Shameful Neglect of Council Housing

Good quality housing is of course an essential necessity for all and yesterday was a significant anniversary in relation to the provision of council housing. Architect George Clarke pulls no punches in this interview for the Big Issue as to the current housing crisis and what needs to be done to sort it:- 

George Clarke blasts the state for shirking its housing responsibility

“Politicians can sit there and blame everybody else in the world, but as far as I’m concerned, the state has a responsibility to provide homes for those most in need.”

Architect George Clarke is the amiable presenter of a host of Channel 4 home building and home improvement shows. On programmes like Restoration Man and Amazing Spaces he follows inspirational architectural projects offering an expert’s eye and warm support to dreamers building brighter futures. The shows have made him a national treasure.

But Clarke is furious about the housing crisis and the way council housing has been undermined, sold off and almost fatally diminished in recent decades. His new documentary – released to mark the centenary of the Addison Act, the almost revolutionary Parliamentary bill which in 1919 heralded a state-built housing boom in Britain – is vital viewing for anyone with an interest in housing and frustrated by a failure to fix the current crisis.

Clarke is on fighting form when he welcomes The Big Issue to his production offices in Brixton, South London. This is, he says, a passion project.

“I was brought up on a council housing estate and I saw how really good, well-designed houses in a well-designed estate with great public spaces and amenities created a great community,” says Clarke, who revisits his childhood home in Sunderland where his mother still lives as part of his new film. When I was 16 I used to walk from my council estate to the architect’s practice where I did my apprenticeship every day. That is when I got a massive passion for homes and housing. Until those in power really fully understand how transformative a good, affordable, decent home can be for people we are never going to solve the housing crisis.”

The Addison Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation of the 20th century. It transformed housing provision in Britain, placing a duty on councils to provide homes for people most in need, establishing council housing as we came to know it. The plan was ambitious. If the target of 500,000 new homes, to be built with government subsidy, proved hard to meet (as have, it seems, most government housing targets in the intervening years), the 213,000 homes that were built laid the foundations of a new system. It was sparked by the need to house returning soldiers from the First World War. Homes Fit For Heroes was the tagline, and politicians of all stripes got behind the idea of state provision of housing.

The Becontree Estate in Dagenham was among the most ambitious and extensive new neighbourhoods. “This says to me that 100 years ago the government cared,” says Clarke in the new film, surveying the quality of design of the houses and the neighborhood spaces the residents enjoyed. It shouldn’t be hard to do it again, he says, to have some actual inter-departmental joined-up thinking.

“The Addison Act was revolutionary because it was the health minister Dr Christopher Addison – not the housing minister – who said that truly affordable, state-built, well- maintained homes would be the staple of a modern and new society, providing housing for those most in need. Now, wouldn’t it be amazing if the health minister said the same today? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the health minister talked to the housing minister talked to the education minister and realised that if we provided a huge amount of good-quality, affordable, stable homes for people most in need, it would transform the health of many people, it would transform the mental wellbeing of many people, and it would even transform the standard of education that our kids are receiving?”

Clarke points out of the window towards Dawson’s Heights in Dulwich, built in 1964. This imposing and impressive architectural marvel was designed by Kate Macintosh when she was just 26 and working for the London Borough of Southwark’s architecture department. Imagine that happening now. The 300 high-quality new homes were built after crucial legislation based on the Parker Morris Committee’s 1961 report, which set down minimum standards for new homes. A focus on quality as well as quantity followed the housebuilding boom in the wake of the Second World War.

“Loads of people want to live there,” says Clarke. “One problem now is that with so many cutbacks councils don’t even have architectural departments. The Greater London Council used to employ hundreds of architects doing the social good, doing the right thing for society. All that expertise is gone. Which is why it is easier for governments today to go to private industry.”

This, says Clarke, is a huge problem when it comes to providing homes for those most in need. “There are some terrible developers out to make a massive amount of money to the detriment of communities and society,” he says.

“One of the biggest problems is that the home to them is not much more than a commodity to be traded and transacted, rather than home being an affordable place to live. There are some big, big, big powerful housebuilders out there whose only interest is to make a shitload of money and push up their share price. They move on from one site to the next without any regard for what is being built and how long it is going to last. And when it comes to council housing, they want to get rid of it.”

