Housing and Housing Management

Balancing the two key contracts

• Publisher: Dunedin Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780465739
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Poverty in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Housing been described as the wobbly pillar of the welfare state on account of it never achieving universal coverage as did health and education. This does not diminish its importance for individuals, households, communities and social stability. Adequate and affordable housing provision is one of the key elements of a functioning democracy. Often characterised as the routine undertaking of simple tasks, housing management never established itself as a key profession in the public sector during the twentieth century. The author challenges that characterisation of housing management by arguing that, from its inception, housing management involves complex tasks. Housing managers engage with some of the most difficult situations, including homelessness, racial harassment, domestic violence and anti-social behaviour. In continually responding to changing emphases in housing and welfare policy, housing management has established itself as a pragmatic and humane profession. However, this characterisation is itself challenged by the systematic erosion of welfare provision and the disciplinary nature of welfare reform that requires housing managers to have an enforcement role in respect of those people that they have traditionally sought to help. Housing management practice in the social sector has always had a complex role as it negotiates the contracts that exist both between tenants and landlords and the wider contract between the welfare state and its tenant citizens. This role faces new challenges as housing is placed at the heart of both welfare reform and an increasingly disciplinary state. The book will be of particular interest to students of the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and to policy makers and housing managers more widely.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction and Aims

This chapter:

introduces housing management, which will be covered in more detail in Chapter 2;

explains the scope of the book and why the focus is on management rather than housing supply or other aspects of policy;

identifies key terminology in the development of social housing;

explains the thinking behind a historical approach beginning with the establishment of property management law in ancient Rome and continuing with the management practices of early ‘social housing’ – the subject of Chapter 3 – and continuing the historical approach to current times through Chapters 4 to 6;

introduces readers to some of the conflicts and tensions that arise in housing management practice as housing managers are expected to play often contradictory roles in implementing a variety of social policies – the modern manifestations of this are covered more fully in Chapter 7;

outlines why ‘citizenship’ is seen to link importantly with social housing management – developed in Chapter 2 and a theme through subsequent chapters;

outlines the content of the subsequent chapters more fully.

Introducing housing management

Housing management is the umbrella term for a range of activities undertaken by landlords in the public and private sectors in relation to their housing stock, its tenants and its applicants. Malpass and Murie (1999) suggest that to some extent housing management is undertaken in all tenures including owner occupation, but the term is not commonly applied to that tenure. The focus of this book is the management of social housing, but the management of private-rented housing is of relevance as that is where housing management originated long before it was ever thought advisable for nation states to fund and/or directly provide housing which needed to be appropriately managed as both a public resource supporting wider social policy objectives and as a public asset with value to be protected.

The UK has a long record of state intervention in housing conditions. It also pioneered direct state provision in seeking innovative ways to resolve the housing problems that plague most economies as they urbanise and industrialise (see for example Engels, 1887; Dewsnup, 1907; Kaufman, 1907; Englander, 1983; Daunton, 1983; Morton, 1991). Consequently housing management in the context of public/social housing also has a long history, but its primary practices, certainly in its early years, derive from long-established private-sector practices and the limitations of even older legal principles and practices derived from the Roman legal system. This ‘institutional’ framework necessarily limits much social housing management activity. The social conservatism for which it is often criticised may well derive from this institutional frame. Max Weber (1903–6) identified the role of institutions that persist in sustaining purposes for which they were not purposefully designed as being one of the basic problems of social science.

The ‘two contracts’ in the subtitle of this book that I see as being in fundamental contradiction are the landlord/tenant contract with its 2,000 years’ institutionalised history and the ‘social contract’ between the citizen and the state that guarantees and extends social citizenship. The latter extended housing management in the social housing sector, so in the second half of the twentieth century (along with other aspects of welfare) it developed practices that helped secure homes for the most vulnerable in our society. But all the time the management of social housing was constrained by an unreformed and institutionalised tenancy contract that is designed to protect property ownership, wealth and privilege. It is this contract that welfare reform and other factors in social change (such as financialisation of housing) rely on to reverse the social citizenship achievements of the past seventy years in social housing.

