Housing shaken to the foundations

Housing shaken to the foundations


Peter Hetherington
Wednesday January 10, 2007
The Guardian


Social housebuilding and regeneration programmes face the biggest shake-up in at least two decades with the launch next week of a new government agency designed to streamline delivery.
Likely to be named Communities England, the organisation will be formed partly by the merger of two quangos - the national regeneration agency English Partnerships (EP) and the Housing Corporation, which funds and regulates social housing. Because it is also likely to embrace functions handled by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), such as neighbourhood renewal schemes, insiders say the body should be seen as a completely new agency, with a mission to address the hot issues of "community building" and "place-making".

It comes at a significant time for social housing in England, with a review on the role of the sector by John Hills, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics, due to land soon on the desk of the communities and local government secretary, Ruth Kelly. Martin Cave, a professor at the University of Warwick Business School, is also undertaking a review of social housing regulation for the DCLG, the first exercise of its kind in three decades.

But the big question is whether substantially more public money will go into social housing. Adam Sampson, director of the homelessness charity Shelter, thinks that a government led by Gordon Brown will take the issue more seriously than the outgoing Blair administration. Whether it will find £1.25bn annually to double social housing building from the current level of around 25,000 homes annually in England - Shelter's bottom line to cope with a growing need - is another matter.

Among the many items in the "in tray" at Communities England will doubtless be the role of housing associations, those social businesses, partly funded by the Housing Corporation, that want a wider role in regeneration. Some - including Places for People, the biggest of all, with a turnover of £254m - also want to float on the stock market. Many in the social sector have doubts. David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, which represents the associations, says: "I am personally not keen, but remain to be convinced."