“Tackling Homelessness and rough sleeping is what first got me into politics”

Grant Shapps has always professed a profound personal attachment to the cause of homelessness and rough sleeping:

“When a family is made homeless or someone has no choice but to spend a night sleeping on the street, they become some of the most vulnerable people in our society. I am shocked and saddened when I see people bedding down for the night on our nation’s streets, or hear of a family spending another night in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation. Tackling homelessness and rough sleeping is what first got me into politics.”

Whether he’s sincere or not, it’s evident from today’s figures that he’s failing the cause he entered politics for. Rough sleeping is rising rapidly as a result of his housing policies.

Overall in England, the number of rough sleepers is up a fifth on the same time last year – rising in eight out of nine English regions.

In the East Midlands it increased 55% on last year, in the North West there was a 49% increase and in the South East 39%.

Percentage increase in rough sleeping between autumn 2010 and autumn 2011:

His defence has been that he has changed the way rough sleeping is counted and so the figures are inflated. Maybe, but that’s no defence to why the numbers are rising, however they’re counted. He’ll do well to find any reputable housing charity or body to say that they aren’t.

In economically dire times, with increasing unemployment, reduced benefits and less support for vulnerable people, you might say that this is inevitable. It’s a fair point.

However, at the risk of praising one of Labour’s main opponents in a different part of the country, I point you to these figures on homelessness:

“Less [sic] people in Scotland are being made homeless according to official statistics published today.

There was a 20 per cent decrease in both homelessness applications and assessments, comparing April and September 2011 with the same period one year ago. Falls were recorded in 28 out of Scotland’s 32 local authorities.”

Can a new Tenant Voice rise from the ashes?

One of the best projects I’ve been involved with over the past few years was chairing the group that led to the creation of the National Tenant Voice.  The NTV was the third leg of Labour’s regulatory system for social housing – the smallest and cheapest part – together with the Tenant Services Authority and the Homes and Communities Agency.

The aim was to create a new type of organisation which would bring tenants’ and residents’ views to the table in Whitehall, facilitate scrutiny of landlords’ performance at all levels and help promote tenant and resident self-organisation around the country.  The views it represented would be based on research and wide consultation with tenants and residents, including those not represented through existing tenants’ and residents’ associations.

It was a complex project because the NTV had to be complementary to the existing structure of national tenant organisations, which fully supported its development, and because it was to become a non-departmental public body, and the rules surrounding NDPBs are ferociously complicated (it makes you wonder how there are so many of them).

The NTV operated through a National Tenant Council of 50 members – a very impressive body of people active all around the country – and had just got going and appointed a Chief Executive – Richard Crossley, who had done most of the work to set it up – when the Election happened.  Grant Shapps thought that spending £1m on tenant representation was a waste of money and it was axed almost immediately.  He did however provide some funding for a review of where the tenants’ movement might go next and the report of the review has now been published and attracted a big spread in Inside Housing magazine – news story here and feature article here.

The ‘New Dawn’ review, also co-ordinated by Richard Crossley, rightly concludes that the abolition of the NTV has been a major blow to the tenants’ movement and to the aspiration that tenants, with proper resources behind them, might be enabled to have a real influence over national policies and sit at the table on a more equal footing with the well-resourced landlord and professional organisations as well as the Government.  It looks at options for new structures to evolve but concludes that these will take some time.

The issue of resources remains at the heart of the debate about the future of the tenants movement.  With virtually no funding, organised tenants locally make a huge difference to the quality of life on estates and do a huge amount to make landlords accountable.  Many of the criticisms of tenant organisation stem from the fact that they operate on a shoestring and usually have few funds to organise events and consultations.

The report concludes, and I agree, that:

There is recognition in the sector that the sector itself should make funding available for tenants to have a voice at national level.  In the consultation we carried out, a payment of an amount per tenancy to support influence at national level was supported by an overwhelming majority of those consulted.  Just 1p per tenancy per week would give a budget more than the original budget of the NTV.  This will need to be explored further.