Scope of the book

The broad aim of this book is to trace the ‘singular social history’ of housing management practices, with an emphasis on the social housing sector. The ‘how to’ guide approach is avoided because organisations vary hugely in their approaches to service delivery and the systems they apply to it – some of these differences will be illustrated in Chapters 5–7 (but see also Rallings, 2014). Another reason to avoid the operational manual model is that social housing management practice is subject to so many elements of policy change and at so rapid a pace that any such publication would be almost immediately out of date. Even the most ‘basic activities’ of housing management require knowledge of the law relating directly to housing (as constantly revised by legislative change, government guidance and case law), and a working knowledge of welfare payments and entitlements with an emphasis on housing benefit. Current changes involve the accumulating impacts of welfare reform and the introduction of Universal Credit (which has already spanned six years and is still operating through growing ‘pilot’ schemes).

Housing managers also have to understand the roles of other agencies and professionals they have almost daily contact with, both statutory and voluntary, in their efforts to secure homes (within the terms of the contract) or provide alternatives. Dealing with a case of antisocial behaviour (ASB) can involve the police, education, social services, mental health practitioners, probation and others, all of whom may have a range of responsibilities and relevant powers, the scope of which housing managers will need to understand and be able to engage constructively with in order to fulfil their own role effectively.

In addition there are growing contrasts between approaches to housing in Scotland and England reflecting the gap in commitments to citizenship in those two countries (and also in Wales and Northern Ireland I believe although I have not studied these examples in detail). Law and the rights it embodies through contracts between state and citizen or between landlord and tenant are a key element of housing management so the law will unavoidably be part of the story without this being in any way a legal text book.

The focus is also on general needs housing management rather than on the arrangements that exist in supported or special needs housing. Due to the particular needs of the client groups there are special arrangements for funding, staffing and tenancy agreements (the often disputed use of licences for example). This important area of housing management requires very specialist knowledge.

Key players

Briefly, from the late nineteenth century, state investment in housing came through ‘municipal housing’ or ‘council housing’, which morphed into ‘public housing’ with the rise of the public role associated with expanding state responsibilities. From the 1960s housing associations were also providers of ‘public’ housing due to extensive government funding of their activities (they were the ‘Third Arm’ of government housing policy – the other two being council housing and home ownership). From the 1980s as government switched its capital investment towards housing associations, the term ‘social housing’ evolved and eventually became the term of choice. The implication is clear that this was no longer a ‘public’ asset or resource but there remains at least a nod towards social objectives.

A further change in nomenclature came following the 1990s’ withdrawal of public investment from social housing and increasing reliance on private capital finance for development and major repairs. Housing associations then became Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) with their social objectives often reduced to the limited protection offered by their charitable status. At the same time the private investors saw the ‘social’ emphasis as being rather worrying when what they wanted was a reliable return on capital. Therefore, as RSLs moved away from meeting social objectives to do with housing needs and towards meeting consumer ‘choices’ in a market, the terminology describing what they provide changed to ‘affordable housing’ and ‘social housing’. These now survive as a form of terminology largely used by people who think that a state can and should have a role in housing its citizens well. ‘Affordable housing’ could in theory be provided in any tenure but increasingly is actually provided in none. Private-sector house prices and rents rise inexorably and social landlords are driven towards unaffordable ‘market rents’ and the repayment of commercial loans.

Background to social housing management

Much was written in the nineteenth century about the ‘housing question’ but largely in terms of arguing the most effective means of increasing housing supply while also ensuring improved conditions. Housing shortages had led to massive overcrowding. Poor understanding of sanitation and inadequate maintenance practices had exacerbated the problems of low wages and poverty experienced by most of the urban working population, who suffered poor health as a consequence of these failures (for a graphic report incorporating all of these factors see Engels, 1887, p. 76). Housing supply and supply policy history are relevant in terms of the development of housing management in the state sector, but housing policy is covered extensively in other literatures and will take a secondary place here.