One century on from the Addison Act, hundreds of people in need of homes are now being offered temporary accommodation in converted shipping containers. Some accommodation has no windows as rules about minimum space for dwellings are circumvented thanks to new laws in 2015 about converting offices to residential use.

“We have massively gone backwards,” says Clarke. “In the 1950s and 1960s, if you weren’t doing the right thing on housing, you were unelectable. Now, they don’t give a shit. And the reason they don’t give a shit is because they in effect privatised the whole system so it is not their problem. The Welfare State was built on health, education and housing – if you decide to ignore housing, it’s a farce, isn’t it?”

How did it come to this? When did society’s safety net stop working with regard to housing? When did we become beholden to profit-chasing developers and in a race to the bottom regarding standards? The big change came in 1980, one year in to Margaret Thatcher’s government. The Right To Buy policy was heralded as making home ownership a possibility for thousands of working-class and low-income people and families. More than one million council homes were sold off in the 1980s alone. Expanding home-ownership to those for whom it had been cut off was not a bad plan. What came next was. The problem was the tiny, tiny proportion of housing stock that was replaced.

“My own very, very, very personal view is that it was Tory bribery. It was a clever policy by Thatcher to buy the working-class vote,” says Clarke. “I have seen lots of people benefit from Right To Buy. It has given them stability. It has given them home ownership. But it is bribing one generation and pulling up a ladder from the next generation coming through. And that is why we are in the fucking mess we are in. I would scrap Right To Buy. We are at a time of national emergency.”

An increasing share of income raised from Right To Buy went directly to the Treasury, rather than the councils who were losing their housing stock alongside a guaranteed revenue stream. Council housing numbers plummeted, from around 6.5 million in 1979 to just two million by 2017. If selling off the family silver was harmful, failing to replace it then renting it back at vastly inflated prices seems positively reckless.

“Selling off state assets at a massively discounted rate and not replacing that house is just stupid,” says Clarke. “And worse still, more than 40 per cent of all the homes that have been sold off under Right To Buy are now in the hands of private landlords – who are renting them out at considerable profit, quite often to people on housing benefit. It is then costing the state a shitload of money. That, to me, is one of the biggest scandals of all.”

The tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire should have been a moment to take stock. If ever there was a time to look at how this country can do housing policy better, and to ensure secure and safe housing comes before profit, it is surely now. Clarke lives less than 100 metres from Grenfell. He is unimpressed with the political response to the 2017 tragedy.

“It is more bollocks from the government,” he says. “If they listened to people in the industry who really understand, the changes should have been made already. Secondary means of escape, proper equipment for the fire brigade, the list is a very easy one. But the government are weak. Grenfell is the tip of the iceberg. It could have happened anywhere and it can still happen in the 160 buildings that still have combustible cladding. If it had happened in Sunderland or Glasgow, we’d think it was because they had no money. But it shows it can happen not only in the wealthiest borough in Britain, but also in a building that has only just been refurbished. Isn’t that 100 times worse? It is a scandal on the biggest scale you could imagine. It should bring the government down but the fuckers wouldn’t even turn up and pay their respects until they were put under pressure. You can tell how angry I am.”

So what would Clarke do? You are housing minister, I tell him, I have just appointed you. What are you going to do on your first day in office? He barely blinks before launching into a long list of proposals. “I would do about 20 things in the first half hour. I would bring in a policy to build more council housing. I would give councils the power to be able to build again.

“I would put in a long-term housing strategy and get cross-party consensus so that policy would be set in law and be followed for 40 or 50 years, I would do everything to eradicate homelessness – and set myself the target of doing it in one year. I would make sure the money is there, even if it meant higher taxation. I would ban combustible cladding and say there needs to be secondary means of escape, smoke alarms, sprinkler systems and proper maintenance programmes for every high-rise building. I would make sure there were controlled rents and a minimum standard for housing. I would increase building regulations – everyone says that would put up house prices, but that is an urban myth, a threat by the private housebuilding industry to stop governments improving building standards. And I would say that all housing in Britain by 2030 has to be zero-carbon. It would be a long day in the office and everybody would say that the state can’t afford to do it. Well, we can’t afford not to do it.”