Councils and housing associations pay large amounts for membership of their national organisations which, correctly, have a major influence on the development of policy or at least make sure the views of the organisations are known.  Tenants are often aggrieved that these subscriptions are effectively paid for out of their rents but any request for funding for tenants locally or regionally or nationally is treated as if it is some outrageous demand and is normally only ever available with strings attached.  Tenants are often furious, for example, at having to apply for funding to attend meetings and conferences that the landlord attends as a matter of routine.

The time has come for tenants to be able to fund their own representation out of their own rents and for landlords to co-operate willingly in this.

The abolition of Labour’s infrastructure for social housing regulation is being replaced by a national committee that will be focused on money and much less interested in performance and services provided to tenants.  The gap is supposed to be made up by a greater emphasis on local tenant scrutiny.  But without funding this will fail and without an effective and properly funded national tenant voice, Government will not get to hear about it until it is too late.

You can contact Richard Crossley through Linked In or at richard.crossley1@virginmedia.com

You can contact Taroe through http://www.taroe.org/

The New Dawn report is dedicated to Terry Edis, the Chair of NFTMO and an inspirational tenants leader, who died recently.

Three Years on, Tory Mayor is Failing to Tackle Rough Sleeping

By Nicky Gavron AM                                                                                                                   Labour spokesperson on Planning and Housing on the London Assembly

Three years ago this month, the Tory Mayor Boris Johnson pledged to end rough sleeping in London by 2012. Today, faced with a perfect storm of unemployment, funding cuts, welfare reform and housing market failure, even more people are sleeping rough on London’s streets.

In September it was reported that rough sleeping between July-Sep 2011 was up by 34% on the same time the year before, while figures published in December (below) by CHAIN, the most authoritative source of rough sleeping data, show this increase continuing.

In 2009 Boris Johnson created the London Delivery Board – bringing together charities and local and city government to reduce rough sleeping. This voluntary sector led project has delivered excellent pilot projects acrossLondon.

But despite this good practice, the Mayor cannot escape blame for the increase in rough sleeping.

He backs the government’s cuts to local authority and housing budgets, supports their poverty inducing welfare reforms and says inflation-busting rents in the private sector are not something he worries about.

The Mayor’s has frozen his own rough sleeping budget at £8.5 million over the next three years.

This is despite housing charities being united in its belief that the number of people sleeping on the street will continue to rise as the impact of government spending decisions and welfare reforms bite.

A budget that cannot move to reflect changing and worsening circumstances is clearly inadequate.

More worryingly, the amount of money given to the Mayor was calculated before the launch of his No Second Night Out programme in April 2011 on estimates of future need. By July 2011, it was already known that future need had been underestimated and that the budget was inadequate.

Yet the Mayor’s budget has not changed.

The situation has been exacerbated by the government not only cutting the Supporting People budget by 11% but also lifting the ring-fence that guaranteed it was spent on helping vulnerable groups like rough sleepers.

This means that local authorities – facing across the board cuts – have impossible choices to make; use the money to preserve homelessness services or plug the gap in children’s services.

So local authorities will be increasingly incapable of funding the services needed to give rough sleepers the help they need to turn their lives around.

This is disastrous. The most recent CHAIN statistics show that ofLondon’s hostel population 52 per cent require help with alcohol addiction, 35 per cent with drug addiction and 46 per cent suffer from mental health problems.

The Mayor and his Government needs to understand that solving this problem requires investment – investment in homes, services and jobs.

This is one of the wealthiest cities on earth. In times of austerity, the way we treat our most vulnerable and marginalised people will be seen as the barometer of how
civilised we are as a society.

Nicky Gavron is a London-wide London Assembly Member and Labour Group Spokesperson for Planning and Housing. You can follow her work on the London Assembly on twitter @nickygavron or through her blog at nickygavron.wordpress.com

Octavia Hill cries wolf?

As my family hold 3 National Trust life memberships I feel emboldened to add a few words to this week’s spat between Inside Housing blogger Colin Wiles and the National Trust’s Assistant Director of External Affairs Ben Cowell over the draft National Planning Policy Framework.

Colin’s ‘crying wolf’ gambit is that the NT and the Campaign to Protect Rural England have been scaremongering about housing development in the countryside and are in denial about how many of the new homes we need will have to built on greenfield land.  Colin supports the NPPF’s plan-led approach, the presumption in favour of sustainable development, and the ‘no-return to a blanket brownfield-first policy’ and argues that the planning system has acted as a brake on growth.

