The provision and management of social housing for those who are unable to access the housing market is essential to the maintenance of the fabric of society. Roughly 20 percent of households in this country rely upon some form of subsidised housing provided by local authorities and housing associations, and many who would otherwise be homeless are housed in private sector accommodation procured by state and voluntary agencies. Yet others rely on housing benefits provided through tax receipts to help them afford the homes they rent. The social housing industry is vast and still growing, with an annual growth in the number of housing associations and management bodies, and is changing to adapt to new political and economic forces. There are very few countries in the world where some form of subsidised housing does not exist, and the total number of social homes is likely to grow worldwide, as are the challenges of the sector.
This course is aimed at students on housing and related courses, ranging from HNC level through professional qualifications to housing and related degrees. It covers the main themes in the field, giving a broad overview as well as detailed case studies exemplifying housing policy and practice in a mainly UK and specifically English context, although drawing on best practice elsewhere, where alternative non-UK approaches are thought to be appropriate to the issues explored. It is also meant for housing professionals at all levels who desire a broader overview of the subject than may be gained through working in a specific part of, or function in, the sector. The overall aim is to enhance understanding of the key themes in social housing, so as to increase the effectiveness of housing management, and so the quality of life of those who depend on the sector for a roof. It is hoped that it may motivate some to consider or implement positive changes, which will move housing policy and practice forward, in an uncertain and developing social and economic environment where change is a constant.
Social housing is a phrase which has only really gained currency over the last fifteen years or so, and it is not without its critics, both as an expression and as a concept. In this course, it is taken to mean housing provided by local authorities and housing associations (sometimes known as Registered Social Landlords, although there is not an exact equivalence), and extended to cover housing managed by these bodies, regardless of ownership. The key feature which defines the essence of the products and services provided by all social housing providers is that these activities and products are non-market, in that they cannot be obtained by bidding with cash or other financial resources in competition, and that the products are allocated principally on the basis of housing need rather than effective demand, although there has been some blurring of the boundary with the increased prominence of low-cost home ownership in general and shared ownership housing in particular.
Social housing bodies can be direct providers of housing – such as when a housing association develops and manages property, or enablers – where a body helps its clients or customers to find housing through another agency, for example, where a local authority (that is, a council) makes a cash grant to a housing association to build housing, or works through the planning system to enable land for social housing development. Another example of enabling is where a council contracts out the management of its homes to another party. The largest housing enabler is the government, which makes cash help available to back council housing management and maintenance activities, and gives permission to councils to raise money to do major regeneration or improvement schemes. The Housing Corporation, the housing agency responsible to Parliament for part funding housing associations through the social housing grant regime, is another key enabler, as are private finance institutions. It is important to understand the nature and development of providers and enablers to gain a full awareness of the scope and direction of social housing, against a backdrop of macro-economic imperatives.
The historical trend since the late twentieth century has been for councils to relinquish their development and in many cases their management role in favour of enabling via housing associations and even private companies. It was not always thus: from the end of the First World War to the early 1980s, councils were indisputably the key providers of social housing in all the senses described, and a combination of political and economic pressures led to the weakening of the municipal provider role. The key reason for this diminution is related to changing government fiscal and monetary policies, especially a concern to control inflation through public expenditure constraint, on the assumption that the control of public sector finance is probably the easiest and most acceptable way to regulate the amount of money in circulation, rather than imposing credit controls on consumers or by relying heavily upon the crude lever of interest rate adjustments. There is little reason, on the evidence of the past thirty years, to believe that there will be a reversal in the move away from municipal housing provision and management, and it is highly likely that in twenty years hence, the expressed wish of the 1987 Conservative Housing Minister, William Waldegrave, that ‘there should not be much of it’ (referring to council housing) – either in the ownership or the management sense – will probably be granted. Predictions in this field are always dangerous, but the trend to date is quite clear, and students of housing and practitioners need to be adaptive to changing circumstances, as in any other profession.
