Down by the Riverside

She gives an uncompromising assessment of the Tories’ welfare reform agenda.

“The scale of the impact on young people is punitive. There’s lots of protection for pensioners, particularly those people who have served this country, but there’s a hell of a lot of pressure on young people and they’re going to be paying the debts of this government and this country for a very long time. I think there needs to be a bit more equity where welfare reform is impacting.”

"What happens to our young people in supported housing when they’re ready to move on?"

The shared room rate for under-35s is “really tough… and really unfair”, she adds.

She calls on the government to repeal the “daftness” of removing housing benefit for 18 to 21-year-olds and fears an unintended consequence will be to force them to take desperate measures.

“If you’re a teenager and you’re a parent you’re exempt [from losing housing benefit], so what happens to our young people in supported housing when they’re ready to move on? All that is available to them is a shared house with a stranger. It might be a rational choice to decide that having a baby is a good idea. Do we really want the consequence of welfare reform to be people who are having families as a way of resolving their housing crisis?” She shakes her head. “It seems nuts to me.”

Change needed

When it comes to the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap spectre that is hanging over the sector, she sees no way forward without a complete change of direction from government. “We should take supported housing and extra care out of any consideration of the LHA and come up with a model that is based on the fact that we’ve got national costs, or what we’ll end up with are regional inequalities and the North yet again potentially losing out. It takes £20m out of our care and support business if the LHA was implemented.”

Her assessment is stark: “I am not crying wolf, we would have to close services.”

“Everybody wants to buy. Even people who are struggling to rent"

It’s a swelteringly hot day when Inside Housing visits Riverside’s Manchester office, an unassuming block just outside the city centre. Manchester is affectionately known as ‘the Rainy City’ so the 28 degree heat has taken everyone by surprise.

It’s not the only surprise of the day. When we ask Ms Matthews about her take on Right to Buy, she is pragmatic. While others in the sector have been hesitant about openly embracing a policy that is seen as a threat to social housing stock, Ms Matthews is up-front that Riverside will continue with a Right to Buy offer even if the government programme falls by the wayside.

“Everybody wants to buy. Even people who are struggling to rent, their aspiration is to own a home. When we’ve asked our customers, more than 70% of them aspire to own their own home so even if the government drops the Voluntary Right to Buy we are going to continue to sell a small percentage of our homes to people who want to buy them and that’s part of our estate regeneration piece. Last year we sold 60 to 70 of our own properties at a shared equity reduced price as part of a process of breaking up areas of just one tenure.”

But the government’s proposal to fund the policy by forcing councils to sell off their high-value homes gets short shrift from her. “I think it’s absolutely right to drop the high-value asset levy. It was wrong and it’s clearly been seen to be really punitive, so it’s good that’s disappeared into the long grass.”

As for matters closer to home, Riverside is surveying the scene and making moves into estate regeneration. Starting in London, the 52,000-home landlord is looking at which other areas could benefit from some “major investment”. The Liverpool City Region and Carlisle are the main contenders for Riverside’s attention at the moment.

Replacement pledge

Ms Matthews has pledged to replace all the social housing on the estates where it is currently working in London. “We’re starting in London so we’ve got big plans in London around demolition, but also the replacement of all the social housing cross-subsidised by sales, and over the next few months we’ll be deciding in which other bits of the country we want to do that kind of estate regeneration at scale, working in collaboration with local government and combined authorities.”

But investment requires confidence in the policy landscape, so what are Ms Matthews asks of the new government? As one of the leading figures of Homes for the North she is keen to see a step change in how government sets housing targets. Homes for the North represents Northern housing associations and has already caught the attention of government despite only forming in the past few years.

“We need rent certainty first, then a rent settlement that makes sense for government, the sector and our customers.”

The group is sceptical about the tendency of politicians to throw out large, five-year housing targets. “One of the asks we’ve made is that rather than having targets for a parliament we should break that down into annual targets that are reported on because that which is counted happens. If you keep on back-loading it, then back-loading will happen. We at Homes for the North would like to see that being a target which is annually reported on so it builds towards the target over the whole life of the parliament.”

The Conservatives have pledged to do “bespoke” deals with councils to allow them to build more homes, in some cases by lifting borrowing caps. Ms Matthews welcomes the return to a focus on council housebuilding but warns against the “fragmented” nature of only doing deals with some councils. “If I was the National Housing Federation, what I’d say is you need a deal across the whole sector. Going for a fragmented deal will mean that some get left behind and some of the capacity that could be used in the sector doesn’t actually come to the table.”

Housing associations would be keen to get in on the act once the government starts talking to councils about development deals. “If we’re in a position where the government wants to contract with local authorities or combined authorities, then housing associations want to be part of that. So we’d be clear what the risk, reward and the return was for all the parties involved because that then would enable us to do that large-scale planning, and some of that ambitious stuff that is really needed in housing markets that don’t work.”

She echoes voices across the sector in calling for rent certainty after 2020. “When we’ve taken on debt to build new homes, some of that money is across 30 to 50 years and with the assets we’re building now we expect to last for 100 years, so it’s really daft we don’t know what’s going to happen to rents after 2020.

“We need rent certainty first and then what we need to do is come up with a rent settlement that makes sense for government, makes sense for the sector and makes sense for our customers. I absolutely believe that affordable housing should be truly affordable… We’d like to see a partnership between government, combined authorities, metro mayors and the sector around what the housing deal for an area is.”

But she sees a more ambitious role for housing, feeding into the government’s preoccupation with an industrial strategy for the future. “There’s a need for housing and enterprise zones that fit inside the context of the industrial strategy – housing as infrastructure. There’s been a lot of focus on the high-demand areas [for housing] which aren’t defined and we’re anxious the low-rent, low-value areas don’t get left behind. The South needs a stronger North. This isn’t us competing with London or the South East – London and the South East need housing markets that work better in the North and for UK plc in a post-Brexit context.”

Such outward-looking arguments may be what is needed for the housing sector to grab the attention of policymakers. “Strong and stable” may be a well-worn mantra that eludes our current government, but the housing sector can be grateful that in Ms Matthews it is alive and well.