The housing sector was told it was forcing its tenants to compete over ‘victimhood’ and was guilty of colonising people’s lives today, in a heated and impassioned debate on the future of social housing.
 
 
In the final day of the National Housing Federation’s (NHF) annual conference in Birmingham, a panel of speakers got their teeth into the weighty question of ‘is social housing dead’. David Orr chaired the panel-led discussion before throwing the show open to the floor. Discussion was lively to say the least.
 
 
Participating in the frank exchange of views were Professor Anne Power, professor of social policy, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics (LSE); Claire Fox, director of the Institute for Ideas; Julie Fawcett, housing association tenant and director, Stockwell Park Community Trust; and David Robinson, chair, early action taskforce, Community Links.
 
 
Claire Fox took a provocative stance, accusing the sector of being “judgemental” and essentially authoritarian; she told it to “stop the colonisation of people’s lives” and even accused it of “social cleansing”.
 
 
If such words left the audience “stunned” as one delegate from the floor said later, it almost certainly made them sit up and pay attention, as Fox injected controversy into the affair that expanded the avenue of debate into anti-social behaviour and a social landlord’s responsibilities in this issue.
 
 
Earlier, Fox said that the lack of social housing, and the needs-based policy of allocating homes, had effectively forced prospective tenants to adopt a ‘needier than you’ narrative that essentially demands they internalise a script of helplessness.
 
 
“Because there isn’t enough housing, in order to get social housing, you have to kind of queue up and show your scars; you have to show that you are particularly needy in particular ways, and I think we have created in the tenants of social housing, or anyone who wants to be, the demand that they are more oppressed, more victim-like, more suffering than anyone else, and I think that is very nerve-wracking and is actually the opposite of creating independence, which is maybe one of the aspirations that was originally associated with social housing.”
 
 
She said that there were not enough homes and that more were needed, but added that what was being delivered was far too little, far too late.
 
 
Professor Power was adamant that we are not seeing the death of social housing, or at least we are not seeing the emergence of any need for its demise, but she intimated that there was certainly scope for it to die an untimely death.
 
 
“This is not the death of social housing unless social landlords, and particularly the big housing associations become completely stupid,” she said. “Social housing will play a very powerful role over the next decades.
 
 
“It is a huge asset base. It is not an asset base for selling off at maximum value in order to segregate the people into poorer areas, it is an asset base for housing very important, very low paid, very key parts of our communities. The richer the community, for example Kensington and Chelsea, the more it depends on those baseline childcare workers, elderly helpers, taxi drivers, waiters and so on. And to talk as though we can shove people out of high cost areas because we don’t need them any more is rubbish.”
 
 
Housing associations, for all they have “grown up” to become big players in development, are rooted in neighbourhoods, she added. “That’s where our real roots are, that’s where our real value is.”
 
 
On building, though more homes are needed, she said the sector has to protect its asset-base:  “You cannot sell your silver, you cannot eat your seed corn, in other words sell off your cheap not-wanted but occupied by low-income people property to do it. Building is not worth destroying homes for.”
 
 
With a huge rise in demand for renting, there is a “whole new opportunity for social landlords” in the private rented market, in the intermediate market, in the ‘not-for-big-profit’ market, she said. She also urged the sector not to be afraid of the Government – it often doesn’t know what it wants and it changes its mind on things, she said.
 
 
Julie Fawcett injected a little bit of class into the affair, when she spoke of what she saw as the value and importance of social housing, but she expressed her concern that “actually, this is the death of social housing”.
 
 
“I am incredibly miffed by what’s going on,” she said. “For me, the asset base of housing actually belongs to the working class, it’s about the only thing we had that we could call ours, and we’ve lost that. And we’re now actually being forced into private housing. I am London-centric and I can already see the real issues facing particularly young families, moving into private accommodation. Occasionally their benefits are held up and their landlords are getting ready to evict them before the benefits are sorted out. This is causing a whole heap of problems for all of us.”
 
 
David Robinson talked making people ready for the next steps in their lives; ready for primary school, ready for secondary school, ready for work – not resilience. Talking of resilience is “defensive” he said whereas public policy should look at what can be done to make people “ready to cope with adversity”.
 
 
He talked of “housing for public benefit” –saying he defines it a little more broadly than social housing. It involves an emphasis not just on the provision of a roof but on the provision of community building: that a home is part of a wider community. He added that such aims could not be realised unless such housing remained low cost and therefore the need for state subsidy remained.