Housing is losing its soul

There’s an age old debate which raises its head every ten years or so; should we do away with the license fee and let the BBC fund itself through advertisement like any other TV channel?

It’s a good question but what on earth, you may ask, has it got to do with housing?

Well the argument for retaining the license fee goes something like this: the BBC is a public interest broadcasting channel and its mission is to produce TV for the wider benefit of the general public.  This should include TV which is politically balanced as well as programming designed to include minority interests where audiences would be too low to be commercially viable.  However, should the BBC have to rely on the vagaries of advertisement, then ultimately its impartiality would be compromised – he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Its an argument which I am rather drawn to.  Commerciality has its place but ultimately there has to be a point where it stops and public interest takes over.

Commercial assets

Since 2010 the focus on the sector has been an increasing drive to commercialise, to bring in new money from outside the sector and to sweat existing assets to provide new money to invest.  All of those are laudable aims, but they are aims which need to be balanced by the underpinning values of the sector. 

Now I understand the pressures which social landlords are under to build new homes and find new forms of funding in a grant free world but the commercial should not be won at the expense of the social.  Yet I genuinely fear that this is what is starting to happen.

Every time that I read about yet another landlord agreeing yet another million, billion pounds on the bond markets I do so with extremely mixed feelings. 

Of course I welcome the new homes which that money will provide, but I also worry about the price that will be paid to afford those new homes.

For every pound spent on servicing debt is a pound not spent on providing services for tenants. 

Now I accept that these have always been competing priorities but never before has there been so much pressure on both of them.  Never before has there been so little oversight of the social value that housing providers should be delivering.

In fact I’ve had a number of worrying conversations with the leadership of social landlords who tell me that ‘we think we might be spending too much on services for tenants’ or ‘yes we are a social business but the business bit must always come first.’  It’s a growing rhetoric in the sector but it’s one that I don’t buy in to.

Social housing was created to address housing market failure.  It was not created to simply be part of the wider housing market. 

Too often I hear the ‘business plan’ being used as an excuse as to why things can’t happen, as if the business plan was something beyond the landlords’ control.  Yet the business plan is a reflection of housing associations’ investment decisions.  So when an association chooses to take on new debt to finance new homes it is also (whether consciously or not) deciding not to invest that money in providing services for its tenants.

Too often, as providers build new homes and new estates, I see them start to abandon their older or more difficult-to-manage areas.  Property starts to get sold on the open market (often at auction) regardless of who it is sold to or what impact this might have on the local community.  This is housing associations adding to the process of community abandonment.

Too often I see senior managers more obsessed about the next development opportunity and seemingly less concerned about delivering real change in the lives of their tenants.

Social landlords need to be run for the benefit of their tenants and for the wider benefits of the communities which they serve.  When a social landlord decides to ‘disinvest’ in a house they are choosing to ‘disinvest’ in a community.  When they auction off an ageing property in a difficult-to-manage area they are adding to the cycle of physical decline and helping to create the sort of crisis neighbourhoods which need major state intervention. 

When they start to disinvest in services for tenants they are adding to the cycle of social decline and help to create the troubled families of the future.

And that can’t be allowed to happen.

What is the point of building new social homes if the result is exacerbated community and family decline elsewhere?

Which is where the regulator needs to step in. 

Building blocks

Whilst I understand the need for the Homes and Communities Agency to ensure organisational viability and good governance, you cannot regulate a sector by simply looking at its individual building blocks.  Having lots of solid bricks doesn’t necessarily build a viable home.

Over the past fifty years we have all paid our license fee for social housing.  Our taxes have paid to build the asset base of social housing, and social housing needs to be accountable to us for the public good which that investment deserves. 

We cannot allow the complete commercialisation of these social housing organisations.  We cannot allow social housing providers to become just another landlord.  The idea that landlords could ‘buy’ their way out of regulation as the policy Exchange think-tank suggested this month, and ‘buy’ their way out of their public duty, is frankly about as acceptable as adverts in the middle of Strictly Come Dancing.

Ann O’Byrne is cabinet member for housing at Labour-run Liverpool City Council and assistant mayor