FABIAN SOCIETY THE POLITICS OF A FAIR HOUSING POLICY Edited by James Gregory With chapters by Vidhya Alakeson, Richard Capie, Kate Green, Brian Johnson, Matt Leach, Nick Raynsford, Duncan Shrubsole, and Rebecca Tunstall FABIAN SOCIETY The Fabian Society is Britain’s leading left of centre think tank and political society, committed to creating the political ideas and policy debates which can shape the future of progressive politics. With over 300 Fabian MPs, MEPs, Peers, MSPs and AMs, the Society plays an unparalleled role in linking the ability to influence policy debates at the highest level with vigorous grassroots debate among our growing membership of over 7000 people, 70 local branches meeting regularly throughout Britain and a vibrant Young Fabian section, and the Fabian Women’s Network. Fabian publications, events and ideas therefore reach and influence a wider audience than those of any comparable think tank. The Society is unique among think tanks in being a thriving, democratically-constituted membership organisation, affiliated to the Labour Party but organisationally and editorially independent. For over 120 years Fabians have been central to every important renewal and revision of left of centre thinking. The Fabian commitment to open and participatory debate is as important today as ever before as we explore the ideas, politics and policies which will define the next generation of progressive politics in Britain, Europe and around the world. Fabian Society 11 Dartmouth Street London SW1H 9BN www.fabians.org.uk Fabian Ideas 628 First published 2011 ISBN 978 0 7163 0628 3 Series Editor and Editorial Director: Tom Hampson Editorial Manager: Ed Wallis This pamphlet, like all publications of the Fabian Society, represents not the collective views of the Society but only the views of the author. The responsibility of the Society is limited to approving its publications as worthy of consideration within the Labour movement. This publication may not be reproduced without express permission of the Fabian Society. © The Fabian Society 2011. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. British Library Cataloguing in Publication data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound by DG3, London, UK To find out more about the Fabian Society, the Young Fabians, the Fabian Women’s Network and our local societies, please visit our web site at www.fabians.org.uk. Homes for Citizens The politics of a fair housing policy Edited by James Gregory With chapters by Vidhya Alakeson, Richard Capie, Kate Green, Brian Johnson, Matt Leach, Nick Raynsford, Duncan Shrubsole, and Rebecca Tunstall This Fabian Ideas pamphlet is published in partnership with Moat and Crisis. About Moat Moat is a housing association providing affordable homes in thriving communities for people in the South East of England. For over forty years, Moat has delivered high qual- ity general needs homes for affordable rent, supported accommodation and tenancy support services. Moat is also one of the Homes and Communities Agency’s development partners and is the appointed Local HomeBuy Agent in Essex, Kent and Sussex. It manages approximately 20,000 homes and employs 430 people. About Crisis Crisis is the national charity for single homeless people. We are dedicated to ending homelessness by delivering life- changing services and campaigning for change. Our innovative education, employment, housing and well- being services address individual needs and help homeless people to transform their lives. About the authors James Gregory is a Senior Research Fellow at the Fabian Society. Vidhya Alakeson is Research and Strategy Director at the Resolution Foundation having previously worked as a Senior Fellow at the Nuffield Trust. Richard Capie is Deputy Chief Executive at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). Before joining CIH, Richard was Head of Policy at the Housing Corporation. Kate Green was elected MP for Stretford and Urmston in Greater Manchester in May 2010. Previously Kate was the Chief Executive of the Child Poverty Action Group. Brian Johnson is Chief Executive of Moat. Brian was previ- ously Chief Executive of CityWest Homes and has experi- ence in welfare to work as Executive Director of Operations at Remploy. Matt Leach, at the time of writing, was Associate Director of ResPublica. He has recently been appointed Chief Executive of HACT – the housing action charity. Nick Raynsford is MP for Greenwich and Woolwich. Nick was Minister for Local and Regional Government in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister from 2001 to 2005. Duncan Shrubsole is the Director of Policy and External Affairs for Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people, and is responsible for the organisation’s policy, research, campaigning and communications functions and best