Regulating Social Housing

Governing Decline

David Cowan, Morag McDermont

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781904385820
• eBook ISBN: 9781000448139
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

Drawing upon Foucauldian analyzes of governmentality, the authors contend that social housing must be understood according to a range of political rationalities that saturate current practice and policy. They critically address the practice of dividing social from private tenure; situating subjects such as the purpose and financing of social housing, the regulation of its providers and occupiers and its relationship to changing perceptions of private renting and owner-occupation, within the context of an argument that all housing tenures form part of an understanding of social housing. They also take up the ways in which social housing is regulated through the invocation and manipulation of obscure notions of housing 'need' and 'affordability', and finally, they consider how social housing has provided a focus for debates about sustainable communities and for concerns about anti-social behaviour.

Regulating Social Housing provides a rich and insightful analysis that will be of value to legal scholars, criminologists and other social scientists with interests in housing, urban studies and contemporary forms of regulation.

Chapter 1:

On Social Housing, Decline, Regulation and Government

Peter, you’re probably the only person I know who can answer this question and, if you’ve got time I'd be grateful. When does the descriptor ‘social’ be linked to ‘housing’. My understanding is that it occurred at some point during the 1980s and was used as a means of ‘doing down’ the sector – as part of the discursive narrative of housing at the time – and subsequently came to be adopted generally. Is that right? …

best, as always

Dave

Dave

It is my understanding and recollection that [the term] social housing was not introduced with any pejorative implication, but it was reacted to in that way by (some) tenants on the basis that it sounded too much like social security and being On the social’. They thought it was a way of identifying them with dependency, but … the term arose as an alternative to the government’s preferred label [, ‘the Independent Sector’].

I think the whole thing could have been avoided if we weren’t so wedded to a 3 tenure model of housing in Britain. After all, there is no real need to bracket Local Authorities and Housing Associations together.

A final observation would be that the difficulty of using a term like social these days indicates the distance we have travelled from the collectivist days after 1945, and therefore the difficulty of overcoming social exclusion. It seems to be a measure of resistance to policies promoting cohesion and solidarity. Depressing isn’t it?

Peter

[Email conversation between one of the authors and Professor Peter Malpass; reproduced with permission]

While the content of this book seemed fairly obvious to us, we spent a disproportionately long time considering its title. ‘Regulating Social Housing: Governing Decline’ was what we came up with, with some assistance from the then Glasshouse Press commissioning editor. We can’t claim that this title is perfect (by any means); however, it does carry with it the key theoretical, empirical and conceptual messages that we aim to discuss in this and subsequent chapters. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an outline of those messages, and hint at some of the major shifts in thought which have accompanied the development of ‘social’ housing in England and Wales.

‘Social housing’?

The conjunction of the words ‘social’ and ‘housing’ represents a relatively recent, and perhaps paradoxical, truth-claim in the history of state involvement in the provision of housing in the United Kingdom. In the early 1990s, at a time when we questioned the existence of the social, or talked of its crisis, the term began to be applied to rented housing provided by local councils and housing associations in a rapidly demunicipalizing not-for-profit rented sector. It was in an attempt to recover both a distinctiveness and commonality of purpose in the face of fragmentation that the term ‘social housing’ belatedly came into currency.

We like to think about the creation of the term ‘social housing’ as being a site of resistance to Conservative housing policy, as in Dave’s original email to Peter Malpass cited above. However, Peter’s response suggests a different type or set of resistances being deployed, a response from tenants attempting to resist being placed within a particular framework or category. We return to this issue later.

One way into the term is to see it in terms of what it was designed to replace. For much of the twentieth century, housing policy had drawn on the idea of the ‘public’ to describe the state’s intervention in housing provision. However, by the 1980s that term just would not do; it simply did not describe the vision of this type of housing held by the Conservatives who became obsessed in housing, as in so many other areas, by the idea of the mixed economy of provision. In their 1987 housing White Paper, the Conservatives coined the phrase ‘the independent rented sector’ to cover housing provided by housing associations and private landlords. This was a fairly clear message in itself; yet, by 1995, it was clear that the term social housing had stuck and it seemed to describe the provision of ‘not-for-profit’ housing by councils and housing associations. In that year, for example, another White Paper talked about the ‘social housing product’ (incidentally also seeking to extend the term to profit-seeking providers).

Between those periods, the term came into currency in both academic and professional discourse. For example, Ball et al (1988) use the term without discussion, and Hughes and Lowe (1991) talked about a new century of social housing again without pinning it down. Housing professionals, rapidly losing the local authority/housing association distinction as the transfer of stock from the former to the latter altered the policy landscape, used the term to demarcate their own area of expertise. Indeed, until recently the term ‘social housing’ has been used by professionals and academics alike, almost without question – we instinctively think we know what it is, or alternatively, its meaning is so difficult to pin down that it is too difficult to question definitions. Nevertheless, we believe that the term is meaningful, and that it is worth spending time attempting to untangle and understand its meaning. Indeed, you can tell from Peter’s email that the term is both controversial, critical and tells us/him some rather depressing things. But the most critical reason for attempting to pin it down is that current professional discourse at least appears to be attempting to remove the word ‘social’ – our concern is that in abandoning the term we are in danger of ‘abandoning the social’ altogether from housing.

