their point. Here in the UK , unless we see some of that ‘Big Society’ backbone, we might just be living in tent cities for real.

This article first appeared in the combined Northern, Midlands and Southern Housing magazine, July/August 2011. It was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 11 August 2011.

Interview: David Ireland, Empty Homes Agency

Bringing back the empties

Putting the nation’s empty properties back to use won’t solve the housing crisis, but it can certainly help, as David Ireland, chief executive of the Empty Homes Agency, explains to Mark Cantrell  

 First published in the June 2011 edition of Northern Housing

David Ireland

BRINGING empty homes back into use is hardly going to solve the country’s housing crisis, now, is it? That question is a source of frustration for David Ireland, chief executive of the Empty Homes Agency, because the clear answer is no; no it won’t – but it can play an important role in providing homes for people who need them.

“The issue of housing need is very multi-facetted and if there was one single thing that could solve it, well, no doubt it would already have been done,” said Ireland. “The truth is there’s a lot of different things that need to be done. I don’t see it as problematic at all that [empty homes are] not going to solve the whole problem – it’s not – but if it’s done, well it is going to make a significant impact and that is enough for me.”

There are no easy fixes to the housing problems, whether that’s from a newbuild perspective, or a refurbishment position, but with around 738,000 empty homes in England, that’s surely a potential source of homes that is worth looking into. Ireland certainly thinks so, but for many, perhaps the primary focus of thought when it comes to empty homes is the potential blight they can inflict on neighbourhoods. Of course, getting them occupied is a solution to that too.

“Empty properties are of course a problem to people next door to them, and there are a lot of poor effects that an empty property can have on the feel of a street. That’s an issue in itself, but housing need is of greater importance,” said Ireland.

“We have a growing issue of housing need. House building is maybe showing some small signs of recovery, but it’s still at very low levels and it is certainly not producing enough to meet all the need. So it has got to be important to look at all the possible sources of creating homes in this country – and what better place to start than homes that already exist and are just not occupied?”

Ireland has held the post of chief executive for just over four years, and worked as an employee for some five years, but before that he was a trustee of the organisation. When a job came up at the Agency, he resigned his trusteeship to apply for the role; an indication of his strength of feeling over the issue of empty homes.

Before joining the organisation, he worked in local government, managing Hammersmith & Fulham Council’s private sector housing team, as well as working on its housing strategy, during which time he was struck by the tragedy of homes going to waste through being left empty.

Indeed, Ireland has written a book on the subject of bringing an empty property back into use, suitably entitled ‘How to rescue a house’, published by Penguin Paperbacks back in 2005. After that, it seems almost inevitable that he should join a campaigning organisation dedicated to making the theme of his book a countrywide phenomenon.

“[Empty homes] is an issue that I dealt with in both of my [local government] roles and it struck me that it was an area that I could make the most impact for people,” Ireland said. “There is nothing more important than making sure someone has got a home and seeing a home being wasted is particularly galling for people who don’t have one, or who don’t have an adequate home. I felt that anything I could do to address that issue had to be a good thing.”

The agency itself, an independent charity and a member of the National Housing Federation, was established in 1992 to – in its own words – “help people create homes from empty property and campaign for more empty homes to be brought into use for the benefit of those in housing need”. Though a small organisation, over the years it has built up a wealth of expertise borne out of its research and practical activities.

Part of the agency’s ‘intelligence gathering’ is the unenviable task of crunching through Government statistical information to glean out the national picture on empty homes. It’s not exactly glamorous work, of course, but information is always half the battle, not just for the agency but for the people it works with.

“We try and put the information out there to make it as accessible as possible. Although the information on the numbers of empty homes is published by the Government, it’s not always very clear and it’s tucked away in spreadsheets that are hard to find. So we try to make it more accessible and better known,” said Ireland.