practice services. Rebecca Tunstall will be Joseph Rowntree Professor of Housing Policy and Director of the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York from October 2011. Currently she is based in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. CONTENTS 1. Introduction 1 James Gregory LEGACY AND VISION 2. The Place of Social Housing 17 Nick Raynsford 3. The Squeezed Middle 31 Vidhya Alakeson VULNERABILITY AND NEED 4. Life Chances and Housing: the Facts 47 Rebecca Tunstall 5. Housing After the Cuts 63 Kate Green 6. The Challenges of Private Rental 75 Duncan Shrubsole SECURITY AND ASPIRATION 7. Housing Under the Coalition 95 Richard Capie 8. A New Role for Social Landlords 109 Brian Johnson 9. Housing Associations at a Crossroads 123 Matt Leach viii 1. Introduction James Gregory or very many of us, whether we’re living in social hous- ing, renting in the private sector or paying back a mort- Fgage, housing costs are a source of great anxiety and con- cern. Polling frequently reveals that around a quarter of house- holds find it a struggle to meet their housing costs. In a major piece of research conducted by Shelter in 2010, it emerged that 27 per cent of social renters and 34 per cent of owner-occupiers actually lost sleep through worry about their housing costs.1 Polling for the TUC yields similar results: one in four people said that the stress of keeping up with mortgage or rent pay- ments has affected their performance at work.2 With rents in many areas continuing to rise and the inevitability of an inter- est rate hike for owners, there is very little reason to think that this situation is set to get any better. However, there is a real and surprising barrier for anyone trying to solve Britain’s housing problems – despite this widespread anxiety there is very little sense of housing as a political problem that a social or campaign movement could coalesce around. This has largely been because of a failure of the left to understand the extent to which we need to treat housing needs, and solutions, holistically rather than as a series of discrete problems affecting different household ‘types’ and tenures. By this I do not just mean – in the valid but worn cliché – that we need more ‘joined up’ policy in 1 Homes for Citizens housing, bringing together housing provision with other services such as debt or employment advice. We do indeed need more of this. But we also need a more nuanced under- standing of how policy interventions or reform in one hous- ing ‘sector’ can have repercussions in others. That is the core aim of this book. In the past we have made the wrong arguments. Too often the argument for addressing the chronic undersupply of social housing, for example, has emphasised the social injustice of fail- ing to meet the housing needs of the most vulnerable in our society. In fact, we will have more hope of addressing this injus- tice if we highlight the positive effects of greater social supply on every household – that it would take much of the heat out of the housing market and bring ownership nearer the reach of many more people whilst also reducing demand in the private rental sector. There is no need here for a trade-off between ‘need’ and ‘aspiration’: creating a more stable housing market for aspiring buyers does not entail the neglect of either social or pri- vate rental housing. On the contrary, stability in the housing market positively requires a holistic approach to reforms in other sectors. In particular it requires a more coherent approach to the place of the private rental sector in our housing landscape. For too long public policy has adopted a hands-off approach to private renting, with far less attention to regulation and consumer rights than we should expect in a modern market. Meanwhile, though, the foundations of a progressive politics of housing are perfectly clear: they are animated by an ideal of integration and a real sense, in the phrase of the day, that we are all in it together. Of course, there are many people who are not in the same boat when it comes to housing need; for some there is little or no struggle. But where people are struggling we should resist the urge to think of different types of struggle for 2 Gregory different ‘types’ (tenures) of household. This thinking has con- strained the politics of housing in Britain for decades and, at worst, has sustained a housing policy that has literally segregat- ed many social housing tenants from mainstream society and the opportunities it brings. Ideals alone are clearly not enough – and this collection of essays aims to offer some insights into policy means as well as political ends. We are proposing three policies that are especial- ly important. The first policy is the need for flexible rent in social housing, with rents better reflecting households’ ability to pay.