Taking a bite

Earlier this year, the then housing minister Caroline Flint became the first to take a bite when she suggested social tenants should have to sign contracts committing to look for work to access a home.

The Chartered Institute of Housing was the next to tuck in, suggesting there should be a significant shift away from static tenancies for life.

Now the right-leaning think tank the Centre for Social Justice, set up by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, has become the latest to dine out on the issue.

Its suggestion that tenancy for life should end was made in a report by a group chaired by Kate Davies, chief executive of Notting Hill Housing.

Security of tenure was introduced in 1980 following years of unrest over rents and housing conditions. Members of tenants’ groups had managed to negotiate tenants’ charters with council landlords, but became aware that legislation was needed to underpin them.

Almost three decades later, the security of tenure debate has provoked passionate argument from both sides.

Tenant Lyn Ralph, a tenant of Doncaster’s arm’s-length management organisation, says increasing homeownership is not the answer to society’s ills. Ms Ralph and her injured army husband lost their Aldershot bungalow in 1989, after overstretching themselves with a second mortgage. ‘It was heartbreaking,’ she recalled. ‘It was only bricks and mortar, but my husband had a nervous breakdown.’

And Ms Ralph, now chair of the Doncaster Federation of Tenants’ and Residents’ Associations, said that in her experience, homeownership also caused ‘a terrible division between the haves and have nots’.

Professor John Hills, the academic whose own government-commissioned report on the role of social housing kick-started the current debate about its future last year, thinks the latest report goes too far in a number of areas.

The report makes an uncomfortable leap between the suggestion that successful tenants be helped to build equity stakes in their homes and an end to security of tenure, which he said he found ‘unhelpful’.

‘Clearly it’s very helpful that the report sees an important role for social housing and suggests ways in which social landlords could work better to improve the employment of their tenants,’ Professor Hills said. ‘But some of the more radical suggestions made in the recommendations might actually take [us] in the opposite direction.’

Professor Hills added that the ‘recommendation that social landlords should be able to sell units as they see fit, using the proceeds for either reinvesting or other social purposes, does seem to me to be to be a huge leap away from simply asset management’.

‘Taken to its logical conclusion, it means that social landlords could sell their stock off,’ he added.

Daniel Zeichner, a member of Labour’s national policy forum, said the report’s authors were ‘living in a fantasy world’ with their suggestion that more people should be encouraged into homeownership and their implication that social housing was a ‘kind of second-best tenure’. ‘Although we recognise there’s a strong lobby from inside the housing profession, Labour is going to stand firm,’ he said.

But shadow housing minister Grant Shapps had little but praise for the report, hinting that its recommendations had potential as future Tory policy. ‘I think they’ve got some really good, interesting ideas: things that we’d certainly want to be looking very closely at,’ he said.

Mr Shapps was reticent on the subject of whether the Conservatives would throw their weight behind the idea of scrapping lifetime tenancies, but said tenure reform was something that ‘has to be thought about’.

He was sympathetic to the idea that housing associations should be freed from government targets and allowed to provide housing ‘as they see fit’.

On homeownership, he said: ‘I don’t think people need to be tied into homeownership and I don’t think it needs to be an ultimate direction for anybody, either. But I think it is true that homeownership has probably done more to transform communities than any other housing policy in the last few years.’

But Defend Council Housing chair Alan Walter was unconvinced.

‘[The report] was a fairly crude way of saying, “we want to get rid of the public housing sector”,’ he said.

He is concerned that the government review of council housing subsidy could also threaten secure tenancies. ‘The danger is that they try to use that as an opportunity to redraw the definition of council housing,’ he said. ‘We won’t let them do that.’

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