Winning the argument

[Dan this needs a re-write - it’s a campaign feature, not a neutral summing up of the lack of evidence on ASB and crime prevention. If you can’t find statistical evidence, you need to give qualitiative evidence of the sort of projects that landlords are doing and the impacts they have. Look at HEather’s health feature as a model for this - she explored the limitations of the evidence, but also put a strong case for social landlords’ role. Please see my email for more specifics.]

‘We’re not really ever so good at quantifying benefits,’ says Melanie Rees, head of policy at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). ‘A lot of the work I can think of has been quite anecdotal and ad hoc. We’re only just beginning to start calculating the return on social investment.’ 

It’s a point we hear repeated time and again within the sector. Social landlords are too coy about their work, don’t shout loud enough, have so much to offer.

It’s a problem the sector has never properly overcome: proving to government its own value. Inside Housing’s Housing Benefits campaign wants to begin to change this, and while other features will be looking at benefits to health, education and employment, here we will examine how crime is tackled by landlords.

Or, more accurately, what benefits do social landlords bring to the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, and can we evidence any cost savings to these government bodies?

Starting points

The potential to make a positive impact on crime of all types is enormous. Together the Home Office and Ministry of Justice spend more than £30bn a year on public safety (£32bn in 2013/14).

Reoffending rates are still stubbornly high. Across the country, 46% of adults that go to prison for committing a crime reoffend within the first year, according to the Prison Reform Trust. For those serving sentences of less than 12 months this increases to 58%.

One of the Ministry of Justice’s future priority areas, announced in 2014, was to ‘reduce reoffending by using the skills of the public, private and voluntary sectors’.

Surely here then, social landlords can bring a case to government on the basis that they are cutting crime?

One recent project aimed at cutting reoffending in the Midlands has the potential to impact on government spending on crime. A Bromford project running from March 2014, has supported six prisoners and 12 family members to try and reduce reoffending. XXX Have requested cost savings and social impact from Bromford. These were not detailed in Inside Housing’s feature XXX

There is no comprehensive data that Inside Housing could find anywhere that documents social housing’s contribution to crime prevention, or how much it saves the Treasury in preventative action. But there is evidence that social landlords are trying to prevent crime where they can.

With, for example, anti-social behaviour (ASB), there is more work out there on spending, but gaps remain.

John Wickenden, data analysis manager at consultancy Housemark, which does an annual report quantifying investment by landlords in preventing ASB, says: ‘For ASB we’ve got the spending data but not got to into the social impact yet. I think we have robust data on cost and quantity but social impact –we’re not yet able to calculate.

‘That’s the kind of holy grail stuff for someone like me. It’s really tricky to quantify and it’s even more difficult to define. Probably it needs to happen more, this strategic stuff. I think sometimes people in the sector just want to do a good job rather than quantify things.’

‘I hope Inside Housing’s campaign will change this and convince the sector to work harder on evidencing benefits.’

A controversial approach to tackling ASB was Isos Housing employing a private security firm at ‘an expected cost of £20,000 per year’ to spy on its tenants. XXX Have requested cost savings and social impact from Isos. These were not detailed in Inside Housing’s feature XXX

Another approach, at City West Homes, based in Manchester, worked on a project education young people about the effects of anti-social behaviour on victims through £800-a-day workshops. Matt Jones, assistant director of communities and neighbourhoods at City West, said that agencies (he did not say which) made savings ‘in the region of £20,000 in the 12 months that followed the training’ . He could not establish a link between the two things, or give a net saving after costs. XXX Have requested cost savings and social impact from City West. These were not detailed in Inside Housing’s feature XXX

Mr Jones also said that ‘in one of the key areas it has been targeting, Swinton, youth-related ASB has dropped by 90% since April 2013’ but did not provide figures for the percentage change and did not suggest any evidence of a causal link between the two things.

Still, Housemark, in a report from July 2014, found that £295m was spent by housing associations on ASB in 2012/13. But more than that, when the government looked at changing ASB laws, Housemark’s data was used by parliamentary committees and fed into consultation evidence. The result, in the Anti-Social Behavaiour Crime and Policing Act, parts of which have just come into force on 23 March. [one what date?], is that there are now a wider range of measures at landlords’ disposal.

‘They kept the injunction, which could have just gone out of the window,’ says Mr Wickenden. ‘There are more tools in the toolbox, for example the positive requirement element of the ASB injunction. Our data and evidence had what I believe is a positive impact.’

When asked about housing’s offer to the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, the National Housing Federation (NHF) says that it doesn’t do much work on this area and that the one person who may be able to speak about this is on leave.

Eamon Lynch, managing director of Resolve Anti-Social Behaviour (RASB), formerly known as Social Landlords Crime and Nuisance Group, said: ‘Erm, no I have to say I’m not aware of any tagetted research on the social and economic impact of social landlord’s work on ASB and crim reduction. Certainly not across the sector.

‘Certainly the sector could be much much better. I suppose, it’s probably something we’ve put in the “too difficult to handle” category.

‘It’s something we’ve talked about but couldn’t really get a clear handle on what the criteria for an equation is.’

Further scrabbling around by Inside Housing uncovered that social housing does have one key argument to make around its contribution to crime prevention: the Decent Homes Standard.

Whilst, according to the English Housing Survey (2011/12), within the private rented sector 35% of housing does not meet the Decent Homes Standard, within housing associations the figure drops to 16%.

When the G15 group and the NHF had a go at assessing the social and economic impact of social housing investment in September last year via a commissioned report, they did uncover that ‘evidence suggests decent housing can help crime prevention, especially for young homeless people. However, there are issues around identifying causality.’ In other words, the report found no way to establish a proven causal link between decent housing and crime, either because the data and analysis was not good enough, or simply because there is no link [any more details on why?]