Defining ‘social housing’

Michael Harloe, in a discussion paper tellingly entitled The Social Construction of Social Housing (1993), attempts a definition in a footnote:

The term ‘social rented housing’, let alone ‘social housing’, has a variety of meanings. But social rented housing can be broadly characterised as having three major characteristics. First, it is provided by landlords at a price which is not primarily determined by considerations of profit. Second, it is administratively allocated according to some conception of ‘need’. Third, government control over social rented housing is extensive and has become more so over time. (ibid, 3)

Now, while Harloe here makes a distinction between ‘social housing’ and ‘social rented housing’, in the remainder of the pamphlet he, like most academics, uses the term ‘social housing’ without consideration of whether we are only talking about one tenure or not. Producers of ‘social housing’ have recognized elements of owner occupation as being part of their remit for some considerable time: for example, the 1950s promotion of self-build by the housing association sector; and leasehold schemes for the elderly, shared ownership and other low cost home ownership schemes developed by municipalities and associations from the 1970s. It is true that this provision has been seen to be at the margins, but from the beginning of the 1980s government housing policy promoted home ownership not simply through the right to buy, but also by increasingly providing subsidy for low cost home ownership schemes more generally (at the expense of rented housing). This is particularly evident since the publication of the Barker Report (2004), but the roots of this shift were evident much earlier (Murie et al, 1976). Government housing policy now talks in terms of ‘affordable housing’ (ODPM, 2005), and the Government obsession is with ‘key worker housing’. Even a survey of affordable housing by Roof, an editorially independent magazine produced by Shelter (a campaigning organization for the homeless and housing), is concerned with affordable home ownership. It is therefore arguable that being tenure blind, or only being concerned with rented housing, misses the point, both in terms of historical meanings of social housing as well as the current environment.

Meeting ‘need’

Arguably, it is Harloe’s second category, of being ‘administratively allocated according to some concept of “need”’, that is most commonly considered to be the defining characteristic of social housing. In fact, this statement has two parts: ‘administratively allocated’ signals that social housing is housing managed by some form of administrative, or bureaucratic organization – organizations provide social housing, not individuals. And these organizations employ administrative, not market mechanisms. The latter are not synonymous with social housing because they cannot be deployed to allocate according to need.

On the other hand, the current policy focus seeks first and foremost to promote ‘choice’ in the social rented sector, which thus challenges even these assumptions. As the housing Green Paper in 2000 (DETR/DSS, 2000: ch 9) conceptualized it, there is a need to move away from bureaucratic ‘allocation’ towards ‘letting’ property. In this new conceptualization, the role of the managers is to act as facilitators of choice.

The ‘concept of “need” ‘invoked by Harloe is also problematic. It is regularly employed by academics in their appreciation of the underpinnings of the sector:

Social housing is conventionally conceived of as breaking the link between income and housing quality – a mission characterized as ‘meeting housing need’ – its existence justified in large part by merit good and equity arguments. (Marsh, 2004: 201)

It has almost been a mantra in housing circles that social housing is allocated according to ‘need’. (Cowan et al, 1999: 403)

‘Need’ is here being used as a unifying concept – in reality, we find unity neither over time, nor in space. There are clearly difficulties in using the term ‘social housing’ as an identifying term over time because it has only been in circulation for the last twenty or so years. But an even greater difficulty appears when one begins to attach attributes such as ‘need’ to the term, because it is difficult (perhaps impossible would be more accurate) to find a unifying concept of ‘housing need’ over time. The philanthropic housing trusts termed need as being connected with being ‘in poverty’, in part arising from seventeenth-century definitions of ‘charitable’.

State housing policy from the end of the nineteenth century directed housing subsidy towards the ‘working classes’, but this was removed as an official definition by the Housing Act 1949. Post-Second World War, housing shortages were so widespread that housing ‘need’ was a concern for ‘an extensive spectrum of income and socio-economic groups’ (Harloe, 1993: 2). In the 1980s and 1990s, housing need came to be attached to an increasingly marginalized (Forrest and Murie, 1991) section of the population. This last definition of need – a concept of social housing being for the most vulnerable households – would probably equate to the present day assumptions of most academics and professionals about ‘need’; except that government housing policy is now inverting the meaning of the term. Need has become an issue of the needs of society; the necessity to house for teachers, policemen and other ‘key workers’ in the overpriced and unaffordable south-east.

Social housing is non-profit-making

Harloe’s first criteria, of price being set in accordance with principles that do not take profit as being the primary motive, is one that is echoed by other housing scholars, as a subsequent email from Peter Malpass demonstrates:

My view is that if social housing is to mean anything it has to be based on the following principles: that decisions about provision are determined on the basis of some judgement of need rather than profit; that rents are set on a non-profit basis, and the distribution of dwellings to individual households is on the basis of need rather than ability to pay and first come first served.

