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Jules BirchTenants seem to have slipped down the agenda – the only option is to embarrass ministers into action
Ministers now have little to say on tenant engagement, creating the impression that they are engaging just enough to look like they are doing something and no more, writes Jules Birch
Whether you put it down to carelessness or couldn’t-care-less-ness, the inaction inside government that has sparked the open letter from A Voice for Tenants (AV4T) is symptomatic of a wider political paralysis.
As the group itself points out, it is not representative of the eight million people living in social housing in England but it is the best we have until the government keeps the prime minister’s promise to bring tenants into the political process.
The letter (in full below) is all the more effective for the contrast between its moderate language and its stark message that working behind the scenes has not produced results.
The only option left seems to be to embarrass the politicians into living up to what they have said over the past two years – accepting Inside Housing’s open invitation to a meeting seems the bare minimum they should do.
And there is a strikingly similar message in The Times this morning from Grenfell United, as it attacks “indifferent and incompetent” ministers who took their “kindness as weakness”.
Two years of meetings have produced too little action, they say, with no progress on their call for a new model of housing regulator and thousands of people still living in “death traps” with combustible cladding.
“The letter is all the more effective for the contrast between its moderate language and its stark message that working behind the scenes has not produced results”
Grenfell and tenants were top of the agenda for the ministers in post at the time of the fire – the work of Alok Sharma and his civil servants is praised in the AV4T letter – but have slipped down it as the months and now years have passed.
Three housing ministers later, Kit Malthouse, the current temporary incumbent, has plenty to say on Twitter about new supply under the hashtag #morebetterfaster, but he has not mentioned tenants since the engagement events held with AV4T’s help last October.
All this only reinforces the impression that the politicians at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) are engaged in doing just enough to look like they are doing something and no more than that.
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As I’ve blogged before, this impression predates the current incumbents but it has come even more into focus in the past 12 months.
It applies most obviously to the glacially slow progress made since last year’s Social Housing Green Paper promised a new deal for social housing and asked whether there was “a need for a stronger representation for residents at a national level”.
The fact that the volunteers who have done more than anyone else to help that happen are not even able to afford train fares to meet in person is nothing short of a national embarrassment.
“All this only reinforces the impression that the politicians at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government are engaged in doing just enough to look like they are doing something and no more than that”
It continues with the stalling progress made on getting rid of combustible cladding on existing homes – work has been completed on only 6% of private blocks and there are still 71 with no plan in place.
The message to private block owners that they should “do the right thing” has always looked weak at best and has been dismissed as a “hollow threat” by the owner of Northpoint in Bromley.
Local Conservative MP and former local government minister Bob Neill has called for direct funding from the government and last week attacked “a worrying complacency” at the Treasury.
And the impression also extends to housing issues that go beyond those raised by the Grenfell Tower fire.
Take, for example, the leasehold scandal. In December 2017 former housing secretary Sajid Javid pledged to free leaseholders from “feudal practices” in the leasehold market and tweeted:
We’re going ban sale of new build leasehold homes & set ground rent to zero for new leases to help end #leaseholdscandal & protect hard-working homebuyers
— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) December 21, 2017
That promise has been steadily watered down as time has gone on – the ban only applies to most houses and ground rent was not set to zero when the details finally emerged – and last month Mr Javid’s successor James Brokenshire unveiled that classic political device for dressing up inaction as action: a voluntary industry pledge.
An equally cunning but transparent device is to announce things in press releases to garner some favourable headlines and then quietly let them drift.
Which should suggest a need for caution among campaigners about the recent government announcement on ending Section 21.
Issuing a press release headlined ‘Government announces end to unfair evictions’ is not the same thing at all as actually doing it.
“A cunning but transparent device is to announce things in press releases to garner some favourable headlines and then quietly let them drift”
All this is happening in a political context that will be dominated by six more months of Brexit drift and infighting about the Tory leadership.
Most immediately, that means that the spending review that was set for the autumn could be delayed.
That is the spending review, remember, that was meant to “end austerity” and set departmental spending limits for three years from April 2020.
Delay could see departments forced to rely on existing budgets for another year, implying no extra money for new programmes and the extension of existing measures such as the benefit freeze.
Just to sum up the priorities in our politics right now, the housing minister is in the news again this morning – but yet again for the fantasy Brexit compromise named after him, rather than for anything to do with his day job.
