Category: Housing

  • Housing Policy 1

    Housing: approaches to policy. Part 1.

    by Trevor Locke

    Introduction – policy, practice and history

    I begin by going back to the core concepts that lie at the roots of public policy. I go on to consider housing and the materials that have been used to construct homes because history is a narrative of change. If we can see where housing might go in the future, we might get a firmer grasp of the kind of policies we need to adopt today. As most historians would say, the future is seen through the lens of the past. If we can see how the construction of homes and housing has changed over history, we might be better able to see where trends are likely to go in the future. A number of new policy issues are discussed, including the basis of occupation such as house ownership and renting.

    I begin however with a discussion of policy, in the field of housing, one that sets the agenda for many of the issues that follow. The term ‘housing’ is frequently used but, in this context, it means ‘homes’ – all types of domestic accommodation. Most people, in this country, live in houses but that gives only a partial picture of what people regard as being their homes; a substantial segment of the British population now live in flats and apartments, a trend that is steadily growing. Having a home is a fundamental element of human existence but whilst a house might provide shelter, a place for cooking and a place to sleep, a home is an emotional anchor that binds people to the place that serves as their base and the bedrock of their identity. I start by looking at three core concepts: policy, practice and planning. I frequently use these concepts but they deserve some explanation. I then consider history as it relates to these three concepts.

    Policy

    In this book, I refer many times to ‘policy’ and this is a subject on which I have written extensively in the past. It is a term that, in my view, requires some explanation. In the 1990s I wrote a book that, on the face of it, was about planning: New Approaches To Crime in the 1990s [Locke, 1990]. In it, I argued that policy includes a statement about the goals of an organisation or system. A policy also states the definitions, boundaries, principles and requirements that are used to set up and operate a system [ibid p 80]. In chapter 4 ‘A Matter of Policy‘, I set out what I thought to be a conceptual framework for policy. Bear in mind, that, I was addressing the public sector and the organisations within it, that response to crime and dispense justice at the national and local levels.

    Much the same conceptual framework is also true for private sector bodies such as corporations and businesses. Organisations can have policies, I argued, but so too can systems. The criminal justice system, for example, can be (and should be) driven by policies – those of the organisations that run the system, including the courts, the police, local authorities and departments of the national government (such as The Home Office, Ministry of Justice and so on). The same model applies equally to housing, where the legislation and guidelines laid down by the national government create a system within which local organisations (the operators, such as local authority housing departments, housing associations and private landlords) implement the policy.

    Policy is formulated and then implemented. When a policy is formulated, those engaged in the task can undertake policy analysis and evaluation. The task of policy analysis sets out to clarify the underlying values implied in a proposed policy, to articulate and state the goals of the policy and might also look at existing policies, examining the degree to which these have been successful. This is the evaluative side of the process. In the case of housing, the national government sets out a policy framework within which its departments and local operators make decisions, take action, and formulate their own policies. One of the goals of the policy is to provide a framework within which decision-making can be consistent and fair. Where housing is concerned, we can see policymakers being influenced and lobbied by a variety of organisations, as well as the usual dialectic that takes place between elected members and their permanent administrations (civil servants and the officers of local authorities.)

    It is because the process of policy formulation is complex that it becomes necessary to grasp how it actually works, how it should work and how best to make it effective. In the 1990s, I had a mission to advocate policy science at both national and local levels within my professional domain (criminal justice) and, today, I feel the need to re-visit that discipline where housing and its related areas of policy are concerned. Twenty-five years ago I was embedded in my professional area of work at both national and local levels and had access to policymakers from the top-down, at all levels. Today, I have to view housing policy from the outside, observing what is happening, without being part of it. This affords me a degree of freedom I did not always have in my previous career. I acknowledge that I have no inside understanding of how housing policy is being made, who is making it and how they are making and that is, I freely concede, a weakness. I have, however, examined some of the products of the policy process – the statements of policy that have been published and thus offer insights into how housing policy is being made.

    Has the world of public policy changed that much in 25 years? The people involved in it have certainly changed, as each set of elections has varied the names and faces in the various corridors of power, but I believe that the processes through which they make and implement policy have not changed that much. Hence, my argument is that policymaking, formulation and implementation need to be understood as much now as it was then. When I see a variety of policy failures, particularly in the field of housing, I am convinced that these are due to the lack of a discipline that could have avoided these pitfalls and if only policymakers had done the job better then such calamities could have been avoided. Housing policy is frequently of poor quality, both in its formulation and implementation. This is often because it is riddled with unintended consequences that reflect shortcomings in the way it was made. The purpose of the disciplined approach to policy formulation is to follow through to the outcomes, to forward plan implementation and to arrive at a strategy that is likely to work in the round. Hence, the argument that follows the need for joined-up policies.