Clarke is not yet in charge of housing policy, although he may get a few votes based on the above. However, he is actively seeking to improve council house provision. We need, he says, to build 100,000 new council houses every year for at least five years. To show how it can be done, Clarke is working with Manchester City Council on a new development.

“It is a big step by Manchester Council to commit to building council housing when everything is stacked against them,” he says. “We want to build housing that is truly affordable while raising the design and space standards. I am hoping it will help eradicate, or at least minimise, the stigma associated with council housing. We are building a low number which I am gutted about. But we have to start somewhere. We are doing 27 houses and some apartments. I want to work with councils, not against them. I have a lot of sympathy for councils, because they are battling against central government and failed policies from parliament.”

Clarke is spearheading a campaign to persuade other councils to follow suit. The centenary of the Addison Act should spark a new wave of state-built housing, he says. Housing fit for the way we live now.

“This is going to be one of the most hard-hitting things I ever say. But the government doesn’t care. Because if it did, it would radically change its policies. It is about action, not words. I am sick to death of hearing the same headlines. We all know what the problem is. We all know what the solution is. We as a nation should be standing here, proud that we have solved the housing crisis, that we have built fantastic state-owned homes, that we have provided homes for those most in need. If we can’t do that there is something fundamentally wrong with the entire system.”

Adrian Lobb

George Clarke’s Council House Scandal on Channel 4 can be viewed here.

Warehousing the Homeless

Just parking this here as there is no-one else to talk to: my organisation gives only slightly less of a f*ck than the government. This morning I was stressed, cramming the grubby tattered remains of a long gone family holiday into a bag: tent, sleeping bag, pillow, into a bag for client leaving prison. "Jesus! It can't be that bad" says partner. Not that I haven't bleated on, but conveying the horror of what is happening is clearly a challenge we are not meeting...

The comment above chimed with the following story I saw on the BBC website yesterday. Coming as it does on the back of hearing how Theresa May's treatment of the Windrush generation whilst at the helm at the Home Office is likely to cost us upwards of £200million, I'm beginning to think I live in a country I no longer recognise. 

Inside Harlow's office block 'human warehouse' housing

"It is very scary," says mother-of-four Melanie Smith, sitting on the sofa which doubles as her bed, a few feet from the oven and sink of her one-room studio. Pressed close to her couch is one of the two beds that fill the rest of her flat and upon which her two sons eat, play and sleep. Ms Smith is one of hundreds of residents placed at Terminus House in Harlow by councils in and around London, often many miles from everything and everybody they once knew.

The former office block - the Essex town's tallest building - is one of hundreds up and down England which have been turned into housing without ever needing planning permission. Its owner, Caridon Property, claims it delivers a "good service" at the 14-storey 1960s office block - and that it does all it can to keep people safe. But since the building was resurrected as a housing complex in April 2018, crime has soared.

Police figures show that in the first 10 months after people moved in, crime within Terminus House itself rose by 45%, and within that part of the town centre (within a 500m radius) by nearly 20% - to more than 500 incidents - compared with the previous 10 months. More than 100 incidents involved violence or sex crimes. Incidents included anti-social behaviour, burglary, criminal damage and arson. There has also been at least one drugs raid.

Harlow's district commander Ch Insp Matt Cornish said: "I am absolutely convinced that Terminus House being at that site is a contributing factor in the increase in crime and anti-social behaviour we are having." And some occupants told the BBC that living at Terminus House, which is also home to 25 people recently released from prison, is frightening.

Ms Smith was placed there in April 2018. "There's no room," she said. "They have to eat, drink and sleep in their beds. There's no room to move about. It is not good for them. It is ridiculous really." She said it was not safe for her children to go downstairs, even during the day, because of drug users who are "out of it". "It is very scary. You don't know who is outside the door," she said. "Any arguments that happen, it is always, constantly, outside the door. Often you hear them banging against the door where they are fighting. The wall next to me - I had to clean the blood off it two weeks ago. You don't want them [the children] going down there - I don't want them thinking this is normal."