NT’s ripost, ‘the Octavia Hill defence’, is that the NPPF will lead to bad developments in the wrong places and that they are not against growth – and indeed have supported and even undertaken housing development in the past.

My starting point is that a huge increase in housing development, and especially affordable housing development, is needed but the NPPF is not the right way to go about getting it.  People seem to be supporting NPPF because it is better than nothing, and for the housing lobby it is a way of avoiding disagreeing with the Government on everything.  The danger is that NPPF sets up battle lines between NIMBYs and developers which will not be resolved in favour of the principle of building the right number of homes of the right type in the right places.  It is a framework of rules but it does not set out a process for determining how many homes, and how many affordable homes, are needed nationally, regionally and sub-regionally, and then building those numbers into local plans.  Local councils are too variable in their politics, capacities and abilities to undertake the strategic development role that NPPF envisages for them.  If some deliver and some do not the total will be inadequate.

Colin is right to argue that many – most – of the new homes will have to be built on greenfield land,  but the principle of ‘brownfield first’ is still right.  The Government is wrong to have abandoned Labour’s hugely successful target for building on brownfield land.  It was striking that in all the work done for Ken Livingstone’s London Plan and London Housing Strategy the evidence told us that there were huge volumes of unused and underused land in London and that the capital had real capacity to build new homes for Londoners, especially around new transport infrastructure, regenerating areas of the city without degrading green spaces (which Ken was equally keen to protect and enhance).  Although some sites are really hard and expensive to develop, it seems right to me that developers should be under pressure to re-use land in existing urban settlements first.  They like the profits that come from greenfield sites a little too much to be given a free hand.

The other word that is emphasised insufficiently in the argument between Colin and Ben is affordability.  The country, and the south east in particular, already has too many sprawling estates of executive houses taking up large volumes of former green land at very low densities.  This was better controlled during Labour’s period in office through the stronger system of regional planning and the emphasis on achieving a proportion of affordable homes.  The Tories care not one jot about this and neither do many local authorities covering less urban areas.  Too often the interests of NIMBYs and developers coincide in agreeing not to build any affordable homes.

Ben makes much of the fact that Octavia Hill was one of the NT’s founders, as if that provides some sort of assurance now in the centenary of her death.  History is no guarantee, and it is more salient that the NT have a very close association these days with CPRE, an organisation that does not in my view have progressive leanings.  There are also dangers in the NT adopting an aggressive campaigning stance and claiming to speak on behalf of its millions of members when it is hardly an open democratic organisation with popular participation.  Nor does it speak on behalf of suburban Britain where many of the new homes will actually be built or on behalf of the urban poor who ultimately have most to lose if the policy goes wrong.  The NT at present reminds me of the AA, which claims to speak on behalf of millions of motorists but is just another private right wing lobby group.  Colin makes a good point that organisations that are more fully engaged in the rural economy are more amenable to the NPPF.

The NPPF is being revised and we will see what the Government comes up with next.  At present the NPPF fails as a policy, but not for the reasons advanced by NT.  At its heart there is a core contradiction, trying to combine a national policy – generally in favour of development – with a localist approach – which at best will be highly variable as local councils and communities respond to developers’ proposals.  And it does next to nothing to ensure that genuinely affordable homes will be built.

How the Policy Exchange gets it wrong

Monimbo

Red Brick has commented before on the influence which the think tank Policy Exchange has on government policy, which prompted me to wonder if its reputation is deserved.  Certainly on economic policy it has come a cropper, since it confidently predicted in August 2010 that the necessarily heavy spending cuts and recession would be quickly followed by a ‘big boom’, in which growth through most of 2011 will be ‘the strongest seen in the UK since the 1980s’.  Probably not even George Osborne expected that to happen.

Also published in August 2010, its policy paper Making Housing Affordable was more cautious in its forecasts and notably gloomy in its analysis of social housing.  Perhaps it was more responsible than any other think tank paper of that time – although there was heavy competition from Localis – for promoting the view that social housing was an out-and-out failure, devoting page after page to making its dreary case.

