Here s a useful article from Jules Birch in Inside Housing…. check out the social media links and importance in terms of communication…
Why do we need social housing? The answer may seem obvious on this website but too often elsewhere the one you’ll get is ‘we don’t’.
It’s a theme I’ve blogged about repeatedly over the last few years as social housing has been eroded from within and overtaken from without by the relentless rise of private renting. As coalition ministers never cease to remind us, the sector shrank by 420,000 in England under the last Labour government, but their own policies are merely accelerating the decline while they blur the distinction between affordable and social.
Former housing minister John Healey summed it up bluntly like this in December: ‘If social housing’s own won’t stand up and speak out loudly, then present policy will prevail by default.’ As my fellow IH blogger Colin Wiles has explained, social housing professionals formed the campaign group SHOUT (Social Housing Under Threat) in response. It’s already made a submission to the Lyons Review arguing that half of Labour’s promised 200,000 homes a year should be social housing. If you’re not already, you can follow the campaign on Facebook and on Twitter.
In the meantime though, relentlessly negative coverage continues on TV. The intro to last night’s flagship 7pm news programme on Channel 4 was its controversial ident of the Aylesbury estate. Channel 4 News would not tolerate distortions like the artificially inserted clothes lines, shopping trolley full of rubbish and Sky dishes but Channel 4 itself continues to resist a campaign by residents to #changetheident and show their alternative more positive version.
Channel 4 is of course also the home of shows like Benefits Street and How to Get a Council House. Three housing professionals in Wales were so annoyed about the second series of HTGACH that they set up the Council Home Chat campaign to counter the stereotypes. If you’re not already, you can follow the campaign on Twitter and read myth-busting blogs by people who live, work and believe in social housing here.
Campaigns defending the principle of social housing and fighting back against negative images of it are in some ways two sides of the same coin. But there is also a deeper battle of ideas that the people who would answer my initial question with ‘we don’t’ think was won long ago. For them social housing is either old-fashioned or politically and morally undesirable or just economically inefficient. It may be a minority view but this is the thinking that lies behind both the slow death of social housing and the negative images on TV and it badly needs debunking.
A good place to start is with the two latest policy essays from the Chartered Institute of Housing from Steve Hilditch and Keith Exford. Between them, and coming from different angles, they make some important points.
As a housing campaigner and editor of the Red Brick blog, Steve’s staunch defence of social housing will come as no surprise. However, he also confronts many of those anti-social housing arguments in explaining how we got from a position of ‘the housing crisis is nearly solved’ at the start of his career in 1976 to a new crisis now. Perhaps above all:
‘We have failed to match the distribution of prices and rents in the housing system to the distribution of incomes. Inequality has grown and so has insecurity: the number of people with very low incomes in the “flexible labour market” with zero-hours contracts, casualised labour, irregular self-employment, and part- time work. The correct housing policy response to these changes is that homes need to be cheaper not more expensive.’
Steve explains what’s gone wrong in housing policy over that period and the rise of the perceived wisdom that social housing tenants are ‘subsidised’ even as the actual subsidy goes to ‘the least efficient and lowest value-for-money sector, private renting’. Along the way he raises questions about the commercialisation of larger housing associations and who social housing should be for. He concludes that: ‘Over the last 35 years it has had the life squeezed slowly out of it by ideology and bad policy. But it can be reinvented. And the benefits of doing so could be great.’
Keith Exford’s essay starts by asking why housing policy in general, and policy on affordability and rents in particular, is such a mess. As chief executive of Affinity Sutton, he quotes the example of one of its estates in Islington where the amount tenants pay varies from an £80 per week ‘fair rent’ to a £290 per week ‘affordable rent’.
But he also makes the point that ‘it is arguably impossible to improve affordability through rent levels alone. If for political and economic reasons we are prepared to countenance low incomes then high housing costs can only be defrayed through subsidising rents.’ And he argues that the ‘obsession in some quarters’ with expanding private renting ignores the fact that British pay rates are too low to make market prices affordable without housing benefit.
With no official government policy on affordability and rents, Affinity Sutton commissioned its own research to help it frame an affordable rent policy. ‘It is already clear that devising a market rent-related rent policy to help those on the lowest incomes is challenging to say the least,’ he says. ‘The “target rent” approach, which takes into account the housing market and lower incomes, may not be perfect but it at least offers a sensible starting point for a more logical approach.’
Other research shows that supply-side subsidy for social rents offer the best long-term deal for tenants, taxpayers and providers. He argues that a mix of social rents, affordable rents and market rents is the way forward in contrast to current policy. And drawing on the IPPR’s work on bricks and mortar subsidies he concludes: ‘Spending 95p of every housing pound on benefit just doesn’t make sense, does it?’
Both essays are worth reading in full. The detail of their argument may differ in some respects but both make the crucial link between housing and the labour market, rents and people’s ability to pay them. What both show, I think, is that the underlying case for social housing is not just as strong as ever but even stronger now than it was in an era of full employment and high wages.
Why do we need social housing? The answers are there. Now people beyond this website need to hear them.