The course will deal with the UK social housing situation, but national housing policy, if there can be said to be one, is being increasingly influenced by European law and institutions, as well as by concepts from further afield. Many of the problems and challenges faced by housing managers in this country differ little in type and degree to those elsewhere, and policies and strategies to devise reasoned reactions, measures for containment or even solutions may frequently be found outside the UK or Europe, albeit with modification as a result of cultural, political, social and economic state and interstate differences. This justifies examining case studies of housing policy and practice elsewhere in illustrating possible ways forward. A good example is given in the choice-based lettings system devised in Delft, Holland, in the mid-1990s, allowing housing applicants to bid for properties according to both their relative needs and wants, which has been successfully applied in the UK in both low and high housing demand contexts. Another is in the development of ecologically and environmentally sustainable housing, pioneered outside the UK, mainly in Scandinavia, which has provided a good role model for development here. And the development of site-and-service plots in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to enable self-builders to construct viable homes without recourse to massive state subsidy or reliance on the national or local state, providing low cost housing for rent or for sale, is arguably a reasonable model for assisting would-be home owners to realise their ambitions on a low capital input basis here. There are other models, such as an armed housing police presence in many of the USA’s welfare housing areas, which should not be lightly replicated in the UK, but the issues surrounding the presence and control of anti-social behaviour are often similar, and it is useful to consider the variety of responses in various cultural situations, if only for the sake of comparison and contrast.
This course will deal with housing in a people centred manner, looking at enduring themes in housing provision and management, rather than as a handbook or list of current housing study topics, such as the law, housing finance, development, planning, allocations, lettings, and housing associations. It is impossible for a modern book on housing to cover these details in an up-to-date manner, as the legislational and practice context is always changing, and going to relevant websites (for example, the ODPM’s or Housing Corporation’s) is probably a much better way of getting the up-to-date facts than reading a book where the lead-in time is probably around a year. At root, the basic themes of social housing are relatively simple, but need talking through. These themes are best summed up by considering certain basic universals in housing. Households need somewhere to live that is decent, and convenient, in an area where there are reasonable road and rail links, schools, hospitals, shops and recreation, as well as work. They have to pay for it somehow, unless they cannot afford to, in which case there is arguably a collective responsibility to help them do so. The property needs to be looked after to ensure that it does not fall down or get into disrepair, for the sake of the household and those who will need it after them. There are rights and responsibilities attached to living in the home, to and from the provider, and to and from the wider community. If the household needs to move, they should be able to without too much hindrance, and if its characteristics change, there should be a way of dealing with it either by moving or by changing the design or dimensions of the home they live in. These universals have not changed much in principle over generations, and the complexity of custom and legislation merely provide the clothes. This course will stress the universal and little-changing underlying human realities which drive social housing.
The ‘big picture’ themes of social housing are factors underlying housing supply and demand, housing management, the finance of housing and the political and economic realities which drives it, equalities and diversity issues which run through the entire field, and ways of developing new housing.
By way of introduction, the study of housing supply and demand demands that we look at the variation in wealth economic performance spatially. In some areas of the country, there is oversupply of housing in relation to demand, and in others, there is a supply shortage. This reality is underpinned by differential economic performance – related largely to the growth and decline of key industries and economic sectors. An example is given by the growth of the financial and related sectors in London and the South East, and the consequent relative skilled labour shortages which have helped generate higher average wage levels through relative and sustained labour shortage there than in more peripheral areas such as the Midlands and North East. This has had the consequence of driving up house prices, as effective (or cash) demand for owner-occupation has grown faster than supply. As growth has not been uniform, the consequence of this is that many households find themselves priced out of the market: and developers have consistently failed to develop sufficient housing, perhaps to keep prices keen and profits at an acceptable level for them. Social housing programmes have been unable to keep pace with non-effective demand from those whose earnings or other income has failed to keep pace with the overheated sales and private rental markets, and the results – high homelessness and temporary housing use levels in London and the South East – are all too obvious.