The organisation also augments this centrally collated information with its own research, filling in the blanks as it were, and these efforts have revealed some tragic gaps in the data. They are tragic for two reasons: the first is the tragedy of additional empty homes that might otherwise be lived in. The
second facet of this tragedy is that the abandonment is a legacy of dead, or at least stalled, regeneration programmes.

It makes for a sad legacy to the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) programmes, for example, as the agency discovered that 12,000 properties were now empty as a result of the programmes’ end. The impact of the recession has also impacted on regeneration schemes further afield. Across London, for example, the agency’s investigation found some 5,000 additional empty homes and it believes there may be as many as 10,000 across the capital – not just empty, but often forgotten.

These are properties that have effectively fallen off the reporting system’s radar; scheduled for demolition, or major re-working, they became ‘non-houses’ once the regeneration programmes ground to a halt. Because they are ‘off the books’, and off the beaten track where pedestrians seldom visit, these boarded-up ‘ghost-sites’ can all-too-easily slip out of mind.

“Now, maybe these homes are not viable for re-use, but I suspect an awful lot of them are,” said Ireland. The average figure for refurbishing empty homes is put in the region of £10,000. Even given the variance in prices that averages by their nature mask, it still represents a lower cost, and generally lower hassle, route to making available more homes.

Over the years, the Empty Homes Agency has notched up some key successes, such as tax breaks for people who want to bring an empty home back into use, or the introduction of Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs), and the agency’s message has found its argument more widely accepted.

Indeed, Ireland is pleased at some of the incentives that have emerged of late, such as the New Homes Bonus that will reward local authorities for the numbers of empty homes brought into use, as well as the numbers of newly-built homes. The Government’s announcement of a £100 million pot from the HCA , specifically targeted at bringing empty homes back into use, is a significant boon for the cause, Ireland believes.

“Although £100 million might not seem a vast sum of money in the great scheme of things, it is going to be very positive,” Ireland said.


This article first appeared in the June 2011 edition of the combined Northern, Midlands and Southern Housing magazine. It was subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 24 June 2011.

Cover Story: Pickles promises people power

And ‘gulags’ to you too, Mr Secretary

Eric Pickles said he felt tempted “to become a bit Maoist” in the pursuit of the Localism Bill’s much-hyped promise of freedom for local people, but its social housing reform proposals left many tenants feeling ‘kicked in the gulags’, writes Mark Cantrell

 First published in the February 2011 edition of Northern Housing

FROM the language used, you’d think it was the fall of the Berlin Wall all over again, only there’s no jubilant crowds tearing down the concrete slabs with their own hands, or puttering Trabants trundling along the pot-holed roads towards the promise of a democratic destination.

Oh well, there’s always Eric Pickles cutting a dash as the heroic liberator ushering in a brighter tomorrow. That’s got to count for something. The secretary of State for Communities & Local Government appears to have a penchant for name-dropping Communist-era dictators whilst talking up his legislative package with ‘barricade-rumbling’ bombast. One almost expects him to punctuate his speech-making with a no-nonsense bark of ‘Comrades!’

“[The Localism Bill] is a triumph of democracy over bureaucracy,” Pickles told the House of Commons during the introduction of the Localism Bill’s second reading. “It will fundamentally shake up the balance of power in this country... It will revitalise local democracy and put power back where it belongs – in the hands of the people.

“For too long, Government has believed that Whitehall was the centre of the universe. We genuinely believe in local democracy, in local communities, and in local solutions. This Bill will give councils the power and the authority they need to make sensible decisions for their area – a shot in the arm for local democracy – and it will give people new rights, new powers, new opportunities to act on the issues that matter to them. By pushing power out, getting Government out of the way, letting people run their own affairs, we can build a stronger, fairer Britain.”

Hurrah for democracy then, except the Localism Bill isn’t really “getting Government out of the way”; rather it’s lengthening the leash on local authority.

Even so, nobody is going to complain about a little extra freedom, even if the leash remains to pull one back to heel when least expected, and the Bill has been broadly welcomed, if – as is often par for the course – there come attached a number of caveats and concerns. Councils certainly welcome the General Power of Confidence the Bill grants, but there’s concern about the 142 powers it grants central government to regulate and otherwise direct the ‘flow’ of localism.

