Keeping watch

Inside Housing’s front page headline ‘Tories: we will scrap the TSA’ (19 March) made me think of the classic diatribe in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: ‘Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, public order, irrigation, the roads, what have the Romans ever done for us?’

So what does regulation do for us? First, we benefit from low borrowing costs and the continuing availability of loans. Lenders take comfort from regulation. This benefit is estimated to be worth around £400 to £500 million per year.

Second, without a regulator, who sorts out organisations in trouble? The regulator hasn’t always spotted problems immediately but it has always got there in time and engineered a solution that has safeguarded the interests of both tenants and funders.

The third issue is rents. The TSA is the intermediary for implementing government rent policies. Its abolition would either see housing associations free to set their own rents or the government directly responsible for rent setting - leading to a number of unintended consequences on the public purse.

Fourth, the TSA ensures that public money is retained for public objectives - as taxpayers we should all be concerned to ensure this happens.
The fifth issue is quality. The decent homes programme has been achieved by regulation - not by accident Without a regulator the focus on quality homes, services and safety will become solely a matter for individual landlords (as it is for the private sector). Like it or not, regulation has driven up standards.

The sixth issue is stock transfer. In the past 20 years more than a million homes have transferred from local authorities to housing associations and been brought up to the decent homes standard. Some £15 billion of deficit funding has been raised - tenants voted for this on the assur-ance of close regulation. Without such reassurance it is unlikely there would be any future transfers.

Even more is at risk if the government seeks to tackle these issues by taking on regulation itself. The Weaver judgement shows how close housing associations are to public body status. The end of the TSA should see our current private status protected. But if regulation is transferred to government and it takes on the powers to direct us as it directs local authorities then re-classification as public bodies is inevitable. At that point some £55 billion of our loans become public debt as would the further planned borrowings of £25 billion over the next five years.

Apart from providing access to cheap money, sorting out the crisis cases, keeping rents affordable, locking in the public benefit, maintaining a focus on quality homes, services and safety, and keeping some £55 billion off the public sector balance sheet, what has the TSA ever done for us?

Barbara Thorndick is chief executive of West Kent Housing Association

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