Report after report has sought to identify the scale of the affordable housing shortage, and governments have tried from time to time to direct funds to housing agencies operating in high demand areas, or have tried to change the town and country planning system to bring more land forward for development. Major building enabling programmes, such as those announced in 2003 in the Blair government’s Sustainable Communities Plan for the Thames Gateway, and various sites in the South East including Ashford, Milton Keynes and the Cambridge–Stansted corridor, have been formulated to ease demand by increasing affordable housing supply. From time to time, regional policies have been involved or modified to try to refocus demand elsewhere in the country – witness the development of the New Towns between 1946 and the late 1960s, and the assisted areas policies designed to revive flagging areas of the country, such as the North East and South Wales, which had lost their prime industries and suffered all but economic meltdown as a consequence.
There are areas of the country at various levels – nationwide, within counties, local authority districts, towns and cities – where supply of housing in all or specific sectors exceeds demand – which has led to mass demolition, partly due to changes preference for house styles and perceptions of neighbourhoods, and partly due to long-term economic decline in pockets of areas or regions, or generally.
It is very important for any student of housing to understand the effects of the varying relationship between supply and demand, as this is the key to variations in house purchase and rental prices, and so for variation in the need to develop affordable housing in general, and social housing in particular, and approaches to allocating these scarce resources by social gatekeepers like councils and housing associations, and their representatives.
The management of housing is also a major theme in this course. The roots of modern social housing management lie in practices developed by nineteenth century charitable housing reformers such as Octavia Hill, who adopted a ‘people centred’ approach, stressing the importance of personal responsibility for payment of rent, keeping the home clean, and attempting to get on reasonably well with neighbours, as well as the virtues of work. These early approaches would perhaps seem patronising to today’s social housing customers, but it is surprising how many of the approaches have survived, and have even, in recent times, been brought back into prominence. Octavia Hill would have applauded a return to the attempts to control anti-social behaviour by dedicated legislation and policy development, and would have recognised the motivation behind attempting to restrict housing benefit entitlement in cases of unneighbourly behaviour and criminality. Fundamentally, the key tasks of social housing management in its generic sense have not changed; they are to ensure that the property remains decent through ensuring repairs and maintenance, assisting tenants to keep to their side of the bargain and punishing them when they fall foul of their agreements, and making sure that they have access to a range of other housing and related services, such as enhanced support in sheltered dwellings. Housing law has, of course, become much more complex and voluminous since those early days, and new rights have been added, and there has been a greater emphasis on self-management, although even this has its roots in the co-operative movement which has its beginnings in Victorian England. Readers should reflect that there really is very little that is fundamentally original in housing policy development, and that old themes have been reworked and refined, and dwelt upon time after time. It is this continuity which is an abiding feature of housing management.
Finance is another central theme of the social housing. To the casual observer, and even the hardened professional, it sometimes seems as though the housing finance system in this country was designed to confuse the unwary, and to ensure that true power remains with those bureaucrats who maintain it on behalf of the state and its agencies! It is true that the subject can be hard to fathom, especially if individual guidance notes and legislative instruments are read in isolation, but there is nothing fundamentally difficult about the area. It is, however, essential to grasp the fundamentals of how the construction of new properties and their improvement are financed, and how money is spent on running housing services, to go very far in appreciating the detail of the systems; and the fundamentals are really very simple. Loans are a major means of financing development and major repairs and improvements in the housing association sector, and local authority housing. Anyone who has bought a major item, such as a car or a house, will already be familiar with the process of raising a loan, the repayment schedules, and interest elements which go with it, and may have had their knowledge sharpened by financial difficulty, and it is the author’s belief that if the reader applies personal knowledge and experience to the subject, it will become far easier to understand. For example, it is much easier to buy a house on a relatively limited income if someone leaves you money (a ‘grant’) than otherwise, since the amount you will have to raise (the loan) will be correspondingly smaller, as will the total amount of interest payable. First, it will be easier to raise a mortgage, because lenders limit their advances to a restricted multiple of annual income, and a smaller mortgage is easier to service from day-to-day income than a larger one, depending on income level. Second, the amount set aside to repay the loan, added to the sum which one might keep by for repairs and bills, will, all other things being equal, be smaller than if the grant was lower, or if there was no grant at all. In the context of social housing, this sum is generally reclaimed from tenants as rent. If these points are grasped, then understanding housing association finance will be no problem at all.
