Whether you believe decent homes was a success or, ultimately, a failure, you will find plenty of ammunition in today’s report on the programme by the National Audit Office. You’ll also find one big question: what next?
The case in favour is that the programme tackled an urgent problem - almost 40% of social housing non-decent - and rectified it in 92% of cases by the target date of 2010. That’s quite an achievement given the £19bn repairs backlog bequeathed by the Conservatives.
The case against is that it will take up to nine more years to get the remaining 8% of homes up to scratch. As of now, 305,000 homes are still non-decent and 124,000 will still be by 2014.
Meanwhile, as public accounts committee chairman Edward Leigh wasted no time pointed out, the department started the programme with no clear idea of how much it would cost and still does not know how much has been spent.
The story of decent homes is in many ways the story of the noughties. The Labour government elected in 1997 was packed with northern MPs who saw that their existing social housing stock was falling apart while there was low demand for the new ones being built. Only later did ministers realise that new homes were a major problem too and priorities abruptly changed.
The programme was also a key weapon in the departmental campaign to get rid of council housing that had begun under the Tories. Local authorities were given three options to meet the standard - stock transfer, arm’s length management (almo) or the private finance initiative.
The failure of that campaign in many ways explains the failure to meet the rest of the target. Some authorities and many tenants stubbornly campaigned for a fourth option and successive ministers stubbornly resisted them until doing a u-turn too late to find a way to fund the work. Meanwhile the almo programme was being dogged by delays and by the end of the noughties budgets earmarked for decent homes were being raided for new ones.
So what next? As long ago as 2004 the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister select committee called for a new, more ambitious standard - decent homes plus - to apply from 2010 onwards. Some landlords have independently applied a higher standard to their own stock.
In the meantime, environmental concerns have changed the agenda out of all recognition. Decent homes have to provide ‘a reasonable degree of thermal comfort’. But with zero carbon new homes on the horizon, and emissions from existing homes seen as a major problem, that has long sounded badly out of date. Surely something more ambitious is needed - both for social housing and the for the private rented stock accommodating vulnerable people that is also part of the decent homes programme.
In addition to higher energy efficiency standards, landlords and tenants also told the NAO they wanted to see higher standards for individual elements like new external doors and double glazing and new ones for things outside the home - lifts and communal and external areas.
The department and Tenant Services Authority seem to be making the right noises but so far there is no firm successor to decent homes. Reform of the housing revenue account is tantalisingly close but not there yet. But without both, and public spending cuts around the corner, it’s not hard to predict that maintenance problems and the repairs backlog will start to escalate once again.
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