So far, some positive mutterings, but no proof. The problem is, with this report and a great many others, there is a long list of counter arguments and holes with any argument that crime is cut through housing association activity. This isn’t just inconvenient, it’s dangerous for the sector.

Even the G15 report found that evidence on better housing design reducing crime and anti-social behaviour is ‘weak’ and crime is ‘better addressed by other social policies, such as those addressing poverty’.

‘There is limited evidence on the impact of affordable housing on community cohesion,’ the authors worryingly concede. ‘In fact, if anything what research shows is that traditional housing estates have become crime hotspots’.

In another report on the social and economic impact of housing, commissioned by the Scottish government in 2010, the only link between housing and crime reduction lies entirely outside of the rental model, with the report finding that only ‘home ownership increases social capital and participation and reduces crime’.

On the face of it, this is a partial advocation for the Conservatives’ plans to expand the aspirational policy on home ownership, Thatcher’s Right to Buy, to housing associations.

It begins to become clear on research the topic that failing to evidence the benefits that social housing brings to the table, means that the sector begins to lose the argument, and lose it badly. [really? does anyone actually expect social landlords to help tackle crime? - (help tackle = help prevent, root causes, etc, yes surely) well if not, then there is no point in writing a feature on what RSLs can do to help Home Office and MoJ ]

Negative impact

In a spate of reports over the last decade, the data appears to show that social landlords are part of the problem, not the solution in terms of crime and intergenerational life issues.

A landmark report by The Smith Institute in 2008 on the ‘public value of social housing’ found that at the turn of the millennium, 30-year-olds that had lived in social housing were four times more likely to be involved in high level criminality than the general population and also nearly twice as likely to be a victim of crime.

Even when removing deprivation issues from the equation and comparing life opportunities and social background like for like, the report found that social landlords had ‘not managed to successfully combat the disadvantage experienced by its tenants and may have added to it.’

For tenants that entered social housing in two samples, from the years 1958 and 1970, the risks of deprivation in later life were ‘substantial and worse in social housing than for those in the private rented sector,’ the report found.

In concluding remarks, the authors said that ‘it is striking that even with so many control measures introduced there are still apparent differences in adult outcomes between those in social housing in childhood and others [in different housing tenures].’

‘Even with broad and comprehensive control variables, social housing is still on average a predictor of worse outcomes than tenure in the private rental sector or than owner-occupation. One interpretation of our findings is that we should expect less contribution from social housing to other policy areas, and more investment from other areas of social policy to support people in social housing,’ the report says.

So all the substantial academic and social work done on social housing’s impact in terms of reducing crime and improving life opportunities either shows no evidence of improvement or, more often, finds that social housing perpetuates multiple social issues.

At worst, this is evidence that social housing has failed its tenants completely. And even at least worst, it is a call for better work on mixed communities and for more intervention from other areas.

John Hills, in his landmark study of the ‘future of social housing’ in England in 2008, calls the lack of evidence on links between sub-market housing and improved wellbeing and employment opportunity ‘disturbing’.

The report finds that the public perceives social housing as having twice the presence of drug dealing that PRS housing does, and three times the presence of owner-occupied. Vandalism is perceived to be twice as high, as is ‘troublesome teenagers’ and the general level of crime.

Of course, this is only perception, and more substantial data is needed to examine whether this is myth, reality or a bit of both. But it’s not doing much for social landlords’ public and political image, is it? If crime and anti-social behaviour in social housing is worse than PRS, how can landlords expect to persuade the Ministry of Justice or the Home Office that they do valuable work with tenants? Why bother with sub-market housing at all as a tenure type, in fact?

Wake up call

For now, until better research comes along, it appears landlords should be wary of shouting too loudly about the benefits they can offer the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

It’s time for the sector to wake up and begin to find ways of shifting the weight of evidence back in its favour.

One project that did effectively measure its impact was a social enterprise called Kineara, who work with Poplar Harca to prevent evictions.

Analysis of the project, reported by Inside Housing, found that Kineara saved Poplar Harca around £7,000 per household it has prevented from being evicted. On this basis, the 34 households Kineara successfully kept in their homes last year saved the association an estimated £238,000. Mark Coleman, head of housing at Poplar Harca, called this estimate ‘conservative’.

Research into homelessness by the New Economics Foundation and the New Policy Institute puts the average cost of a homeless person to the state at between £24,000 and £26,000 a year,meaning some £850,000 in council budget was also saved through Kineara’s work. This is the kind of evidencing that the sector (and the media) can begin to make noise about to central government.

Tom Murtha, founding member of campaign group Social Housing Under Threat (SHOUT), which aims to ‘reverse the denigration of the social housing supply and brand’, says: ‘Putting pound notes on impact is always difficult. In my long experience in the sector, we have never had a really concerted campaign to prove our impact. There’s been very little, and it’s always piecemeal.

‘Selling things to government departments is almost impossible, because there’s often no way they can capture those savings. You just need to keep hammering and hammering the message. There also comes a stage where things are at such crisis point that inevitably groundswell reaches a point where something has to be done. I think we’re close to that point right now.

It’s a critical moment and we need to seize it. But unless we also take the public with us, as well as the government bodies, we will never get the results we want.’

If the sector is right in what it believes; that the foundation for a stable life is, for many people, a social home, and that this brings social benefits for crime, anti-social behaviour, education, health and life opportunities, then landlords and representative bodies need to find a way to back this claim up with evidence, fast, before that opportunity passes forever.