Our social housing model needs work

Tim Williams, Regeneration & Renewal, 8 February 2008

For new housing minister Caroline Flint's Fabian Society speech this week on social housing represents a policy breakthrough. Essentially she is saying, particularly to young people, that to get a social letting you need to be seeking work. Fantastic. Remember the shocking fact behind this announcement:most social lettings go to single people, most of whom are young and most of these are workless.

Hands up those who knew this. Hands up those who think it's a priority for the state to support such people from the time they enter social housing to when they die. For virtually no-one who enters social housing is in work and few in it find a job. New work and pensions secretary James Purnell has made banker David Freud his benefits tsar. Freud says the current system commits people to a form of house arrest. Flint is now asking how social housing can support people into work rather than trapping them at home. Turning this approach into reality will be tough, so understanding what caused the problem would help.

Right-to-buy was part of it, as was the collapse in building social housing. Together they left social housing dominated by a residual population of deprived people. Then there are the issues of who social housing is for and the unintended effects of targets. Social housing has become almost exclusively for the "homeless" whose "need" takes priority over other people's needs to an extent that causes community friction. I say "homeless" because we now know that most of them are single people who have families they could and perhaps should stay with. And targets? The Housing Corporation's main measure of output is "units grant-funded". Although it is efficient at delivering this output, it is the wrong one and leads to most of the problems the Hills review on social housing identified last year: particularly that of building social housing in areas of concentrated poverty and, indeed, existing social housing.

The new Homes and Communities Agency can have few more crucial tasks than ensuring that its outputs do - as the Hippocratic oath puts it - no harm. In pursuing a more sophisticated set of regeneration outputs, the agency has a second, more practical, challenge. Units grant-funded may be the wrong engine driving an organisation, but it's a lot simpler to control than the right one.

- Tim Williams advises the Government and is a director of Navigant Consulting. Email: tim.williams@haymarket.com.