Down the corridor lives Kylie Yiangou, a single mother of a three-year-old boy, who was placed at Terminus by Epping Council. "It is a nightmare. It is mentally draining. They shouldn't have sold this place as a dream. I don't care if people want to sit in a room and overdose. But not next to my son. One minute they are laughing. The next minute they are fighting. The minute he says 'mummy I'm scared' I just lose my temper and have to go outside and literally drag men out of the hallway. And to be honest, I am homeless - how can I turn round and say I don't want that? I am homeless. How can I turn something down?"

Planning permission?

• Under a change to Permitted Development rights in 2013, developers became able to turn offices into residential premises without planning permission
• Unless there are demonstrable concerns about issues such as flooding or contamination, local councils have no control over such developments
• More than 1,000 homes in Harlow have been created from office block conversions
• The Local Government Association said in January 2019 that half of all new homes being created in Harlow are from office block conversions

Terminus House is covered by nearly 100 high definition CCTV cameras. "We just want to make sure that all the areas are covered," says Paul Jackson, regional manager at Caridon Property, which owns and runs the building. We do have some people that are vulnerable and it makes them feel safe. And should there be any incidents then they are covered and the police can use our system. I think we offer a good service. The property we have is like a stepping stone for most people. We have people from all different backgrounds. Most of them will be on a lower income. We offer a service that can help people out, people that are vulnerable. Councils come to us, they want to use our property and people are usually here for anything between two months and a couple of years. There's a need and we try and supply the need."

He confirmed there had been a police raid which involved a search for drugs adding: "I am aware there are drugs being taken in the property and we work closely with the police to try and resolve that. Like any other block of flats I'm sure there are situations and issues. But on a day-to-day basis everyone we see seems to be getting on OK."

While Terminus House sits at the centre of Harlow, other office blocks on the outskirts have also been given over to new housing. Greenway House, which is run by another company, sits to the far western outskirts of the town. Its flats are larger, the corridors wider and it has a play area for children, albeit a makeshift one in a fenced-off section of the car park. No residents who spoke with BBC voiced concerns about crime or their personal safety. What they did complain of, however, was their sense of isolation.

Channon Manley, housed at Greenway by Enfield Council in north London, described it as "an island with nothing". "The only thing around us is warehousing and business centres," she said. The closest shop is a 40-minute walk away and it takes an hour to walk into the centre of town."

With nearly half of new housing in Harlow being forged from old office blocks, the welfare of children living there has become a growing concern. One Caridon worker told the BBC some children at Templefields House, to the north eastern edge of the town, had found themselves referred to as "office block kids". Bernadette Miele, head teacher at Tanny's Dell Primary, said incoming pupils from Templefields were "presenting with social concerns" and needed additional support from her staff.

Danny Purton, portfolio holder for the environment at Harlow Council, compared the use of office blocks for homes to "human warehousing". "While they are here, we try and make them as welcome as possible," he said. "They are moving here because they are being off-rolled from London, where these people cannot afford the price of housing. In Harlow, the business model works for these landlords. But they shouldn't be here - they should be back with the communities they have come from and where the services are." 

He said many families lived in "complete isolation". "The problem is the location and it is completely inappropriate for families to live in an industrial setting. There are no facilities for the children to play, to meet other children and to have any sort of child's life at all."

More From the Nasty Party

As all probation staff are only too well aware, access to safe and secure accommodation is a key prerequisite of helping people sustain a crime-free life, but the Tories are about to make things that much more difficult. This from the Guardian:-

The End of Council Housing

On Tuesday, the House of Commons will once again debate the government’s new housing and planning bill, hyped up as the key to “transforming generation rent into generation buy”, which will supposedly mark another big step towards the age-old Tory dream of a property-owning democracy. But tangled up in its visions of thousands of new “starter homes” – 5,000 more of which were promised on Monday, when the government said it was going to directly commission housebuilding on five sites in the south of England – are an array of drastic measures aimed at what remains of England’s council homes. Labour sees the bill as the work of a government set on nothing less than the end of council housing as we know it – and on the ground, plenty of people agree.