Pickles’ shadow counterpart, Caroline Flint MP, called the Localism Bill the ‘only if I say so Bill’, while David Blunkett MP threw the jibe into the debate that the Government was “centralising the power and decentralising the pain”.

“This Bill fails to live up to its name,” Flint said. “For all the Government’s talk of localism, the Bill does nothing to convince us that it is anything more than a smokescreen for unprecedented cuts to local communities up and down the country... Far from devolving power as we were promised, this Bill represents a massive accumulation of power in the hands of the Secretary of State.”

The brusque Yorkshireman was having none of that, of course, and the previous Government’s record on decentralisation was lobbed back in Labour’s face as a non-starter. Well, this is all part of the theatrics of Parliament, of course, where shamelessness and a thick skin are a must, but on reflection Flint’s attack on the Bill’s proposals to end security of tenure for social housing tenants was somewhat unwise, given that she herself has ‘form’ in this matter. Still, it’s all good stuff for lobby correspondents and politics junkies, but outside in the real world, the Bill’s measures represent serious change with some potentially cruel ramifications. It’s an ill wind blowing with the Parliamentary hot air, and Blunkett’s interjection is perhaps the most apt for the social housing sector.

The tenants are revolting

The Bill’s content holds few surprises. The Government, after all, has been slapping proposals down on the desk with bewildering regularity: the Bill formalises the abolition of the Tenant Services Authority and the transfer of its regulatory role to the Homes and Communities Agency; it settles the long-running sore of the Housing Revenue Account; it proposes new homelessness measures; it gives councils powers to limit who can apply for social housing in their areas; it grants social landlords the power to set flexible fixed-term tenancies; and it introduces the so-called ‘Affordable Rent’ set at 80 per cent of local market rates.

While the sector has broadly welcomed the greater flexibilities and freedoms the Bill sets out, the measures it outlines are contentious to say the least, and social landlords and other housing professionals have some serious concerns about the implications for the future. The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), for instance, has stressed that the measures will further stigmatise tenants and weaken communities. Given these concerns, there is something of a gaping disconnect between the veritable new utopia Pickle’s ‘blueprint for Britain’ suggests and the harsh reality it inevitably invokes.

“Social housing – affordable and stable – should act as a springboard to help individuals make a better life for themselves, but all too often it can become a block on mobility,” said [then] Housing Minister Grant Shapps. He was writing in the introduction to the consultation document ‘Local decisions: a fairer future for social housing’, that set out the B ill’s housing elements and invited reaction from the sector.

“It is time to change the social housing system. To ensure that the system is more obviously fair; that good, affordable housing is available for those who genuinely need it; and that we get the best from our four million rented homes. The case for reform is strong.”

No argument there from the sector; it all sounds fair and reasonable. Except it doesn’t bode well that the deadline for consultation expired in the course of the Bill’s second reading. Some have accused the Government of bad faith by this curious clash of dates – showing contempt for tenants even – in carrying out what amounts to a fait accompli to push through its social housing reforms. The Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) said that submissions to the consultation will be considered at the committee and other stages of the Localism Bill’s passage through the legislative process, but it’s an assurance that inevitably carries little weight among tenants.

Eileen Short, chair of Defend Council Housing (DCH), has called the consultation a “sham” and an “outrage”. “Tenants will not take this lying down,” she added. “We will not roll over. This is not just about us, but about the future generations and the rights that we have fought hard for. They will regret the contempt with which they are treating tenants.”

Tenants and housing professionals alike are concerned about the impact of new fixed-term tenancies on social cohesion and the nurturing of strong communities. After all, who can afford a stake in their neighbours and their neighbourhood, if they are effectively ‘living out of a suitcase’, facing up to the prospect of a rootless existence of enforced nomadism? Far from being a “springboard” to a “better life” it is more likely to become a diving board to the deeps of uncertainty, turning social housing into de facto “transit camps”.