Revenue finance is also fundamentally straightforward, and linked to what has been said above. The subject concerns current account income and expenditure activity. Every household has bills to pay on a weekly, monthly and annual basis, and has to try to meet these commitments from current earnings plus, perhaps, interest from investments, and, in some cases, from savings. Balancing the books is sometimes very difficult; spending economies may have to be made, or more money may have to be earned through over-time or getting a better paid job, to meet commitments; and the level of these commitments may change, due to new challenges such as a new addition to the family, or divorce, or members leaving home. Similar challenges beset councils and housing associations. Reduced stock numbers through the sales under the Right to Buy, or transfer (sale) to another body, may reduce rental income, but it will also reduce the amount that needs to be spent on repairs and management, and someone has to estimate the implications of such changes, planned or otherwise, ideally before they happen. This is known as ‘business planning’, where organisational aims are set in relation to all of its activities, alternative routes to managing the changes needed to achieve these aims are devised and costed, and the best way forward is decided, and all social housing organisations do this. It is little different from rational domestic finance planning.
Readers may find the whole area of central government subsidy – so important to councils in helping them run their housing affairs, to housing associations in trying to build affordable housing for sale and rent to meet need and aspirations, and to individuals who would otherwise struggle to pay their rent – easier to appreciate if they think of the state as a benevolent if rather dotty parent who believes they have the best interests of their children at heart. The children rarely have sufficient resources of their own to buy what they need and want, and may have a very different view of the amount they need than the main provider. Ultimately, however, the parent considers him or herself to be the final arbiter of how much the child should receive, either to spend directly or to have spent on them, and though they may listen carefully to what the child says, will take it upon themselves to make the decision, even if the money used is in fact the child’s, but held in trust for them. The state and its agency which helps fund housing association development, the Housing Corporation, is always prepared to listen, but at the end of the day, it will decide how much or how little will be given out, or recycled, as it considers itself to be the guardian of the public purse, and has to juggle the needs of local authorities against those of other considerations, such as national security, environmental protection and running its bureaucracy. Analogy always lacks complete accuracy, but can often be usefully employed to make sense of what at first appears to be arcane and almost poetic dialogue.
Development is the next great theme of the social housing. It is about building flats and houses for rent and for sale which those, now and in the future, who are on lower incomes who cannot easily compete in the marketplace, or who are out of the race entirely, can afford to live in, which is suitable for their needs, and which meets both their aspirations, at least in part, and those of the provider. It links clearly to the theme of supply and demand: how much, when and where, are perennial questions raised and not always satisfactorily answered. At times of very great demand, where the state has perceived there to be a ‘housing crisis’, such as after the First and Second World Wars, the establishment has busied itself in rushing up new towns, enabling the expansion of existing ones, and encouraging the construction of high-density estates and dwelling-types, including tower blocks and the like, to house the people: and at other times, it has encouraged the demolition of homes deemed to be surplus to requirement. Changes in the law, such as the 1925 Building Societies Act, which made it much easier to get mortgages to buy homes over twenty-five or thirty years, and the consequent growth of lending institutions and products to help relieve individuals of their money over the long term, prompted a massive development of suburbs around London and other major cities from the 1920s onwards. As a result, three-bed semi land has become an enduring feature of the built environment, as much as high levels of owner-occupation as the preferred tenure has become a prominent feature – and one of the most discussed aspect of – the social landscape of this country.
This is the stuff of development, and the rest – the technical bits including land assembly, planning policy and practice, construction options and technology, the design of sustainable communities if this is ever possible, and the improvement of existing estate layouts and dwellings to address social as well as structural issues – falls into place once the big picture is defined.
The reality of housing studies is that all of these themes are linked, and centred on the needs of households and the constraints imposed by public policy choices and pressures, and it is the links which will be stressed time and time again in this social housing course, to help the reader get a handle on the big picture, which will perhaps motivate them to change the housing system for the better, or at least to understand where they fit in the housing provision and management system.
