The UK, you will have noticed, is suffering from a hydra-headed housing crisis, with the chief scourges being supply (not enough houses) and affordability (the ones we have cost too much.) And we’re near enough “all in it together”, inasmuch as most of us are paying rent or a mortgage to keep a roof over our heads.
But to see where this crisis is biting hardest, you might want to start with social housing: the accommodation rented by those several million Britons who can’t afford to pay the market rate for their roof, and so depend on subsidised provision.
The desire to view this situation for myself led me to accept an invitation in late 2013 from a Newcastle housing association, Isos, to be their “writer in residence”, with an open brief to poke around their operations and publish a book on what I saw. And I was just as keen to find out how a social landlord was managing in hard times as Isos was to get an outsider’s perspective on their business.
My priority was to elicit views of how Isos was performing from a sample of its 20,000 or so rent-paying customers. I toured the company’s patch around the north-east (a rough triangle from Berwick down to Teesside and west to Carlisle), chatting with whomsoever was willing to have me in for a cuppa. I was quickly and forcefully reminded that there are people for whom a social landlord is the only appropriate provider – people like Brett Dunlop and Tina Turnbull, a couple in East Hexham whose parental responsibilities are such that they must act as registered carers to their own three children, and who greatly feel the benefit of residing in a spacious home built by Isos in 2011 with special needs such as theirs in mind.
Michael Lisle – 20 years a tenant in Wallsend – also lives with a disability but it hasn’t stopped him getting involved as a tenant rep who reports back to Isos with local concerns. A self-declared “people person”, Lisle is fiercely attached to the cause of social housing, and what it can mean to individuals in straitened circumstances. “It’s only a tiny flat, but it’s a home, and I love it to bits. And that’s a big thing for people, having a home,” he says.
Ralph Stephenson is equally glad of his tidy Isos-rented bungalow in South Shields, a succession of strokes having curtailed his working life after stints in the RAF and in printing. Stephenson, though, still has a bit to contend with: since his bungalow has a spare room he’s fallen prey to the bedroom tax, and last year he lost his mobility allowance, basically because he has a wheelchair. “Trouble is, I’ve got to have somebody to push it,” he tells me, with the air of one who knows there are times when there’s little you can do but laugh.
I doubt many would dispute that housing associations are doing good work with supported housing of this sort. But it’s work of a beleaguered kind in a time of reduced state spending, when local authority budgets for housing welfare support have been trimmed by 46% since the last election.
Social housing, then, is a cause that needs defending. Whereas mortgaged home ownership is thought to be one of our national obsessions, social housing is dimly viewed as a “residual” tenure of last resort – a political stepchild, too, its constituents uncourted at election time, unlike all those owner-occupiers in key marginals.
While Ken Loach’s 1966 BBC play, Cathy Come Home, did much to strip the scales from Britain’s eyes about the calamity of homelessness, Cathy’s fictional plight seems unlikely to greatly detain audiences of today, more routinely tickled (if not feigning to be outraged) by Channel 4’s Benefits Street. Whether we have a national consensus that social housing is an essential service, or whether societal attitudes have hardened to the point where more of us believe people have to lump whatever shelter they can access – I must say I’m not certain.
What’s for sure is that housing associations go to lengths for their tenants’ wellbeing that far exceed basic shelter needs: now they invest in educational and training opportunities for tenants and support community initiatives of all sorts, including social enterprise start-ups, to try to make a difference not only to people’s physical environments, but to their life chances.
This chimes with the origins of the housing association movement in the 1960s, which was driven by inner-city clergymen appalled at the housing conditions endured by some in their congregation. They set about marshalling volunteers and funds to buy up and rehabilitate vacant and crumbling Victorian terraces. Social housing nowadays is a “sector”: a segment of the modern economy offering a product plus services. And for some observers the trouble with housing associations today is that they rely largely on private finance.
Borrowed money was the catch, if you like, of the Thatcher-era dispensation whereby associations supplanted local councils as state-approved social landlords of choice. Circa 1974, housing associations received capital grants for over 90% of their needs. Forty years on that figure is closer to 20%.
Today the social housing sector holds over £52bn in private borrowings. Critics (such as the novelist James Meek, in a much-discussed essay for the London Review of Books) complain of back-door privatisation. Some bigger housing associations in the south, sufficiently well situated as to part-subsidise themselves by building houses for private sale, have made noises about walking away from government grants altogether.
But smaller associations in parts of the UK with less bullish housing markets have no such bounty at hand: they will always need some public sector finance. Like many of these smaller associations, Isos, as far as I observed, has right-sized ambitions and capacity. “Our raison d’être”, chief executive Keith Loraine told me, “is rented housing for those who need it.” Nor does Isos aspire to expand beyond its north east roots. Though it was formed by the merger and consolidation of four regional associations, with an eye to economies of scale, it remains focused on and committed to the neighbourhoods it knows and the problems they face. This has not precluded investing in large-scale urban regeneration schemes, such as Cleadon Park in South Shields, a 1920s estate which fell into grievous disrepair after the Thatcher-era closure of the local shipyard and colliery. Isos razed, rebuilt and revived the place over ten years, in a joint venture with the council and housebuilder Bellway. But funds for ambitious regeneration have dried up since New Labour’s heyday and housing associations must now temper their ambitions to match.
Housing associations are not, it should be said, at the forefront of policymaking as the next general election approaches. Last week saw the publication of Sir Michael Lyons’s housing review, commissioned by Ed Miliband with the purpose of helping a Labour government build 200,000 homes a year. It envisages local councils as revitalised agents of change, empowered to break the structural blockages in the UK’s housing supply. Lyons argues for new towns and expanded conurbations, encouraging smaller builders and establishing council-led “new homes corporations” with real powers to get developable land built upon.
The coalition government’s big housing review under Natalie Elphicke is focused solely on ideas to boost new building by councils – but with the stress on private finance. No political party is advocating that the state borrow £5bn a year to start mass-producing council houses as it did in 1945. For that reason alone, housing associations should not be traduced for having embraced bond issues and big bank loans. Where would people in extreme housing need be without them today? We need a lot more homes, rapidly, and it can be done, but only if councils and associations see each other as comrades in the big push.
Associations need to be correctly subsidised, but also trusted to choose wisely on what and where they build, whom they house, in what sort of community and at what level of rent. For the foreseeable future no one else will know how to do these things nearly as well as housing associations, and I’d say they deserve our measured support – as a decent model of public-private partnership, in dogged pursuit of a social purpose.
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