Baptism of fire

John Healey seems a down-to-earth sort. He likes a pint of beer, Lancastrian comedian Peter Kay and coffee so strong he insists on making his own. He spent the other weekend camping with his in-laws near Stoke.

This practical take on life carries through to the 49-year-old’s attitude as housing minister, if the number of announcements he has made in the two months since he started the job is anything to go by. The two biggest hits he got in before parliamentary recess began last week were an extra £1.5 billion for housing and a plan to dismantle the detested housing revenue account system.

Even in Eland House today, his last in the Communities and Local Government department before leaving Westminster for the summer, he’s working on yet more new ideas. The results are revealed a couple of days later: a consultation on a new allocations policy and a crackdown on illegal sub-letting (Inside Housing, 31 July).

It’s the controversial allocations question that seems to chime most with Mr Healey’s personal interest - perhaps born during the two years he spent as local government minister - and a theme he returns to time and again: granting more power to councils. Power to build houses, to make decisions on housing need, to choose who should get housing priority.

Myths and misunderstandings
He’s planning new rules to give councils more power over how they hand out social housing. They will, according to Mr Healey, ‘create more leeway for local authorities to give - without touching the reasonable preference categories [those in extreme need] - more preference to factors that they see as important in their local area’. He suggests some things that could bump people up the housing waiting list: length of time spent on it, whether they are actively seeking work, or have a strong local or family connection to the area.

The last one is the hottest political potato. Housing allocations typically make headlines for myth-laden stories about immigrants allegedly jumping the housing queue. ‘Local homes for local people’ is seen by some as music to the ears of the British National Party. Mr Healey denies his plan will fuel the racial fire burning around the topic. ‘It is designed to do precisely the opposite,’ he says.

The minister blames the current system for exacerbating the myth-mongering. ‘It’s very poorly understood and that lack of understanding allows some of the myths and misunderstandings to flourish.’

Instead, he envisions a new world of local transparency and mutual understanding. ‘What I’m looking for [councils] to do is to have a simpler, more open, better reported, more accountable system, so it is easier for people to see what the policy is, how it works in practice, and who is getting the homes in their area.’

So it’s back to local accountability. Local power is also why, Mr Healey says, he has acted fast to free councils from the creaking HRA system. ‘It’s a way of allowing them to assume what I regard as their proper role, which is as the body with the lead responsibility for assessing and meeting the housing the needs in their area,’ he explains. The minister spells out what he wants from councils: dealing with developers to get the homes that are needed, bringing forward land and working more closely with housing associations. He even suggests that councils should push their housing associations harder to satisfy housing need. For Mr Healey, being down-to-earth does not mean sitting on the fence.

Nor does he pull any punches when asked about councils that look likely to refuse to sanction the plans for some to exit the HRA as early as next year. The dissenters dislike the idea of spreading the £18 billion of debt, currently held by individual authorities, between them all. If the minister can’t persuade them to go with his idea, then it will take primary legislation to dismantle the HRA - and probably not before 2012.

Mr Healey stops short of saying that it’s a take-it or leave-it situation - but he repeatedly asserts that ‘the ball is in their court’. He considers councils that imagine the government can service or write off the £18 billion debt to be ‘whistling in the dark’ and suggests they ‘get real’.

Fighting his corner
He’s also talking tough on the government’s recent raid on the decent homes programme. To raise the latest £1.5 billion for affordable housing, most of which has been corralled from other departments, £150 million has been siphoned from funds promised to the dozen arm’s-length management organisations aiming for two-star inspection status from the Audit Commission next year.

Mr Healey is quick to defend the move, stating that payment has merely been delayed until 2011. Not exactly a cast-iron guarantee, given it must first be allocated from decimated public finances in the forthcoming comprehensive spending review. Even so, he is adamant the ALMOs will get their cash.

His pragmatism - along with his experience as a former Treasury finance secretary - shines through when he says that cuts in some parts of the housing budget were necessary to persuade Whitehall to contribute more than £900 million to his £1.5 billion housing fund. ‘If I wasn’t prepared to [make cuts] within the department and within the housing budget, then my position in negotiating what is much more money for housing from other areas of government would have been a lot weaker,’ he contends. ‘I think it is a big win for housing.’

After two months in the job, the social housing sector seems cautiously impressed with Mr Healey: mentions of him draw tentative approval - and favourable comparisons to his predecessors for being more committed and more of a heavyweight.

He is already impressively fluent on the subjects he clearly feels strongly about. But he doesn’t know everything. A question about the housing reform green paper, proposed in 2007 by Yvette Cooper, considered by Caroline Flint and parked by Margaret Beckett, draws a total blank with the current housing minister.

The green paper was supposed to be the response to Professor John Hills’ report on social housing, to explore its purpose and how it can enhance social mobility.

‘Do you mean housing benefits reform?’ Mr Healey asks, glancing at the press officer. No, the housing reform green paper, planned for late 2008. ‘Was it?’ - he’s momentarily confounded. ‘I’m not working on a housing reform green paper at the moment.’ But like any good minister, Mr Healey’s back on message within moments.

‘Whatever the housing green paper was, I’m also looking at some of the longer-term questions about demand for housing, supply of housing and the policy questions that raises.’ He will be doing that this autumn and intends to publish the results, though ‘that’s not work I’d call a green paper’.
That gap in his knowledge brings home the fact that there have been four housing ministers in the last couple of years - work done in late 2008 is now a distant memory.

But Mr Healey is on firmer ground when it comes to whether he will be leaving as speedily as his two immediate predecessors, who lasted eight months apiece. ‘It’s a great job, I’m going to carry on doing it.’ Until the next election? ‘I would certainly hope so - and beyond.’ But that - and whether Labour will be in office to return money to the ALMOs or dismantle the HRA - is one thing that Mr Healey can’t control.

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