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Breakdown of trust between institutions and communities is a warning
Several major reports this week suggest that existing organisations and institutions risk losing their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. These are warnings the housing sector must heed, writes Martin Hilditch
The breakdown of trust between communities and the institutions and systems that serve them was a worrying theme in a number of major reports this week.
There’s a central message – that organisations and institutions need to change their approach urgently if they are to maintain their relevance and ability to effect change – which is remarkably consistent.
First out of the blocks was former housing minister Nick Raynsford’s review of planning in England. It warns that there is a “striking loss of public trust in planning”.
“To be effective, planning must have public legitimacy,” it states. “This legitimacy is under intense strain, with a broad disconnect between people and the wider planning system.”
Days later, the former chief executive of Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, Julia Unwin, published the results of an independent inquiry, which she chaired, into the future of civil society. It found that often organisations have “become too remote from the people and communities we are here for”, and that if civil society fails to respond to people’s “desire for power, we will lose our legitimacy”.
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Then, the National Housing Federation published interim thoughts from its Great Places Commission, focused on housing in the Midlands and the North of England.
As you’ve guessed, it highlights the same issues. It talks about how “mergers have left local communities and stakeholders feeling more distant from their local housing associations”. The report refers to “a growing sense of disconnection”.
The reports suggest a variety of solutions, including holding a national conversation about development needs and signing organisations up to a pact to practice shared models of decision-making and establishing a “national people-power grid”.
"The NHF report refers to ’a growing sense of disconnection’"
Elsewhere this week, on Saturday morning in south London, a group of people met who might provide some additional pointers.
They were there to hear about a housing organisation with more than 800 members – an active supporter base that would put many larger organisations to shame.
The Rural Urban Synthesis Society is a community land trust, based in south London and currently moving forward with the capital’s largest affordable self-build project. It might be small, but it has worked out how to get significant numbers of people involved and is directly backing plans to build more homes.
There are lessons for some more traditional players about how a new model of involvement might work.
The former president of the Chartered Institute of Housing, Alison Inman, summed up her feelings in a blog responding to the Civil Society Futures Inquiry this week.
In it she referred to Bernard Brett, the founding secretary of Colchester Quaker Housing Association who had cerebral palsy, was a wheelchair user and communicated using a letter board. “It is hard not to imagine that were he alive today, rather than running the show he would be seen as a recipient of services, someone with ‘needs’ and ‘vulnerabilities’,” she wrote.
If that rings true with any readers, it points to a need for real and speedy change. The reports contain some starters for 10.
Martin Hilditch, managing editor, Inside Housing