Among the bill’s scores of proposals are a few that cut straight to the heart of what council housing has traditionally been all about. For a start, the government wants to end the system of permanent council tenancies – which was cemented while Margaret Thatcher was in power – and replace it with arrangements that will be reviewed every two to five years, meaning that for new tenants, council housing will no longer represent anything secure or dependable, let alone be passed between generations.

There are also plans to introduce a policy for council tenants known as pay to stay, whereby households that collectively earn more than £30,000 a year (£40,000 in London) could be presented with a choice: either move out, or be charged rents “at market or near market levels” (or, weirdly enough, work less). At the same time – and this is where it all gets almost comically complicated – so as to subsidise housing associations that will now have to sell houses and flats under a newly extended right-to-buy scheme, councils are to be forced to sell their highest-value homes as soon as they become vacant.

No one is sure how any of this will work, and the government seems to be making things up as it goes along: on Monday, for example, David Cameron announced that for every high-value council house sold in London, two supposedly “affordable” homes would be built – but there was no suggestion of any kind of like-for-like replacement. The essential story, then, seems pretty clear: a drastic attack on council housing, which will become not just less secure, but restricted to an ever smaller share of the population, just when Britain’s housing crisis has never been more acute.

How did we end up here? Just under 8% of us now live in council housing; in 1979, the figure was 42%. From the end of the 19th century onwards, the idea of the state providing people with secure and dependable places to live had steadily gained ground. The origin of council housing lies in the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890: three years later, the first council estate – Boundary Street, on the border of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green – was built in east London. By the time Britain entered the era after the second world war, both Conservative and Labour governments were building council houses in huge numbers – indeed, the annual number of new builds peaked under the Tories in 1953 at 220,000.

The history and legacy of all this is a little more mixed than some accounts suggest, partly bound up with the decline of building standards under Conservative rule, estates built on the edge of towns and cities that became bywords for inequality, and high-rise developments that quickly fell into decay. But at the heart of what happened was a simple ideal – of dependable housing for everyone – and a plain social fact: that to live in a council house was perfectly normal.

All that began to change in 1980, when the Thatcher government rolled out the right to buy, an idea that had been around since the late 1950s when a form of it was proposed by the Labour party. This new version was based on huge discounts, 100% mortgages – and the insistence that councils should use the 50% of the receipts they were allowed to keep to pay down their debts rather than building new houses.

As the writer Lynsey Hanley – whose 2007 memoir-cum-social history Estates remains the modern set text about council housing – puts it, from then on: “People wanted to think of themselves as being self-sufficient units. They didn’t want to think of themselves as having a kind of reliance on the state … It became a fundamental plank of the kind of ‘British values’ culture.” Between 1979 and 2013, 1.6m council homes were sold, numbers of new homes plummeted and council housing went from an inbuilt part of the post-war settlement to something pushed to the social margins.

In the meantime, the term “social housing” entered the British vocabulary as councils were superseded by independent housing associations – whose “assured” tenancies tended to be that bit less dependable than the secure terms available in what remained of the country’s council housing. Indeed, from 1997 onwards, the Blair and Brown governments proved to be more interested in housing associations than the traditional idea of council homes: in the 13 years they were in power, a mere 7,870 council houses were built.

And in popular culture, stereotypes that had been given new life in the 1980s eventually went nuclear: the mid-to-late New Labour period, let us not forget, was the era of Little Britain’s council-estate grotesque Vicky Pollard, the hairstyle maligned as the council-house facelift, and the bundling-up of council housing in the same dread category as “chavs” and welfare scroungers.

The views of council housing in both politics and culture, in fact, were intertwined. As Hanley puts it: “There was no urge on Labour’s part to reclaim the best parts of council housing’s legacy … If they’d restored the good name of council housing while they were in power, the Tories wouldn’t have been in such a good position to wreck it now.” (Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, has said that there is no convincing solution to the housing crisis that “does not start with a new, very large, very active council housebuilding project”.)

No one expected David Cameron and George Osborne to be any kind of friends to council housing, but their record still beggars belief. Government investment in social rented housing was cut by two-thirds almost as soon as the Tory/Lib Dem coalition took power. In 2012, jump leads were put on the right to buy when the maximum discount available to tenants was doubled to £75,000 – and a year later, the figure went up to £100,000 in London. The government accompanied this with a pledge to replace every home that was sold, but at the last count, for every nine houses sold, only one was being replaced.

