What is a housing officer’s work really about? The question crossed my mind as I escaped from a close encounter with an anti-social tenant, recently. Ringing in my ears were the words, ‘so what do you get f***ing paid?’.

More important than what I get paid, I guess, is what I get paid for. Surely the most important element of the job is building a relationship with the tenants; getting them to trust you and engage with you. A housing officer should be relied on to offer advice or point the tenant in the direction of help.

The reality is quite different - at least in this authority. The list of job tasks is long and getting longer. It seems to have grown, without thought to the conflicts between the various duties. Anti-social behaviour is an area where these conflicting priorities are most obvious - imagine having to make an arrears visit to a tenant, the day after enduring a tirade of foul-mouthed abuse when asking her to turn her stereo down.

Big expectations

I have found a huge difference in managerial expectations for housing officers, between local authorities and other social landlords. When I worked in a housing association, my role was very clearly defined. I could be sure to deal with arrears, allocations, tenancy issues and estate management. In this council, by contrast, it seems you may be asked to be everything from a social policeman to a housing advisor.

Dealing with anti-social behaviour can be especially corrosive of good officer-tenant relations. It isn’t just the out of hours visits to the drunk and disorderly, but the day to day work of weighing up one tenant’s grievance against another’s. How do you judge who is telling the truth, when both sides swear blind the other is lying?

Recently, a private tenant, who has a mild psychiatric illness, complained about his upstairs neighbours. They were noisy at all hours he said and he couldn’t get a wink of sleep. The unruly council tenants were visited and told to keep the noise down. But they weren’t in the least bit sorry. You see, the man who complained had been howling through the night, they alleged, keeping their baby daughter awake.

Who’s in the right?

Any housing officer dealing with ASB will have come across conflicting evidence on many occasions - and knowing who to believe doesn’t get easier with experience. Good practice suggests we should be hunting down the truth with witness statements, noise monitoring, mediation and a myriad of other techniques. In the end though it remains a judgement call, and King Solomon himself would have been hard pressed to come up with the right answer.

Of course dealing with ASB can be downright dangerous, as well. Inside Housing reported last year on a housing officer savaged by a dog while visiting a tenant. It was not an isolated incident and problems with dangerous dogs are definitely on the increase. It is small comfort to know that verbal abuse remains more common than physical violence.

It came as no surprise to me, to learn that Irvine Welsh, the British novelist with arguably the best grasp of violent life on the margins, wrote Trainspotting while employed in a council housing department. Welsh has acknowledged that he drew on his experiences in this role when creating his story’s grim characters and describing their outrageous behaviour.

Managers need to take more account of the links between criminality and ASB. Housing officers are not equipped to deal with crime. Those dangerous dogs may be owned especially to keep prying eyes - and officialdom - away from houses where drug dealing or a host of other criminal activities are taking place.

Of course there are many ways to protect yourself when visiting tenants with bad reputations. But anti-social behaviour still adds a dangerous dimension to the job that needs to be better acknowledged by councils.

Whatever the dangers, it looks like this quasi-policing approach is set to grow ever more important in authorities. Is it really appropriate?

Community safety is the magic phrase heard at council conferences and training events. We have a community safety committee. It works with the police and every conceivable stakeholder to produce policies that housing officers, in their burgeoning role as social policemen, are asked to help enforce. As a colleague put it to me, ‘I might as well have joined the Probation Service - at least I would have been better paid.’

Out of our hands

Some authorities take a more coherent approach than others. Our neighbouring council has a dedicated ASB team and environmental health officers on call 24/7 to deal with noise and nuisance. It makes sense to take these disruptive duties away from housing officers and put them in the hands of people who have no need to build a relationship with the tenants.

As well, a dedicated team can draw on the professional approach and long-term experience of officers who are dealing with these issues on a daily basis, rather than sandwiched between a voids visit and a tenancy sign up.

But more importantly, it allows housing officers to step back from the situation. It makes it easier to manage tenancies in a calm and supportive way, rather than dealing with chippy defensiveness from tenants who think you ‘have their number’.

Councils must stop taking the easy option with anti-social behaviour. There is a fundamental incompatibility between being a social policeman and a housing officer.

Inside Housing’s anonymous columnist is a senior housing officer

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment