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From the archive - government encourages stock transfers

Inside Housing looks back at what was happening in the sector this week five, 15 and 25 years ago

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30 years ago this week: concern over tenant participation #ukhousing

20 years ago this week: the government was encouraging stock transfers #ukhousing

10 years ago this week: ministers promise a new era of tenant engagement #ukhousing

30 years ago

Last week’s Housing Day made ‘tenant voice’ its focus – and this was an issue that was in the news 30 years ago, too.

A report for the Department of Environment (DoE) found that only 20% of housing associations

had formal tenant participation procedures in place. This was despite what the DoE report referred to as their “better image in this regard” compared to councils, which had a “poor record” according to the report, commissioned from the Centre for Housing Research, at the University of Glasgow.

The report added that there is “little doubt… that small associations were in closest contact with tenants”.

However, the researchers concluded that “organisational type is not the key determinant of effectiveness, nor indeed is the difficulty of the context managed. What matters most is the will to manage efficiently and effectively… No single organisational structure is overwhelmingly superior”.

The report found little difference between the incomes of the households in housing association and council properties – 67% of local authority households had incomes of less than £100 a week, compared to 69% of housing association households.

Our front page 20 years this week
Our front page 20 years this week

20 years ago

The future of council housing hit the front page, when the government was encouraging councils to transfer their stock to associations to lever in private cash to repair their homes.

But tenant ballots were required to transfer the stock, and in many areas such stock transfers were rejected.

Gwyneth Taylor, housing policy officer at the Association of London Government, said the government had failed to tackle fears that tenancy rights would be eroded.

Councils were talking about setting up landlord bodies that they would own to manage the stock, but it wasn’t until 2002 that the government allowed council ALMOs to be established to manage council housing on behalf of their parent local authorities. Today there are 32 ALMOs, managing 440,000 homes.

Peter Marsh (picture: Solent News)
Peter Marsh (picture: Solent News)

10 years ago

Today the government is promising a new era of tenant empowerment following the publication of the Social Housing Green Paper.

If you are getting a feeling of déjà vu, that’s because 10 years ago Inside Housing reported on the launch of a new English social housing regulator, the Tenant Services Authority (TSA), which we said heralded “a new era of tenant empowerment”.

The new regulator’s chief executive Peter Marsh (below) promised that engagement with tenants would shape the way it was regulated. He said some landlords were “fantastic” at engaging, but that others only did it because they had to.

But the TSA never had a chance to change things in the way it hoped and was axed after the coalition government came to power in 2010.

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