This course is aimed at students on housing and related courses, ranging from HNC level through professional qualifications to housing and related degrees. It covers the main themes in the field, giving a broad overview as well as detailed case studies exemplifying housing policy and practice in a mainly UK and specifically English context, although drawing on best practice elsewhere, where alternative non-UK approaches are thought to be appropriate to the issues explored. It is also meant for housing professionals at all levels who desire a broader overview of the subject than may be gained through working in a specific part of, or function in, the sector. The overall aim is to enhance understanding of the key themes in social housing, so as to increase the effectiveness of housing management, and so the quality of life of those who depend on the sector for a roof. It is hoped that it may motivate some to consider or implement positive changes, which will move housing policy and practice forward, in an uncertain and developing social and economic environment where change is a constant.
Social housing is a phrase which has only really gained currency over the last fifteen years or so, and it is not without its critics, both as an expression and as a concept. In this course, it is taken to mean housing provided by local authorities and housing associations (sometimes known as Registered Social Landlords, although there is not an exact equivalence), and extended to cover housing managed by these bodies, regardless of ownership. The key feature which defines the essence of the products and services provided by all social housing providers is that these activities and products are non-market, in that they cannot be obtained by bidding with cash or other financial resources in competition, and that the products are allocated principally on the basis of housing need rather than effective demand, although there has been some blurring of the boundary with the increased prominence of low-cost home ownership in general and shared ownership housing in particular.
Social housing bodies can be direct providers of housing – such as when a housing association develops and manages property, or enablers – where a body helps its clients or customers to find housing through another agency, for example, where a local authority (that is, a council) makes a cash grant to a housing association to build housing, or works through the planning system to enable land for social housing development. Another example of enabling is where a council contracts out the management of its homes to another party. The largest housing enabler is the government, which makes cash help available to back council housing management and maintenance activities, and gives permission to councils to raise money to do major regeneration or improvement schemes. The Housing Corporation, the housing agency responsible to Parliament for part funding housing associations through the social housing grant regime, is another key enabler, as are private finance institutions. It is important to understand the nature and development of providers and enablers to gain a full awareness of the scope and direction of social housing, against a backdrop of macro-economic imperatives.
The historical trend since the late twentieth century has been for councils to relinquish their development and in many cases their management role in favour of enabling via housing associations and even private companies. It was not always thus: from the end of the First World War to the early 1980s, councils were indisputably the key providers of social housing in all the senses described, and a combination of political and economic pressures led to the weakening of the municipal provider role. The key reason for this diminution is related to changing government fiscal and monetary policies, especially a concern to control inflation through public expenditure constraint, on the assumption that the control of public sector finance is probably the easiest and most acceptable way to regulate the amount of money in circulation, rather than imposing credit controls on consumers or by relying heavily upon the crude lever of interest rate adjustments. There is little reason, on the evidence of the past thirty years, to believe that there will be a reversal in the move away from municipal housing provision and management, and it is highly likely that in twenty years hence, the expressed wish of the 1987 Conservative Housing Minister, William Waldegrave, that ‘there should not be much of it’ (referring to council housing) – either in the ownership or the management sense – will probably be granted. Predictions in this field are always dangerous, but the trend to date is quite clear, and students of housing and practitioners need to be adaptive to changing circumstances, as in any other profession.
The course will deal with the UK social housing situation, but national housing policy, if there can be said to be one, is being increasingly influenced by European law and institutions, as well as by concepts from further afield. Many of the problems and challenges faced by housing managers in this country differ little in type and degree to those elsewhere, and policies and strategies to devise reasoned reactions, measures for containment or even solutions may frequently be found outside the UK or Europe, albeit with modification as a result of cultural, political, social and economic state and interstate differences. This justifies examining case studies of housing policy and practice elsewhere in illustrating possible ways forward. A good example is given in the choice-based lettings system devised in Delft, Holland, in the mid-1990s, allowing housing applicants to bid for properties according to both their relative needs and wants, which has been successfully applied in the UK in both low and high housing demand contexts. Another is in the development of ecologically and environmentally sustainable housing, pioneered outside the UK, mainly in Scandinavia, which has provided a good role model for development here. And the development of site-and-service plots in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to enable self-builders to construct viable homes without recourse to massive state subsidy or reliance on the national or local state, providing low cost housing for rent or for sale, is arguably a reasonable model for assisting would-be home owners to realise their ambitions on a low capital input basis here. There are other models, such as an armed housing police presence in many of the USA’s welfare housing areas, which should not be lightly replicated in the UK, but the issues surrounding the presence and control of anti-social behaviour are often similar, and it is useful to consider the variety of responses in various cultural situations, if only for the sake of comparison and contrast.