Jules Birch, award-winning blogger
A Voice for Tenants letter to the housing minister
Dear Minister
It is disappointing that, coming up to the two-year anniversary of the Grenfell tragedy, there has
not been any significant progress in achieving the prime minister’s aim to bring the four million social housing tenants into the political process.
We have asked Inside Housing to publish this letter because we as tenants consider that our input into the political process is sufficiently important to merit sector-wide debate.
We are writing to you again following our letter to you on 15 January, to invite you or your officers to a sectoral discussion to be hosted by Inside Housing on how best to develop national tenant representation.
We welcomed that your government agreed to our request to include a question about national tenant representation in the Social Housing Green Paper. We are sure that you will be delighted that in response to the government’s question, so many stakeholders in the sector have responded so positively that national tenant representation is needed.
We can confirm that this level of positive support for our proposals for national tenant representation is what we are experiencing also. As you know, a huge 93% of respondents to the survey we carried out (mostly from social housing tenants) said that there is a need for national tenant representation. Disappointingly, this was matched by a similarly huge 87% of respondents who considered that tenant voices are not currently heard in government policy discussions.
We are also pleased that all the major sectoral bodies support tenants’ views that there should
be national tenant representation, including Inside Housing, the National Housing Federation, the Association of Retained Council Housing, the National Federation of ALMOs, Shelter and Dame Judith Hackitt in her proposals about how to respond to the issues brought up by the Grenfell fire tragedy.
A Voice for Tenants Steering Group was formed in the wake of Grenfell, bringing together the national bodies that act on behalf of tenants alongside other tenants active nationally.
While our group consisted of the most nationally representative group of tenants at that time, we never purported to be representative of tenants. We have always made the case that it is not possible for any tenant group to speak on behalf of four million social housing tenants or achieve the prime minister’s aim to bring them into the political process without the means to have a two-way dialogue with them.
We approached then-housing minister Alok Sharma MP, offering to work with him constructively and coherently to start the process of building engagement with tenants. He responded positively to our approach and asked us both to draw up proposals for how dialogue with tenants could take place and to assist him in holding a set of ministerial events for him to meet with tenants. At that time, DCLG officers had no experience of working with tenants. It was as a result of our knowledge and experience and the tireless input of many of our volunteers that it was possible to hold a successful series of ministerial events. The minister and DCLG officers were surprised by the quality of tenant debate at those events, and they were a fantastic start to tenants and the government working in partnership together.
“We are disappointed that, despite the overwhelming support for the principles in our proposals, there has been next to no dialogue between government and our group since the end of 2018”
The Ministry broadly welcomed the proposals we had made to them at their request. Given the many different tenant viewpoints on how national tenant representation should be established, we have always proposed that A Voice for Tenants should be established through an extensive tenant-led national consultation with tenants. We saw this as a start to what would need to be a long-term means of building tenant involvement in the political process, which would need to include engagement with tenants in many different ways. The Ministry has asked us on many occasions to amend our proposals, which we have done, and the Ministry asked us to set out how national consultation should take place in our submission to the Social Housing Green Paper, which we also did.
We are disappointed that, despite the overwhelming support for the principles in our proposals, there has been next to no dialogue between government and our group since the end of 2018.
Time has moved on since we made our initial proposals to government in July 2017. More tenant groups are emerging, most of them with stronger views than ours that government should have taken action much sooner to redress power imbalances between tenants and landlords. We recognise that different proposals than ours may be appropriate now, and that we on the A Voice for Tenants Steering Group may not be the right people to take forward the national tenant representation debate on behalf of tenants. It is also the case that our group – which has had no financial resources – is now finding it hard to progress any further. Our last meeting had six people present in person, with a further nine people who could not afford train fares attending on the phone. Perhaps we were naïve, but we never anticipated that it would take nearly two years for any progress to be made and that there would
still be no resources to enable even our small group of tenants to debate issues.
The fundamental question remains regarding how the government and the sector are going to ensure that four million social housing tenants are going to be brought into the political process. If our proposals to government are not what is needed, then what is the government going to do to achieve the prime minister’s aim? How can the housing sector assist in this aim? We invite government and the sector to take part in a sectoral debate on this issue to be hosted by Inside Housing.
These are important issues within the fabric of our society. It is a fundamental democratic deficit that
the views of the eight million people living in the four million social housing tenanted homes are being ignored. Most social housing tenants feel totally disregarded and disrespected by politicians and their landlords alike. Unless we start to take steps to address their alienation and powerlessness, there will be long-term negative consequences for society as a result of it.
Yours faithfully
Leslie Channon, chair, A Voice for Tenants Steering Group