However, it faced an inconvenient truth, which was that demand for this failed tenure was at an all-time high.  It tackled this by arguing that it is purely and simply high house prices that push up demand for social housing and therefore that waiting lists would cease to grow if prices were flat. So ‘stabilising house prices and supporting home-ownership will… eliminate(e) social housing waiting lists over time’ (p.42).

What has happened over the (admittedly short) period since then?  House prices in April 2011 (and again in December 2011) were the same or marginally below their level in Apr 2010 (based on the DCLG mix-adjusted index, DCLG live table 590).  So waiting lists should have stayed the same or fallen slightly.  In fact, waiting list numbers grew from 1.75m households (Apr 2010) to 1.83m (April 2011 – latest figures available).  Not a big rise, perhaps, but hardly evidence that waiting lists will ‘cease to grow’.

The report attached much of the blame for Britain’s poverty and unemployment to the social housing system, even arguing that Labour’s policy of promoting ‘mixed communities’ (which barely got off the ground) was creating unemployment and increasing poverty.  It is odd then, at a time when the size of the private rented sector is rapidly overtaking social housing, that unemployment is at a 17-year high. Policy Exchange likes to assert causal links between factors that just happen to grow or decline in step with each other, so will it now turn its attention to private renting as the culprit for people losing their jobs?

Policy Exchange was right about one thing, which is the overwhelming importance of boosting housing supply. Unfortunately the government acted on its prescriptions for achieving this, by cutting public sector investment in ‘expensive’ social housing and abolishing ‘all central targets and goals’ (p.84 of the report).  We all know what happened next, as output struggles to top even a miserly 100,000 homes per year.

In truth, the Policy Exchange’s prescriptions for housing were a mixed bag. For example, they recognised the disadvantaged position of first-time buyers and of low-income owners who get into difficulties.  Despite its political sympathies, the government’s actions on these issues have been – at best – lukewarm.  And while government has embraced the recommended spending cuts and moved towards a number of PE’s other recommendations (e.g. on social housing allocations and on rent levels), it has steered clear of some of the wilder ones. For example, it has yet to insist on stock transfer properties being ‘returned’ to the government – yes, all 1.2 million of them!

We can also be thankful that the Policy Exchange was strangely silent on council housing finance, and that the government has not felt it necessary to backtrack on the reforms now due on 1^st April. These already look set to produce some modest levels of new investment, according to plans being announced by councils such asBirmingham, Southampton andPortsmouth.  Policy Exchange won’t like this, of course, as it will boost the dependency culture and lead to even more unemployment.

The writers of those reports by Policy Exchange, Localis and the like probably feel frustrated that the government has been unduly timid in taking up their calls for reform, and that the coalition’s first two years of housing policy change will have been a disappointment.  When viewing the devastating effects of coalition policy, with more promised as welfare benefit changes bite, we can only remind ourselves that it could have been even worse.

Bedroom tax: amended amended amendment will be overturned by Coalition

Despite enormous pressure, yesterday the House of Lords defied the Government on one last amendment to the housing proposals in the Welfare Reform Bill – on the ‘bedroom tax’ for underoccupying social tenants.  It was an amended and watered down version of the amendment that the Lords has supported a couple of weeks ago.  Unfortunately the Government immediately signaled that it would again reverse the Lords’ decision when the issue returns to the House of Commons.

The Lords decision was achieved due to a handful of LIb Dem peers voting against the Government.  Of course, a similar stand by Lib Dem MPs would make it impossible for the Government to get its way in the Commons.  But if form is anything to go by, Lib Dem MPs seem capable of failing to support even their most cherished long term policies.

The ‘bedroom tax’ proposal was hardly noticed when the Welfare Reform Bill was first introduced – although Red Brick covered it here and here and here - but has become an iconic symbol of the meanness of the Bill and the Government’s desire to inflict punishment on social tenants for existing.  It will inflict benefit cuts of £14/week on tenants deemed to be ‘underoccupying’ their homes by a single bedroom.  Even the Government admits that the vast majority, indeed nearly all, of the tenants affected will not be able to move home because smaller units are not available for them to move to.