The ‘big picture’ themes of social housing are factors underlying housing supply and demand, housing management, the finance of housing and the political and economic realities which drives it, equalities and diversity issues which run through the entire field, and ways of developing new housing.
By way of introduction, the study of housing supply and demand demands that we look at the variation in wealth economic performance spatially. In some areas of the country, there is oversupply of housing in relation to demand, and in others, there is a supply shortage. This reality is underpinned by differential economic performance – related largely to the growth and decline of key industries and economic sectors. An example is given by the growth of the financial and related sectors in London and the South East, and the consequent relative skilled labour shortages which have helped generate higher average wage levels through relative and sustained labour shortage there than in more peripheral areas such as the Midlands and North East. This has had the consequence of driving up house prices, as effective (or cash) demand for owner-occupation has grown faster than supply. As growth has not been uniform, the consequence of this is that many households find themselves priced out of the market: and developers have consistently failed to develop sufficient housing, perhaps to keep prices keen and profits at an acceptable level for them. Social housing programmes have been unable to keep pace with non-effective demand from those whose earnings or other income has failed to keep pace with the overheated sales and private rental markets, and the results – high homelessness and temporary housing use levels in London and the South East – are all too obvious.
Report after report has sought to identify the scale of the affordable housing shortage, and governments have tried from time to time to direct funds to housing agencies operating in high demand areas, or have tried to change the town and country planning system to bring more land forward for development. Major building enabling programmes, such as those announced in 2003 in the Blair government’s Sustainable Communities Plan for the Thames Gateway, and various sites in the South East including Ashford, Milton Keynes and the Cambridge–Stansted corridor, have been formulated to ease demand by increasing affordable housing supply. From time to time, regional policies have been involved or modified to try to refocus demand elsewhere in the country – witness the development of the New Towns between 1946 and the late 1960s, and the assisted areas policies designed to revive flagging areas of the country, such as the North East and South Wales, which had lost their prime industries and suffered all but economic meltdown as a consequence.
There are areas of the country at various levels – nationwide, within counties, local authority districts, towns and cities – where supply of housing in all or specific sectors exceeds demand – which has led to mass demolition, partly due to changes preference for house styles and perceptions of neighbourhoods, and partly due to long-term economic decline in pockets of areas or regions, or generally.
It is very important for any student of housing to understand the effects of the varying relationship between supply and demand, as this is the key to variations in house purchase and rental prices, and so for variation in the need to develop affordable housing in general, and social housing in particular, and approaches to allocating these scarce resources by social gatekeepers like councils and housing associations, and their representatives.
The management of housing is also a major theme in this course. The roots of modern social housing management lie in practices developed by nineteenth century charitable housing reformers such as Octavia Hill, who adopted a ‘people centred’ approach, stressing the importance of personal responsibility for payment of rent, keeping the home clean, and attempting to get on reasonably well with neighbours, as well as the virtues of work. These early approaches would perhaps seem patronising to today’s social housing customers, but it is surprising how many of the approaches have survived, and have even, in recent times, been brought back into prominence. Octavia Hill would have applauded a return to the attempts to control anti-social behaviour by dedicated legislation and policy development, and would have recognised the motivation behind attempting to restrict housing benefit entitlement in cases of unneighbourly behaviour and criminality. Fundamentally, the key tasks of social housing management in its generic sense have not changed; they are to ensure that the property remains decent through ensuring repairs and maintenance, assisting tenants to keep to their side of the bargain and punishing them when they fall foul of their agreements, and making sure that they have access to a range of other housing and related services, such as enhanced support in sheltered dwellings. Housing law has, of course, become much more complex and voluminous since those early days, and new rights have been added, and there has been a greater emphasis on self-management, although even this has its roots in the co-operative movement which has its beginnings in Victorian England. Readers should reflect that there really is very little that is fundamentally original in housing policy development, and that old themes have been reworked and refined, and dwelt upon time after time. It is this continuity which is an abiding feature of housing management.