    Practice

    Once housing policy has been formulated it then needs to be implemented. There is no point in making policies that cannot be implemented. Policies that fail to be implemented, according to the goals and principles contained within them, are not good policies. Policy leads to practice and practice is about planning. The practice of implementing housing policies is largely about planning: how they are to be put into effect, who will do what, where, when and how. This forms a cycle in which policymakers look at the way they intended their work to be implemented and, if necessary, go back to the policy and revise it because they see difficulties in how it will be put into practice. This is a problem that I frequently see in current housing practice. Policy made at the national level results in unintended consequences and this is due, I argue, to failures on the part of policymakers to use the cycle of formulation and implementation that is required to make effective policy [King and Crewe, 2014]. Taking a suck-it-and-see approach wastes time and resources and causes harm to people in the process. In good practice, the consequences of policy have to be accurately predicted before policies are made. Making policy and then seeing if it will work is bad practice; going back to the policy later to correct mistakes is not good government. What I do not see, in the current approach to housing policy, is a sense of what constitutes approaches to good practice in policymaking.

    There are some exceptions, where specific policies are concerned: the housing charity Shelter, for example, makes available a set of good practice guides on various aspects of its work for housing practitioners [Shelter, 2015]. The Department of Work and Pensions provides local authorities with information and guidance on the Local Housing Allowance Scheme [DWP, 2013]. The Centre for Housing and Support provides its members with a good practice service, covering a range of topics within its remit [Centre for Housing and Support, 2015]. The Chartered Institute of Housing provides its members with Practice Online ‘an online resource that provides comprehensive advice, guidance and good practice examples on a whole range of housing topics in a single place. Updated daily by a team of CIH specialists and expert legal advisors, this is the sector’s one-stop resource for ‘how to do housing’ [Chartered Institute of Housing, 2015]. These and many other examples were not difficult to find. The Government website also provides a selection of guides about housing-related policies, in particular, housing benefits. These are resources aimed at local practitioners. There needs to be more advocacy of good practice in working with policy; many policy experts have defined best-practice in the processes of formulating and implementing policy but the extent to which these are followed varies greatly both in Whitehall and in local authority areas.

    In my work in the 1990s, I used the term strategy to bring together into one conceptual framework the three core elements of the policy process: formulation, implementation and planning. In those days I was heavily influenced by what was happening in the business and commercial side of strategic planning. I found a framework of thinking and research that wrapped together these three elements and joined up the processes of stating goals, specifying planning implementation and guiding practice. It was that strategic approach, to dealing with the problem of crime, that gave me the vision of how a new approach could be taken to responding to crime in the 1990s [Locke, 1990] and I was vindicated, I think, by the way, that government policies on crime and justice panned out in the ten years that followed. What I am now looking for is a strategic approach to housing policy and I do not think that this is outdated, not by any means. It is reassuring that a large number of English local authorities have issued documents using the words strategic or strategy in the titles of their policy publications. Another book would be needed to see if such documents, in fact, make practical sense within this context.

    Planning

    The third arm of this strategic approach is planning. Once policies have been stated, they then need to be implemented and this is the process through which policymakers organise who is to do what, where, when and how. To implement a housing strategy, at the local level, a variety of agencies must work together: local authority departments concerned with housing, social services, residential care, The NHS, housing associations, the private sector and third-sector agencies that identify local needs. So too, at the national level, a variety of departments need to collaborate together and with non-government organisations. There might be lead agencies but effective implementation requires a range of bodies to co-ordinate their work and to collaborate around local plans and practices.

    A lot of information flows within this system, much of it being statistical but also soft data about the impact and experience that practice is having on the lives of people at the receiving end. In nearly all areas of planning, information is the lifeblood of practice. In this regard, both crime and justice systems and housing systems share a common model of operation in which information plays an important role. A recent television programme showed how data is now being used to predict where crime will happen in the future [BBC, 2013, Berg, 2014] Watching this, I realised that what they were doing in Los Angeles, was simply an update on the work I did in the 1990s in Leicester, the North East region and many other local areas. Today, agencies have much more sophisticated modern resources than were available to us in the 80s and 90s. Back then, we formulated a procedure for creating local area profiles of crime, based on gathering and analysing data about where crimes had been committed in small local areas. The work gave a picture of what was happening and we used it to explain how the data could be applied to improving inter-agency collaboration and planning [Evans, 1992]. Developments in real-time analysis of large data sets allowed the LAPD to predict where crimes are most likely to be committed at a micro-level. I can see that the same model could be used to predict trends in housing demand and to indicate to planners where housing would most be needed in the short-term and medium-term future. It would not necessarily need to operate in real-time, but large-scale data sets could be analysed to point to specific areas where accommodation and housing would be needed at the local level. Such an approach would profile local area housing patterns, not dissimilar to those that we developed in the field of policing and justice management.