Contrastingly the only significant innovator in approaches to actually managing housing and tenancy arrangements seems to have been Octavia Hill, who operated in the then ubiquitous private sector. Her contributions will be discussed more fully later (primarily in Chapter 4), and I will be arguing that one of her innovations was treating tenants and tenancy management in ways that imply equality of citizenship, even if she did not follow this through consistently.

Housing management has been criticised as lacking respect for its customers, and it commonly makes the news only when it receives a bad press: for example tenants dying alone in their homes and not being found for some time. There has been a recent case of this in Southwark (Wadsworth, 2016). A famous example has had a documentary film made about it (2012), when a housing association tenant being evicted for rent arrears was discovered to have died three years previously (rent was being paid by direct debit so arrears began to accrue only when the account was empty). While such events are not daily occurrences they usually attract short-term press vitriol, perhaps an internal inquiry, and protestations that this should not be allowed to happen in whatever decade or century we happen to be in at the time.

This raises questions about what housing management actually is and, perhaps more to the point, what we expect from it as a society. Social landlords can be seen as paternalistic, interfering, insensitive or intrusive if they insist on a lot of contact with tenants or are deemed to be attempting to ‘manage’ their lives in any way, but can be neglectful and uncaring when they do not and something goes wrong. As a society we certainly expect more ‘social’ input from social landlords than from their private-sector counterparts, as will be illustrated more fully in Chapters 2, 5 and 6.

The historical approach of the book

Pinto suggests that:

The first real attempt to chart the history of council housing management was Power’s work (1987) which contends that the main reason why attention to housing management per se has been neglected is because authorities became landlords concerned primarily with housing construction and finance (Pinto, 1993, p. 18).

This study is a kind of supplement to Power’s but with different emphases. She was attempting ‘to trace the origins of unpopular council estates’ (Power, 1987, p. xi) using ‘material collected from twenty unpopular, run-down estates throughout the country’ to demonstrate ‘major problems of design, management and the development of social “ghettoes” ’ (ibid., p. xv). The research for her study was undertaken to support (or evaluate) intensive management initiatives introduced by the then Department of the Environment (DoE) under the umbrella of the Priority Estates Project. The focus was clearly ‘problem estates’ where failure is assumed or readily identified, although whose failure exactly may be more open to debate. Does some element of social breakdown in any locality necessarily or exclusively implicate the landlord if there is one?

My aim is to look more generally at the historical contexts of day-to-day housing management and to link this with the idea of developing social citizenship. This entails emphasising not just that council housing management was largely a by-product of slum clearance and building programmes by councils, but also that the only housing management model available to them was a largely neglectful, minimalist and contractual private-sector model that had developed and become ‘naturalised’ over 2,000 years. There was no established alternative. Because of this, council landlords had to develop their own ways of managing stock while the social purposes of public housing evolved, and in their own enterprising ways they often developed the approaches to housing and estate management that later initiatives such as Priority Estates drew on. It is often the case that innovations in practice run ahead of policy and research despite the latter’s claims to be ‘cutting edge’.

There are a range of publications that seek to merge policy approaches to housing provision with aspects of housing management (the list of references here could be huge but would include publications from Smith, 1989; Malpass and Murie, 1999; Balchin and Rhoden, 2002; Lowe, 2004; 2011; Conway, 2000; Harriett and Matthews, 2009; Pawson and Mullins, 2010). However the policy emphasis remains, partly because supply of housing, which has to come before anything can be managed, is more dramatic and immediate in its impact. This impact is not only visual, affecting the urban landscape and in the early days helping to drive city expansion and the creation of suburbia, but can also change the socio-economic geography of towns and cities by moving people in large numbers from one location to another through clearance or regeneration schemes.

Housing policy publications therefore proliferate, debating the merits of forms of supply, whether by extending social housing provision or by expanding property-owning democracy. These key themes in the development of the British housing system in the twentieth a...