Which brings us to now, and the latest legislation. “This bill has 33 new powers for the secretary of state over housing and planning,” says John Healey, a Labour MP and former shadow housing minister. He is particularly irate about the new income thresholds for social housing – which, as far as he understands it, will be discretionary for housing associations, but compulsory for councils. “That is going to catch a swath of ordinary-income families: people who are not earning a fortune, are working hard … Their low rents and long-term tenancies are an important part of their lives, and they’ll get taken away. Some of these people are the same ones who would have been hit by the tax credit cuts.”

He points out that the new “starter homes” the government talks about are set to sell for up to £250,00 outside London and £450,000 in the capital itself, which will hardly make them accessible to many existing tenants. All told, he says: “It’s clear to me that the Tories are killing off council housing, and this bill tightens the noose yet further.”

--oo00oo--

This from Steve Hilditch on the Red Brick blogsite:- 

A bitter pill to swallow

I had intended not to write any blogposts during my extended visit to the antipodes this winter. But the addition of new clauses at very short notice to the Housing and Planning Bill which introduce ‘mandatory fixed term tenancies’ of 2 to 5 years and end security of tenure for new council tenants touches a raw nerve for me. This is a smash and grab raid, stealing a core right from tenants with no real opportunity for debate outside the Bill committee. I am delighted Labour has opposed the change forcefully.

The policy, and the stealth with which it has been introduced, is symbolic of the contempt and loathing this government shows for people on low incomes. They can be moved around like pieces on a chess board to suit the convenience of the government and landlords, or at least be kept in a state of uncertainty as their ability to stay in their home while they are ‘reviewed’ by a housing officer in what will feel like an arbitrary manner. They must not be allowed to settle, to integrate into communities, to put down roots, to provide stability for their children, to build successful lives for themselves.

For people like me, who associate our own ‘social mobility’ with the platform of security and stability achieved by our families due to living in council housing, this is a bitter pill to swallow.

The Tories are not the only people to blame, of course. During her short period as housing minister, Caroline Flint flirted with this idea as well, and plenty of housing ‘professionals’ have made the case for ending what they like to call ‘lifetime tenancies’ – an invented term, quickly picked up by Grant Shapps to make the whole business seem unreasonable. Even now the ethically impoverished National Housing Federation can’t bring itself to defend what remain of tenants’ rights: their argument is that housing associations should be able to let ‘their’ homes to whoever they like and on whatever terms they like. At present they have got their way: the new fixed term tenancy model will apply only to councils while the government continues to work out what to do about the reclassification of housing associations as public sector for the purpose of defining public borrowing.

The story of security of tenure for council tenants is one of bitter struggle. Councils have not always been benign landlords. Even when they wanted to build a lot of council housing to help emancipate the working class they often managed the homes with a rod of iron. They never really shed the mantle of Octavia Hill and consumer rights were a foreign land. Some used the threat of eviction to exert social control and to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor. Labour eventually listened to the case for a charter of tenants’ rights and the Callaghan government sought to enact security of tenure, balanced by strong grounds for possession. Unlikely as it now seems, it was the Thatcher government that put ‘secure tenancies’ into law in the 1980 Act, picking up the Labour legislation and realising quickly that secure tenancies were a necessary foundation for the ‘right to buy’. Thatcher had an ulterior motive, but the tenants’ charter came into existence and brought with it a profound change in the style of housing management, more considered, more balanced, more respectful, more participative, and, when eviction was thought necessary, more evidence-based requiring a judgement in a court of law. Secure tenancies underpinned the modernisation of the social housing sector, even leading eventually (and regrettably) to tenants being called ‘customers’.

Social rented housing is our most precious housing asset. It’s existence broke the historic inevitability that people on low incomes and vulnerable people would also endure homelessness and dreadful housing conditions. It removed the blight of bad housing from generations of children. In my view it was the strongest mechanism of all to achieve genuine social mobility and to give children born into poor families similar opportunities to those enjoyed by better-off families. Many of the key tensions around social housing – the most controversial being who gets it, and who doesn’t – arise not from failure but from its success and popularity and the shortage of supply.