Lord Richard Best moved a new amendment to the proposal which would ameliorate the impact on vulnerable groups, including disabled people, those not required to work, war widows and foster carers.

Richard argued: ‘Even though this amended, amended amendment is now providing much less relief than I feel the situation requires, it nevertheless draws a line by mitigating at least some of the hardship for at least some of those on the lowest incomes, and now exclusively for those who are not in a position to go out to work because they act as carers or are disabled themselves.’

Minister Lord Freud accepted that most of the 670,000 affected people would not be able to move, but said they had options available to ‘make up the shortfall’ and stay in their home.  Presumably he had in mind freezing or starving among his options.

Over 70 housing and disability organisations wrote to MPs calling on them to support the previous, more wide-ranging amendment, citing examples of families that would be affected, including Grandparents who share the care of their grandchildren; families in which two same-sex teenage children have their own bedroom for privacy and study; disabled tenants who need an adapted room to live a dignified, independent life.  Additional bedrooms in such circumstances would be taken for granted and regarded as entirely reasonable by the vast majority of people.

Following yesterday’s vote, David Orr of the National Housing Federation, which has campaigned tirelessly on this issue, said this result ‘is a victory for common sense and fairness. We are delighted that peers have stood firm and yet again voted to lessen the impact of the bedroom tax. ‘Peers and MPs of all parties have voted to amend these proposals. They have been supported by tenants, social landlords and nearly 80 organisations concerned with housing, family issues and disability. ‘Together, we have shown that it is simply unfair to penalise some of the most vulnerable families for under-occupying their homes when they have nowhere else to move.  For disabled people, war widows and foster carers, with nowhere else to go to, this could mean the difference between making ends meet and living in poverty.’ 

The campaign can be followed on the NHF website at http://www.housing.org.uk/

London Housing Budget in a Pickle

By Nicky Gavron AM, Labour’s Housing and Planning Spokesperson on the London Assembly.

The coalition government has slashed London’s housing budget by 60 per cent, although you wouldn’t know it from the press release. Under the cover of giving new powers to City Hall, a budget of £3 billion has been spun to mask the huge cutsLondon faces.

Boris Johnson described Eric Pickles’ £3 billion settlement as “excellent”. But it is nothing of the sort.

Not a penny of Pickles’ money is new. It was all previously within existing London budgets, including:

• Money the government pledged to the Olympic Park Legacy Company (which soon becomes the new Mayoral Development Corporation); and
• £1.4 million of the now axed London Development Agency’s staffing budget.

The budget trumpeted most by the Mayor – £1.9 billion for housing – is a 60 per cent cut on the amount given to London in 2008 by the previous Labour government.

The Labour settlement gave London more money over three years than the Tories are now giving the whole country over four.

Could anyone take this spin as anything other than an attempt to mask the huge cuts to housing and regeneration inLondon?

With this reduced budget settlement for London come a host of new powers and responsibilities. The Mayor accurately describes the new powers as a “landmark” for the city. We agree. Labour has always supported more housing and regeneration powers for City Hall, especially when we are in the grip of a housing crisis.

Rents are rocketing and supply is plummeting across all sectors. But, faced with these challenges, what is the Mayor doing with his new powers?

He does not have a single policy to deal with extortionate private sector rents – believing it should be left completely to the market. And on the supply of affordable homes even he admits his policy is completely unsustainable. Housing associations will be forced to make up the shortfall left by government cuts by borrowing excessively – a policy that threatens their long-term viability.

When seeking election the Mayor said there was capacity to build 40,000 homes on land under City Hall’s control. In typical Johnson style he promised to “put his land where his mouth is”.

But this pledge has gone unmet. Housing completions on land he controls have plummeted to less than half the number Ken Livingstone delivered.

Under Boris Johnson London has more powers but things are going backwards. We urgently need a Mayor with a real plan who can use all the levers now at City Hall’s disposal to tackleLondon’s housing crisis.

Nicky Gavron can be followed on twitter @nickygavron and at nickygavron.wordpress.com

London Labour Housing Group can be followed on twitter @fairdealldnhsg and on the Fair Deal for London Housing Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/FairDealforLondonHousing/