West Berkshire Council’s Resources and Place Scrutiny Committee met on 25 November: you can see the agenda and a recording of the event here. Much of the meeting was taken up with social housing. Although this particularly related to West Berkshire, the general problems it identified would, I suspect, be widely applicable.

• A presentation

There were a range of matters discussed by the attendees, which included a four-person delegation from SNG (better known round here as Sovereign). This included a presentation which hadn’t been shared with members beforehand and so was, as Councillor Richard Somner later pointed out, of limited use. The presentation was quite slick  but it was more of a lecture than a conversation. All in all, scrutiny was a bit hard to accomplish: probably exactly SNG’s intention.

Indeed, for a time it seemed like a meeting of a mutual admiration society. I was wondering if SNG and WBC would remain loved-up throughout the meeting, exchanging various bits of praise for the other and providing encouraging nods when one side or the other made points.

It didn’t last, however. SNG made a comment about the length of time it had taken for WBC to get an application sorted for Paradise Way in Chapel Row. Portfolio-holder Councillor Denise Gaines hit back, accusing SNG of dragging its heels over matters at Windmill Court in Mortimer. (This would have been something SNG would have been particularly keen to avoid discussing, the redevelopment there kicking off some years back with a particularly inept PR blunder that left the Parish Council having to help sort out the mess).

Further accusations could doubtless have been traded but the Chair stepped in and moved everyone along.

• Ambitions

Perhaps the main lesson one can take from this is that although one of the SNG representatives said that “our ambitions are the same as yours”, this isn’t always true. Yes, they both (SNG and WBC) want social homes and for these to be well maintained and well run. However, a housing association will only build or maintain or upgrade them where it’s economically viable.

This tends towards two results: a decent number – the larger the better – of new homes being needed to make a development profitable; and properties reaching the end of their life tending to be sold, so depleting the local social-housing stock. (The proceeds will be re-invested but not necessarily in that community, or even in that district – SNG now has about a thousand fewer homes in West Berkshire than it did when it was set up here in the late 1980s.)

Both of these fairly reasonable ambitions are, however, in many ways the polar opposite of what the local councils, at all levels, want: which is homes spread throughout the district, not concentrated in a few large sites; and for the existing housing stock levels to be maintained. As most councils now no longer build or manage homes, however, they have to rely on two main sources of supply: the private sector and housing associations.

The former generally needs only to provide social housing (often after a fight) in developments of ten or more properties. It now seems clear that the latter also requires this kind of volume at least to build any at all. For both, building costs have risen steeply recently, thanks to the infernal triangle of Covid, Putin and Truss. The compliance costs of insulation and other measures are now, in many ways rightly, higher than ever. If there was a time when small developments of a few homes could add up, it’s long gone.

• A good question

This point was made as a result of a very good question posed by Councillor Laura Coyle. If a home was found to be in poor condition (and it seemed from the presentation that a fair number of SNG’s were), could the land not be used to build something else? This was, after all, often the scarcest and most valuable part of the asset. Even with this advantage, however, it seemed SNG felt that the viability probably wouldn’t be there.

The result, as Councillor Richard Somner and others suggested (at least I think they did, but the subject was rightly treated with delicacy) is that this is likely to lead to large clusters of social housing plonked down in places which suit housing associations and/or private developers, and perhaps the planners, but no one else. This leads to two problems at least.

The first is that creating these kinds of communities risks what might be termed a lack of integration and a possible perpetuating of deprivation. The other is that, by concentrating social-housing developments in a smaller number of places, people are forced to move away from their home areas when they need them. In a rural district with poor or non-existent public transport, this can seem like an exile.

• A medieval digression

The feudal system in the Middle Ages – bear with me for a moment – was ultimately about the granting of land in return for military service (although it’s often wrongly used to describe the general tenant-master relationship). The feudal lords realised – over about thirty years in England after 1066 – that this arrangement was inflexible and inefficient. Feudal levies, the exchange of land for military service, were sometimes of poor quality and grudgingly provided only when and where custom defined.

Better was to commute the levies into cash payments which could be advantageously negotiated, and which the king, duke or whoever could spend on, for example, mercenaries who could focus on just the problem that needed addressing.

• A modern solution

This was, though without the feudalism, what the discussion here was edging towards. Rather than always insisting on a quota of social homes in the developments that get approved – which private companies are reluctant to build, which in some cases housing associations are reluctant to take on and may be distant from the communities they’re meant to serve – might it not be better to move more towards getting cash (as much as possible up front) to be used to build social-rent homes anywhere the local council decides they’re needed?

(This already happens but, in light of these diminishing economies of scale, should perhaps happen more. One would assume that there will be enough protections to ring-fence the funds in the council coffers for the intended purposes. Of course, as mentioned elsewhere, there’s always the risk the government will permit that these funds be pillaged to pay for day-to-day expenses.)

The problem, as mentioned above, is that most local councils don’t build homes any more. The obvious solution is therefore to use this money to subsidise housing associations or private developers to build a specified number of homes of a particular size for social rent in agreed locations that meet the council’s policies.

It may therefore be that a developer writes out a cheque for commuting this obligation one day and the next is receiving another one from the authority to build a specific number of homes which a housing association has already agreed to take on. Or, a housing association receives a subsidy to build two homes on a vacant plot in a village which has become available.

One advantage of such deals is that they’d be legal agreements outside the planning system, which is weighted in favour of developers. Also, the larger commercial developments wouldn’t get slowed down by disputes over the social-housing provision and the results would give everyone much more of what they want than currently.

(There’s also the rather moral question of spending this money now for the purposes for which it was intended. The government has legitimised a number of accounting sleight of hands, such as off-balance-sheet SEND costs and transformation expenditure from asset sales, to keep councils afloat. What’s to say that there won’t be an attempted raid on developer contribution funds, enabling these to be used for day-to-day expenditure?)

Were I running matters, I’d also stipulate that five per cent of all sums raised from such committed payments be ring-fenced for promoting and supporting rural exception sites and land trusts, both of which in different ways allow local communities to address their own identified housing needs.

So logical does this seem – as does so much that I write, just after I’ve written it – that I fear it must contain a terrible internal flaw. At the moment, I can’t see it. What I can see, however, is that the current system is leading to a divergence of interests and results, and an appalling attrition of time and resources. This or something like it might produce a better result. Any comments?

Brian Quinn
brian@pennypost.org.uk