Following on from my last post, having looked through the social housing proposals, some of what the government wants to do is sensible and some of it is not quite as good.   

How you interpret it has a lot to do with whether you are supportive of the coalition, prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt – or, like most of the Labour party at the moment – utterly convinced that everything they do is evil and twisted. 

Remember that at the moment, all this is up for consultation, so isn’t fixed in stone.

So, let’s have a look at the proposals.   The main ones are:  ending lifetime tenancies, and bringing in higher rents for social housing.  

It is easy to attack both of these.   Ending lifetime tenancies would make people insecure, possibly deprive them of their home and risk them ending up away from their communities, friends and families in substandard accommodation.   Bringing in rents of up to 80% of private lettings rates risks pricing people out of the market, or increasing Housing Benefit.  If these were blanket proposals which were about to come in I would definitely be opposing them.  But they aren’t.

First of all:  no existing tenants would lose their secure tenancies.  Even if they move house. 

Second, councils and housing associations will be allowed to decide how long they want new tenancies to be.  The absolute minimum looks like 2 years, but there is no maximum.  And different types of tenants can be given lengths of tenancy.   The government are also asking whether the elderly and the disabled should still be entitled to tenancies for life.  And any fixed term tenancies can be renewed.   

In other words, council and housing associations will be able to choose how they operate these new “flexible tenancies”.   If they want to they can effectively continue to offer people homes for life by offering 20 or 30 year renewable tenancies.     Of course, some may choose not to, and have shorter tenancies.   It will be a local decision.

It is also proposed that tenants will continue to have succession rights to the tenancy for their spouse or partner, as a minumum.  But that landlords can include more succession rights than that if they wish.  Again, it’s all to be decided at a local level.

The way it is all to be decided is via strategic tenancy policies, in which each landlord will lay out what they plan to do in their area.

As for changes to the rents, which will be called “affordable rents”:  it only applies to housing associations, not councils.  And they will only be expected to have a proportion of rents at the new rate, for short-term tenancies.  The detail on this – such as, what the minimum proportion of tenancies will be, is not in the consultation paper.

So what do I actually make of this?  Well, first of all, the ideas have clearly been influenced by the government’s drive for localism.  Councils and housing associations will have much more freedom to decide what to do, and be able to change things to suit their local situation.   Personally, I am in favour of more local decision-making, because in most cases it will lead to social housing which better meets the needs of local people.

But that doesn’t mean there are no risks.   For example, if you allow different councils to make different decisions, some councils make not make very good ones.   People’s tenancies and experiences will differ according to where they live: the so-called “postcode lottery”.    Labour were so afraid of that happening that they micromanaged every process they could. 

My view is that the micromanagement stifled the ability of councils to manage properly, to think for themselves, and prevented innovation and held back excellence, levelling services down rather than up.  And it cost quite a lot of money in bureaucracy.   And it did not prevent failure either.  

I am a glass half full person, so I see these changes as an opportunity to improve social housing, whilst acknowledging that it may have risks where there are bad council landlords.   A glass half empty person may see the changes as an opportunity for unscrupulous councils to fleece tenants or make life more insecure for them. 

What I do know is that social housing is not working very well at the moment.  I think it is worth trying something different.

There are of course other proposals than the two I have talked about here.  More about the rest of it in the next few days.

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