Revenue finance is also fundamentally straightforward, and linked to what has been said above. The subject concerns current account income and expenditure activity. Every household has bills to pay on a weekly, monthly and annual basis, and has to try to meet these commitments from current earnings plus, perhaps, interest from investments, and, in some cases, from savings. Balancing the books is sometimes very difficult; spending economies may have to be made, or more money may have to be earned through over-time or getting a better paid job, to meet commitments; and the level of these commitments may change, due to new challenges such as a new addition to the family, or divorce, or members leaving home. Similar challenges beset councils and housing associations. Reduced stock numbers through the sales under the Right to Buy, or transfer (sale) to another body, may reduce rental income, but it will also reduce the amount that needs to be spent on repairs and management, and someone has to estimate the implications of such changes, planned or otherwise, ideally before they happen. This is known as ‘business planning’, where organisational aims are set in relation to all of its activities, alternative routes to managing the changes needed to achieve these aims are devised and costed, and the best way forward is decided, and all social housing organisations do this. It is little different from rational domestic finance planning.
Readers may find the whole area of central government subsidy – so important to councils in helping them run their housing affairs, to housing associations in trying to build affordable housing for sale and rent to meet need and aspirations, and to individuals who would otherwise struggle to pay their rent – easier to appreciate if they think of the state as a benevolent if rather dotty parent who believes they have the best interests of their children at heart. The children rarely have sufficient resources of their own to buy what they need and want, and may have a very different view of the amount they need than the main provider. Ultimately, however, the parent considers him or herself to be the final arbiter of how much the child should receive, either to spend directly or to have spent on them, and though they may listen carefully to what the child says, will take it upon themselves to make the decision, even if the money used is in fact the child’s, but held in trust for them. The state and its agency which helps fund housing association development, the Housing Corporation, is always prepared to listen, but at the end of the day, it will decide how much or how little will be given out, or recycled, as it considers itself to be the guardian of the public purse, and has to juggle the needs of local authorities against those of other considerations, such as national security, environmental protection and running its bureaucracy. Analogy always lacks complete accuracy, but can often be usefully employed to make sense of what at first appears to be arcane and almost poetic dialogue.
Development is the next great theme of the social housing. It is about building flats and houses for rent and for sale which those, now and in the future, who are on lower incomes who cannot easily compete in the marketplace, or who are out of the race entirely, can afford to live in, which is suitable for their needs, and which meets both their aspirations, at least in part, and those of the provider. It links clearly to the theme of supply and demand: how much, when and where, are perennial questions raised and not always satisfactorily answered. At times of very great demand, where the state has perceived there to be a ‘housing crisis’, such as after the First and Second World Wars, the establishment has busied itself in rushing up new towns, enabling the expansion of existing ones, and encouraging the construction of high-density estates and dwelling-types, including tower blocks and the like, to house the people: and at other times, it has encouraged the demolition of homes deemed to be surplus to requirement. Changes in the law, such as the 1925 Building Societies Act, which made it much easier to get mortgages to buy homes over twenty-five or thirty years, and the consequent growth of lending institutions and products to help relieve individuals of their money over the long term, prompted a massive development of suburbs around London and other major cities from the 1920s onwards. As a result, three-bed semi land has become an enduring feature of the built environment, as much as high levels of owner-occupation as the preferred tenure has become a prominent feature – and one of the most discussed aspect of – the social landscape of this country.
This is the stuff of development, and the rest – the technical bits including land assembly, planning policy and practice, construction options and technology, the design of sustainable communities if this is ever possible, and the improvement of existing estate layouts and dwellings to address social as well as structural issues – falls into place once the big picture is defined.
The reality of housing studies is that all of these themes are linked, and centred on the needs of households and the constraints imposed by public policy choices and pressures, and it is the links which will be stressed time and time again in this social housing course, to help the reader get a handle on the big picture, which will perhaps motivate them to change the housing system for the better, or at least to understand where they fit in the housing provision and management system.
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