As Peter goes on to say, this definition would exclude any consideration of the private rented sector within a definition of social housing; indeed, it also excludes ownership. However, we argue that both the private rented sector and ownership play an important role in social housing policy. Historically, throughout the first six or so decades of the twentieth century, private renting played a critical role in providing for low income households. Octavia Hill’s intervention in housing was not through removing properties from the private sector into a not-for-profit ownership, but was to take over the management of privately rented housing, improving the housing as well as the tenants. And even in the twentieth century, when council housing became a significant sector, we should recognize that some households have been forced to live in the private sector for a number of reasons – discrimination or ineligibility being two particularly prominent causes. Rex and Moore (1967), in their classic study of discrimination and inequality of access to accommodation in Sparkbrook, talked about certain types of housing as providing a ‘twilight zone’. They were not talking about public housing as such, but the more transient private housing – rooms in a lodging-house; some owners who had to rent out rooms to pay off short-term loans; and private tenants. And finally, to add to our argument that private renting is important to social housing, we would point to the actions of local authorities in the 1980s and 1990s. Faced with increasing demands from households in acute housing need, they turned to the private rented sector (PRS) to house homeless households on a temporary basis, through a variety of schemes in which private sector homes were leased to local authorities or housing associations.

However, given the acceptance that private renting is now a profit-making sector, governments have been self-constraining in refusing to exercise regulation of rent levels. They have turned to the housing benefit system to provide subsidy to the households in order to make the housing affordable. We recognize that mixing subsidy and housing benefit risks accusations of mixing provision with consumption. It is argued (see, for example, Malpass, 2004) that housing benefit is simply another form of social security benefit that happens to be made available to pay for housing costs. Just because people in receipt of social security benefits choose to spend their benefit elsewhere does not in itself make those locations ‘social’. Even so, we say that housing benefit supports the social housing sector even if defined in the narrow sense – systems for paying this benefit direct to the landlord have been in place for some time, and are critical for housing association cash flow, since over 70 per cent of their income is derived from this source. Second, and more critically, the availability of a welfare benefit to enable low income, vulnerable households to pay high rents, is precisely what has made it possible for local authorities to use the private sector to meet their statutory duties under homelessness legislation. Indeed, such is the interchangeability of these two sectors that the system could not function without private landlords.

Social housing is regulated housing

Harloe’s final characteristic is potentially the most controversial and challenging – but at the same time links two themes of this book, social housing and regulation. Harloe argues that government exercises control through social housing, and that this level of control, or regulation as we prefer to term it, is more significant than ever before. This characteristic of social housing, we believe, is critical to present discourse and has been so for a very long time.

But it has not just been the state that has seen ‘social housing’ as a mechanism for control. The social reformers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as Edwin Chadwick and Octavia Hill, also saw social housing as a means by which tenants could be ‘improved’, in their morals and their daily practices (Malpass, 1999b), what Hunt (1999) terms ‘moral regulation’. However, it must be recognized that this desire to regulate is not only directed at the occupiers of social housing, but also at the providers. Social housing organizations have always been subject to high levels of control. But the desire to regulate extends beyond the boundaries of local government and housing association provision, to attempts to regulate private landlords who house ‘vulnerable households’. Demands to regulate the PRS have arisen not from those high income households in rented housing, but from households (and those professionals supporting vulnerable households) who become housed in the sector because there is no other choice. One of the mechanisms for regulating the quality of social housing, the decent homes standard, has been extended to take in the most vulnerable private rented tenants after criticism of the ODPM from the Parliamentary Select Committee (2004). Furthermore, as we argue in Chapter 8, property ownership in itself has been regarded as a particularly important method of regulating, or controlling, the owners – indeed, it is this way in which individual ownership is constructed as being social.

What is social about social housing?

The above discussion then begs the question: ‘what is social about social housing’? This poses a rather tricky question, particularly when one opens up the category to include certain parts of the profit-making private sector. Once you’ve asked the question, though, you just can’t let it slip away (or you can’t if you’re us). It should be said in our defence, the question would be just as tricky if one regarded the sector as including simply local authorities and RSLs because recent shifts towards a focus on the ‘social housing product’ means that who provides it is less relevant – thus, there is now the possibility that private sector developers can bid for public money to build housing for low/no income households. In an era when rent collection officers are renamed income maximization officers, in which the public service ethic is being replaced or manipulated by faux private sector values, in which the size of your surplus determines your risk rating (and, therefore, your ability to obtain private money), notions of ‘social’ simply seem misplaced.

However, asking this question is central to the distinctiveness of our analysis of ‘social housing’. As scholars influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, we would be bound to answer this ques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 On Social Housing, Decline, Regulation and Government
• 2 Constructing the Domain
• 3 Needing Need
• 4 On Money
• 5 Regulatory Truths
• 6 The ‘Social’ Contract
• 7 Private Renting
• 8 Owner-Occupation
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index