The F word

Surface-skimming views on many of the issues facing the social housing sector would suggest she is certainly still in the process of finding her feet. She lacks some of the qualities that have marked her predecessors – Yvette Cooper’s detailed grasp of the brief, say, or the fluency and experience of Nick Raynsford. But there is one area where she’s definitely made her mark: her ideas around worklessness.

In case anyone missed it, Ms Flint blasted on to the housing scene early this year, suggesting in her first speech as minister that social landlords should be doing more to help tenants get jobs. Her idea that tenants should risk losing their homes if they failed to look for work sparked fury (Inside Housing, 8 February).

‘I wasn’t surprised,’ she says now. ‘But what’s interesting is that I think the views are rather more mixed than that… I’ve had lots of emails from people who’ve said it’s absolutely right that we should be looking at addressing the very high levels of unemployment of people of working age who live in social housing.’

And that, according to the minister, applies to more than half of them. ‘I have to say, given the stability that comes with a social tenancy, and the low rents below market rent, one could have thought we could do better,’ she challenges.

She certainly has the public’s support on doing just that. As revealed in last week’s Inside Housing, 73 per cent of people polled by Ipsos Mori backed taking a tougher stance on workless tenants.

‘I think people do think that, where people can, people should work,’ the minister says in response to the poll.

‘I think the public understands that not everybody has the same opportunities. I think they understand that sometimes people have to deal with some really difficult challenges in their lives.

‘But I think I would agree with the public in the sense that if you can work, you should work.’

She claims never to have suggested that tenants who did not accept help in getting back to work should risk losing their homes, the idea that fuelled so much outrage. ‘That wasn’t my proposition,’ she says, although she did float the idea of social housing applicants signing ‘commitment contracts’ in her controversial speech.

‘What I did say [was] whether there should be some more obligations for some people, particularly young, new tenants,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t talking about existing tenants and I’m not talking about those people who are older, or have disabilities or for a number of reasons aren’t able to work.’

Status report

It’s among the 18 to 25-year-olds that some of the most disturbing trends are developing, she says.

According to Ms Flint, ‘something like a third’ of new housing association tenants are in this age group, of whom 80 per cent are not working.

‘Now I do think there’s something there that we should address, in relation to how we combine a roof over your head with support to be in work.’

She has two working groups exploring ‘support incentives and obligations as a package’, one of them headed by Jane Slowey, chief executive of the Foyer Federation. They will ‘feed into’ policy.

Also, the Communities and Local Government Department, along with the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Housing Corporation, is compiling a ‘tool kit’ offering housing and employment advice and good practice around helping people support themselves.

Ms Flint confesses to being ‘very struck’ by the work some landlords are already doing: ‘Some housing organisations [are] seeking to recruit from the tenants that they’re also serving. That’s a really good example of where a landlord, a social landlord, can put their money where their mouth is.’ She adds that her department is currently accepting bids from council and housing association partnerships to ‘trailblaze a new way of providing housing and employment advice’.

The government’s £1.5 billion working neighbourhoods fund will pay for this and other programmes, she says.

But how does the minister think social landlords are doing generally? ‘I’ve been really encouraged by both, whether it’s through local authorities and arm’s-length management organisations or through housing associations, their diversity and range of housing that’s being offered,’ she says, though with no mention of stock-retaining authorities.

And she’s seen mixed communities that ‘give me heart that we can actually create a housing landscape in the future which is less separate and with less of the stigma that has been
associated for people living in social housing’.

Target acquired

Clearly Ms Flint cares about changing widespread perceptions of social tenants. A council tenant herself for a time during her teens, she believes the decent homes programme, combined with regeneration efforts, have done something to address notions of social housing as a tenure of last resort.

Now she wants to develop a new built environment of mixed communities. ‘Instead of making the mistakes of the past, we can actually do something different in the future. In that way we can tackle some of these perceptions of what are seen as good areas and bad areas, which are very, very unfair to the majority of tenants who are living in social housing.’

But how much development the current economic climate will allow is what’s vexing Ms Flint at present.

‘If I had one wish, my wish would be that we could get out of this particular credit crunch as quickly as possible,’ she says. ‘The reality of life is: wishes are one thing, making things happen is something else… every day I’m sort of looking at what more we can do.’

Developers and landlords have been warning for weeks that the government’s ambitious goal to build 3 million new homes by 2020 is now unrealistic.

TheInside Housinghouse building tracker estimates 2 million by 2019 is more likely. But the minister rules out lowering the target, at least for now.

‘It’s a challenging target regardless, and I think we still need to focus on that and it’s too early at this stage to start talking about any revision,’ she says.

The minister is placing her faith in the new Homes and Communities Agency coming up with some bright ideas to resolve the current mess. ‘It will be a champion for looking at new ways of working with the housing market, working with obviously our public sector partners but also in the private sector as well,’ she declares. ‘Clearly the HCA’s going to be instrumental in our house supply targets.’

As for the other new kid on the block – the Tenant Services Authority, the watchdog formerly known as Oftenant – she is delighted with the new name.

‘[Oftenant] sounded quite negative to me,’ she says. ‘I think [TSA] is a much more user-friendly name.’

And if she knows who the first chief executive of the regulator will be, she’s keeping quiet. ‘That’s still underway at the moment. I think I’m right?’ she says, casting an inquisitive glance the way of an attendant press officer.

Ms Flint’s task as housing minister is a challenging one. ‘Obviously I’m inheriting a portfolio that’s got a lot of priority across government, right up to the very top with the prime minister Gordon Brown, but also is of huge interest to the public,’ she says.