“Tenants don’t believe it’s right to end lifetime tenancies, limit new tenancy agreements or move those earning more money out of their homes. Indeed, one member commented ‘this will have an adverse effect with tenants and families having to be constantly on the move, a break-up of communities, homes becoming transient camps with no permanent roots’,” said Michelle Reid, chief executive of TPAS.

Chloe Weatherhead, head of housing at e-Academy said: “Communities aren’t formed overnight. It takes time and effort to get to know your neighbours, to get your bearings in a new environment and to make a house a home. Fixed-term tenancies could destroy the communities that many people have worked so hard to build. They could mean the end of neighbours, instead creating whole streets of families who do not know each other. Who would bother planting a garden if you aren’t going to be around to see it flourish? Why worry about creating places for children to play if your children aren’t going to be around to use them? Many people choose to live in social housing and like where they live.”

The Government – in the form of Pickles’ and Shapps’ tireless ‘feel-good’ double act – have promised on numerous occasions that the reforms apply only to new tenants. Existing tenants, they say with all the smooth assurance of a couple of used car dealers, will be protected: their secure and assured life-time tenancies are safe in their hands, but not everyone is convinced by the dynamic duo’s helpful conviviality.

Short, and the organisation she represents, says that the Localism Bill is unclear and ambiguous about these protections. TAROE is also concerned about the lack of clarity and precision over the protections for existing tenants, adding that “future Governments may not continue this protection”. Indeed, there is nothing to say that the current Government won’t decide to reformulate the deal for existing tenants at some point. When everything is up for grabs – and the Conservative-led, LibDem-enabled Coalition has made it clear that this is the case – then nothing can be taken for granted.

Management of short-term tenancies and assessing the means of tenants to see if they are still somehow ‘fit’ for a social home – on top of adding to the admin and cost burdens – risks steering social landlords into what DCH called an “invasive policing role”. The fear was echoed by Leeds Tenants Federation, which said: “It is likely then that flexible tenancies – far from making the best
use of scarce social housing – will be used as a further weapon of enforcement to regulate the behaviour of social housing tenants.”

The principle that social – public – housing is something that must remain available for all, regardless of income or background remains a strong commitment held by tenant organisations and housing professionals alike. The CIH argued there should be no changes to the “overall right to live there”, saying: “social housing should not be exclusively used as part of the welfare system where people must leave when their lives change”.

“The bedrock principle of council housing, that it should be available to all, will be removed,” DCH added. “In recent years council homes have often in practice been rationed to those most in need due to scarcity, and this has led to a concentration of tenants with problems on estates. But the combination of fixed-term tenancies and changes to allocation policies are intended to enshrine this as a principle: a council block would become a hostel... Government says mixed communities are a good thing – now it sets out to destroy them.”

Will central authority listen to the concerns of the locals as it drives ahead with its localism agenda? That’s for Pickles and his ministerial underlings to demonstrate, of course, but he might yet discover he’s picked more of a fight than he bargained for, if the comments of some tenant campaigners are anything to go by.

“Trouble is coming. We intend to make them listen,” said DCH’s Short. “The Bill will be fought through the Parliamentary procedures and committees as strongly as the heat that MPs feel on all sides from tenants. That’s what will make a fight out of this. It’s not just about polite debates in Parliament, it’s about how much we can make them feel they’ve got no choice, because MPs are like councillors in the end: they all need to get re-elected and who do they need for that? The people who live in their constituencies. We know who those people are – because they’re us.”

Any self-respecting revolution needs its ‘kulaks’, but tenants are evidently not prepared to play the role expected. Far from it, they appear ready and willing to come out kicking. Watch out for those ‘gulags’, Mr Pickles.

This article was first published in the February 2011 edition of Northern Housing magazine (cover depicts the magazine's Southern edition) and subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 21 February 2011.