AT HOME WITH...Phillip Blond

Phillip Blond director and founder of the thinktank ResPublica talks to Michelle McKenna about putting the social back into social housing and why RSLs need to up their game

As a social economic commentator Phillip Blond is not afraid to say what he thinks and since setting up ResPublica in 2009 to “create a new economic, social and cultural settlement” he has had plenty to say.

The thinktank came about says Blond because he was “convinced that the orthodoxies on both sides of the political divide were wrong and were wholly misplaced.” The Left, he says “kind of fetishised the role of the state” viewing it as the primary agency of social good and social change while the right viewed the market as the primary deliverer of social good and social change.

“I think both of those positions failed to see the wood for the trees because neither of them delivered even on their base claims,” he says. “The state was meant to save the poor from their lot and was meant to redeem people from poverty. But what we have seen, especially during the New Labour years is as the state got ever more powerful the condition of people at the bottom of society got ever worse, got ever more isolated from opportunity and the pathways to genuine transformation for them were progressively removed but by the same token on the Right the language of the market spoke about a rising tide that lifts all boats and spoke about creating mass prosperity but what really happened is the agency of genuine economic transformation which is assets became evermore concentrated and wealth and prosperity moved ever upwards.”

The shifting economy and culture meant that a new way was needed to “lift the poor from their lot and create mass prosperity not mass dependency” says Blond and that is the “raison d’être” of ResPublica.

Ideas are the prime carrier for social change says Blond and ResPublica is all about building viable policy around new ideas. I n fact Blond’s ideas have been credited with influencing the agenda around Cameron’s Big Society.

“At its best the Big Society is the idea that the agency to deliver what human beings want should be human beings, not the market and not the state and what the Big Society is about is empowering human beings both individually and collectively so rather than the state dictating the shape of our town centres and what things should be like, people who live there should dictate so it is really about a bottom up philosophy to empower people culturally and socially so that they have the economic, social and cultural power to change society around their shared agendas,” he says.

The Big Society cuts across every sphere of G overnment policy and isn’t about just volunteering and philanthropy but community agency, says Blond. While he admits that The Big Society is a way of reducing state dependency he says that it is not a cut but actually a far more effective way of using public money.

“What we know from human beings and anthropology is if you give people very small wins and let them successfully control a small aspect of their lives they gradually see that they can control more and more of their lives,” he says.

“One of the things that is wrong with welfareism is it makes people passive and by making people passive it makes them incapable of more and more things progressively but if we can let people have some agency over anything, it can be something as minor as painting the stairwell in their block of flats or having power over how the flowers are planted and as soon as you give people a bit of success it actually encourages everybody to do a bit more and these things generate momentum.”

The welfare state, says Blond, “has become hugely dysfunctional” with the middle classes getting “huge” amounts of welfare and the poorest people being stuck in “massive welfare traps” where for every pound they earn they lose a pound in benefits. So it is never worth working for those at the bottom and that is what is terrifying because if it is never worth working for those at the bottom then there is never any reason to get out of dependency,” he explains.

Blond believes that the answer to the problem is a welfare system based on assets which would help people to move off income supplements for good. “I would like welfare to increasingly concentrate on assets not on income,” he says. “Because it is only assets that can change people’s outcomes whereas what we have with income welfare is there is only ever a small amount of money and that doesn’t really change people’s lives.”

Giving housing as an example he says that there is “something deeply wrong” that the Government has “pumped” money into social housing for nearly 50 years and neither the Government nor the tenants have benefited.

“The only people who have benefited are the owners of that social housing who have seen their capital stock rise,” he says. “We have never ever been able to create a kind of shared equity scheme for people to benefit from that rise in value and I don’t think that is beyond the wit of man.”

Blond supports the Universal Credit and he agrees that there is a need toreduce the amount of Housing Benefit paid but went on to say: “Whether the precise accounts – who is removing benefits and what we are doing is right is a more debatable point I think. How we do it is more debatable than the idea that there is a problem that needs structurally addressing.”

The emergence of an “underclass” has been at the forefront of many of the debates around the cause of the riots which rocked many of our cities earlierthis year. “I think the reason the riot happened is because once again Left and Right have conspired against pathways out for people and we have created an underclass from which it is very difficult once you are in it to get out of it,” says Blond.

The answer lies in creating pathways out for people he says and the fact that such a high proportion of those convicted of rioting already had criminal records shows a “massive structural failure of rehabilitation.”

But while “rehabilitation is an utter necessity” and he is firm believer that nobody is beyond redemption and help Blond says that we as a nation “have been too soft” on criminal behaviour in disadvantaged communities. “We, in effect, tolerate it – all of the agencies do and criminal behaviour destroys all other forms of social and economic life so I think it should be ruthlessly driven out”.

The “missing element” in the debate he says is how we genuinely help people to turn their lives around and it all comes back to creating pathways out. “We are focusing on new models for reviving the civic society or civic economy – ways in which small business, big business and all of the agencies and institutions of our society can come together to create new options for people,” he says.

This will involve more mentoring and apprenticeship opportunities, a focus on new economic models and new ways to create hybrid social finance and to price small and medium-sized businesses and social enterprise into the economy.

So where do housing associations fit into all of this? On the whole they just need to try harder says Blond. “There is very good practice in some housing associations and it is wonderful but the middle where most people are is not good enough.

“We would like to put the social back into social housing and we think that housing associations need to do a lot more and take care of their people in all ways from education to skills and families, they need to create a situation where they are not just housing people, they are also dealing with their other needs.”