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Social Housing Green Paper - Brian Robson, JRF
- 1. Click to add title Click to add subtitle Click to insert presenter name and/or date Social Housing Green Paper CIH Yorkshire and Humber 9th October 2018 Brian Robson, Acting Head of Policy & Research
- 2. About JRF We aim to create a prosperous UK without poverty Areas for solutions: • More people live in a decent, affordable home • More people find a route out of poverty through work • More people find a route out of poverty through a better system of social security
- 3. This morning… □ Supply □ Affordability □ Stigma / tenant voice
- 4. How far we’ve come… “above all, we choose to build the homes people can buy” 2015 “We need to return to the time, not so very long ago, when social housing was valued.” 2017 2018 “social housing has a vital role… it’s not just about creating a safety net to avoid homelessness”
- 5. Supply : why it matters “I'm one rent review away, one complaint away from being homeless. It's as simple as that … it's exactly how it feels. It can't be felt any other way; that's the situation and I feel terribly, terribly vulnerable, I really do … Absolutely, the overriding threat that hangs dark over my head; I wake up with it every day, I go to sleep with it every night. There's no getting away from it; I'm that far away from my whole world being turned upside-down.”
- 6. Supply…
- 7. Green paper disappointing • Scrapped high value sales • Flex on RTB receipts • Hints on borrowing caps Since then… • £2bn long-term commitment • HRA cap removed…? Next up: • Letwin Review • Spending Review 2019
- 10. Affordable Rents as % of social rents
- 12. Affordability : what could be done? Proposed KPIs: • Repair • Safety • Complaints • Engagement • N’hood management Affordability? • % of general needs lettings at more than 1/3 of local low incomes?
- 13. Stigma - Is it tenure, or income..? - Need to find new, more effective ways to talk about it
- 14. In summary • Green Paper itself disappointing • But look how far we’ve come… • Need to keep building on it – spending review next up.
- 15. “I'm one rent review away, one complaint away from being homeless. It's as simple as that …”
Editor's Notes
- Introduce self BR, P&R PM @ JRF Thanks to Nigel and colleagues for invitation. MORE BLURB
- Org vision to create prosperous and poverty free UK. Do so through research, policy and practice. 2016 Strategy to Solve Poverty. 2017 focus is particularly on policy and practice development –working with others to demonstrate solutions to poverty. Across three themes: Costs and Living Standards – housing a huge part of this – ¼ of poverty occurs AHC; housing largest single cost, growth of PRS – soon largest single home of people in pov. Builds on our research programme exploring links betweek housing and poverty Inclusive growth – we know places that grew the most in last round of growth weren’t places that reduced poverty. Need a new form of growth that reaches everyone. Working with MCR (IGAU) and Leeds (MJBJ) In-work poverty – nature of poverty has changed – 55% of people in pov are in a working family. Record high. Don’t look at these themes in isolation from each other. Seems to us that potential opportunities through devolution to deliver on all three themes, not just IG. Hence work commissioned from recently on how city regions are using, and can use, housing and planning policy to tackle poverty. We are particularly interested in opportunities to deliver more affordable housing at genuinely affordable rents – a pro-poor intervention, poverty v sensitive to rent levels, and it seems to us that Cambridgeshire and Peterborough’s devolution deal makes this area well-placed to do that. Finally, to stress we’re not interested in knowledge for its own sake – hence keen to get findings out to policy-makers and practitioners like yourselves – and do develop solutions and propositions off the back of the evidence.
- We set out three tests for the Green Paper back in July. This morning, I want to give you our view on whether it met those tests; which were around: Supply Affordability and Stigma and tenant voice And, where we don’t think the Green Paper hit the mark, suggest how it could have done better.
- You guys know why. But this is Nick’s story. Nick’s a single man, living in the PRS in London. [read quote] He’s one of 72 households University of York tracked for us over three years; and what they described was a housing treadmill – constantly running fast just to stay still; constantly in danger of falling off. Housing wasn’t a platform for them to build a life from; it wasn’t a source of security and safety – it was an overriding concern that played on their mind and prevented them from getting on in life. So that’s why we need more supply, so people like Nick have somewhere secure, safe and affordable to live. How are we doing at that?
- Delivery of affordable housing of all types has averaged 30k pa short of what we need to be building to meet newly arising need (and others would argue we need to be building far more than that to meet backlog need – see forthcoming Crisis/NHF work). We certainly need to be hitting 80k before we can start to think about social housing beginning to play a wider affordability role. Tory politicians agree – 71% of conservative council leaders and housing needs polled for us by Survation in the run-up to the Green Paper said current investment in social housing wasn’t enough to meet demand in their area.
- Would prefer govt to link rents to earnings, but thinking about direction of travel, what could be done? KPIs – you can take a view on whether they’re a good or bad thing; but if you look at the list, they’re all things you could do really well on by generating as much rental income as you can. Need for a balancing measure of affordability. Don’t want to look at individual tenants – that could encourage associations to alter their intake of tenants. Instead, why not compare rents to local low earnings, and report on how many of those general needs lettings are made at rents that are more than one-third of local low incomes?
- Stigmatisation and stereotyping expressed by social housing residents; certainly through the CIH rethinking project :- very similar to the language used by people living in poverty when they talk about how they feel; And particularly when it comes to their coverage in the media – where people tell us they feel victims of stigmatisation, objectification and victimisation. So is it the tenure that’s the problem; or is it that social housing is seen as a badge that identifies people in poverty – and catches up others with it? --- Our view is that we need to find new, more effective ways to talk about poverty and life on a low income. We’ve been working with the Frameworks Institute on a new, evidence-based way of communicating; one that will build a deeper understanding of how poverty happens and the changes needed to address it. That means leading with shared values of compassion and justice, which most people in the UK share (regardless of political stance), it means explaining how poverty works; showing the real causes and systemic solutions when telling a person’s story; and enabling people to see that changes to systems are possible. That’s a long-term project, and one we’ll need to build a coalition to deliver. If government are serious about tackling this, then we need a long term commitment from them to avoid some of the language we’ve seen in relation to benefits and estates (in particular) in the past.
- In summary I think the Green Paper itself is disappointing – it doesn’t match up to the expectations Sajid Javid set for it But look how far we’ve come – focus on social housing, actions, long-term commitments None of it’s enough though – we need to see words backed by actions. If social housing is to have a larger role than just a homelessness safety net, then the Spending Review next year needs to set out a more ambitious plan than the £2bn announced so far.
- People like Nick are depending on us. Thank you.