Of course the government and big parts of the housing industry will seek to pacify opponents of the change. It will be helpful to tenants, they say, to have their tenancies reviewed every 2 or 5 years. Most will be renewed, they say. Well, what is the point of that? The policy fails in either direction. If non-renewal is the primary outcome, the vast majority of tenants will end up in private renting, far less suitable for families and more expensive for tenants and the state. If most fixed term tenancies are renewed, the policy will not achieve its purpose of getting more turnover to create more space for new tenants. The argument that the government is trying to make that people will be helped into owner occupation is, well, pants. A few more will exercise the right to buy, but where is the justice in that? Remain a tenant and get kicked out, buy and you can stay.

We now have a sector that, instead of managing estates effectively and helping tenants to progress in their lives, will be collecting vast quantities of data about their incomes in case they are ‘high earning’ (£30k per household), monitoring what they get up to so they can review their tenancy every few years, and of course checking the immigration status of new tenants to boot. The new Victorians are firmly in charge.

There is an old saying that to incentivise the rich you have to make them richer, to incentivise the poor you have to make them poorer. This is now writ large in housing. If you are or are able to become a home owner, all manner of gifts – let’s call them subsidies – will be showered on you. The Prime Minister will talk endlessly about the important security and stability that being a home owner gives you, and that this in turn creates the conditions for social advancement. Meanwhile, if you are a social tenant, you will be accused of being subsidised even when you are not, your ability to pay your rent will be constantly threatened by bedroom tax or benefit caps or benefit sanctions, you will be denigrated and demonised in the media, and your ability to stay in your home will be subject to the whim of a landlord even if you meet all the terms of your tenancy.

Security for me and not for you. Subsidy for me and not for you. Social status for me and not for you. Insecurity at work and now at home. A two nation government without a doubt.

Somewhere to Live 2

The Probation Service has a long and proud history of innovation and in particular of being able to find solutions to social problems. In essence this was because two key elements were present at one and the same time. Firstly some very able and life experienced officers and secondly a benign management structure that gave staff encouragement and freedom to innovate. Unfortunately a predominantly young and first career workforce, coupled with a centralised command and control structure means that innovation is very definitely not on the agenda nowadays. We are therefore pretty much stuck with what has been developed in the past, or responding to outside initiatives.

In my part of the country we were very fortunate that many years ago a probation officer had the foresight, initiative and freedom to found a housing project for offenders. Basically it became hugely successful, was floated off by the Service and is today a major Social Landlord serving all kinds of disadvantaged people, including many offenders still. In such schemes it's vital that support is provided as part of the package, with the hope that a transition can be achieved either to a full council tenancy, or to a private landlord. But supply has never come close to meeting demand and there seems to be a continually reducing quantity of Local Authority housing available. Also, resources for offender accommodation is no longer 'ring fenced' and it has to compete with other groups, such as the disabled for funds out of the local 'Supporting People' budget. When this change was brought in I pointed out, sadly to no avail, that this would merely serve to re-introduce the notion of the deserving as opposed to the undeserving. To a certain extent this has indeed happened.

One glimmer of success in recent years has been the growth of the Foyer  movement, an idea borrowed from other European countries and that has rapidly taken hold here in Britain. Basically each project takes in young people, provides supervised accommodation for up to 12 months and during that time arranges either employment or training as well as general support and guidance. A great idea, but I still have a few misgivings about some Foyers selection policy. The same old issue arises of the distinction between who is perceived as deserving as opposed to undeserving. Now in the good old days, I'm convinced the probation service, or to be precise, one or two individual officers, would have been right in there sorting issues like that out. But we're not allowed to now of course, that's a job for management and they don't like rocking the boat with partners. 

Basically if Ken Clarke is going to achieve his aim of reducing the prison population and particularly the re-offending rate for short term prisoners - the group most likely to have serious housing problems - some extra resources have got to be found from somewhere to help with their accommodation needs. At the risk of repeating myself, in an era of spending cuts, I can only see the likelihood of this coming through the new idea of Social Impact Bonds and Payment by Results.