    In 2010, a report talked about the creation and use of modelling in housing, in which economic and social factors were brought together and focused, to some extent, on what it called ‘tenure choice.’ The resulting model allowed certain elements to be predicted. This was useful, particularly in areas of high mobility and change. This work led to the formulation of a predictive model that could be used at the regional level. The report explains how the model can be used to predict trends in housing need [Department for Communities and Local Government, 2010]. The government website’s National Planning Policy Framework provides ‘planning practice guidance’, including to do ‘housing and economic development need assessment.’ This includes a section on the methodology of assessing housing needs [Government website, 2014]. The section begins by stating: ‘Establishing the future need for housing is not an exact science.’ Not a good start because, in my view at least, the opposite is true. The work on predictive modelling shows how a very exacting application of science (and mathematics) can provide toolkits for working with data to reveal current trends and predict where those trends might go in the future. This kind of work is very exact, employing very precise mathematical algorithms. The same source goes on to state that ‘This guidance supports local planning authorities in objectively assessing and evidencing development needs for housing (both market and affordable), and economic development (which includes main town centre uses).

    The assessment of housing and economic development needs includes the Strategic Housing Market Assessment requirement as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework. It goes on to explain that the objective of the exercise is to ‘identify the future quantity of housing needed, including a breakdown by type, tenure and size’ (among other things.) The application of large data sets to mathematical models can appear very fanciful to housing planners faced with severe shortages of accommodation in a local area. This is all well and good but if housing units cannot be created to meet trends in housing need, is there much point in doing all this? Knowing what the trends in housing needs are now or are likely to be in the future is of little use if local authorities cannot manage the supply side of the equation. This is where we are taken back to the issue of the housing crisis. Solving housing policy, planning issues and problems requires more than just information. Moving on to strategy, I consider some of the elements that need to be brought into play to turn policy into plans and practice.

    I looked at some examples of local housing strategies. In Sheffield, there is a housing strategy covering the period 2013 to 2023. The council prefaces this with the statement ‘Our housing strategies help us plan and deliver housing for different groups of people across Sheffield. We update our strategies regularly to make sure we deliver a good choice of high-quality housing, supported by excellent services. Our objective is for housing to be at the heart of high-quality, safe and distinctive places that will enable Sheffield’s communities to thrive’ [Sheffield City Council, 2015]. In its policy document, it says: ‘More information about how Sheffield is changing and the challenges for the city going forward can be found in the State of Sheffield report. A detailed assessment of Sheffield’s housing issues and the need to invest in new and existing homes and housing services are set out in the Strategic Housing Review Report 2012. Both reports contributed to the evidence base for this Housing Strategy’ [ibid]. This illustrates the need for information to lie at the heart of policy. There is evidence, in the report, that the city council will work with other providers to ensure that its policy objectives are achieved. Evidence for a collaborative approach is seen where the report states: ‘Therefore alongside the activity that we are directly responsible for and the work done with or by other organisations, we intend to continue to talk to Government and others about how to reduce the barriers to delivery and create the right powers and environment which will help us achieve our long term goals’ and later ‘It is, therefore, important to recognise that whilst some of this activity is expected to be housing-led, other activities and improvements are expected to be delivered by the appropriate part of the Council, by partner organisations and by helping local traders and businesses to work together to help themselves. In these circumstances, the main role of the Council will be to coordinate the delivery and broker the engagement of all relevant parties’ [ibid, chapter 2]. Allied to Sheffield’s strategy statement there is an action plan that sets out in detail how the policy is to be implemented. In the introduction to the action plan, it says ‘This is the first of three action plans that will be developed over the life of the Housing Strategy and covers the period 2013-16. The Housing Strategy Action Plan 2013 to 2016 describes what we will do over the next three years to help us achieve the housing ambitions contained within the 10-year Housing Strategy. The plan contains actions that are priority programmes and initiatives for the Council and our partners and reflects the current national and local policy situation and financial challenges that Sheffield is facing’ [Sheffield, 2014]. This document indicates that the Council needs to work with partners and the community to put its plans into effect, illustrating what I call ‘a collaborative approach.’

    In Cardiff, there is a clear commitment to collaboration. In its strategy report, Cardiff City Council states: ‘In early 2010, the statutory partnerships in Cardiff agreed to undertake work to integrate their existing plans to develop a single Integrated Partnership Strategy – ‘What Matters’. This new approach, to bringing together a revised Community Strategy; Health, Social Care and well-being strategy; Children and Young People’s Plan; and a Community Safety Strategic Assessment, is indicative of the collaborative work being developed to deliver seamless public services in Cardiff’ [Cardiff City Council, 2015]. What this particularly illustrates is the integration of a number of related policies being implemented through a collaborative approach that draws together a range of agencies. The inter-agency collaboration was something I worked on extensively, through the work I did for the consultancy group ‘Quality Partnerships’ which provided seminars and undertook project work at the local level.

    These two examples serve to show that the concepts used in work on planning policy implementation, in the 1990s, are still alive today. It would be both interesting and rewarding to examine a range of other examples of local housing strategies but I will forego that now in the interests of brevity. I have to say that the above represents desk-based research; I never went to these areas or talked to people working in them, so I cannot vouch for the credibility of these examples as far as practical impact is concerned.

    Having set out my agenda for policy, practice and planning I want to move on to looking at history. The original set of House Bricks articles was inspired by my work on the history of the built environment in the context of my local area of Leicester [Arts in Leicester magazine, 2015].

    History

    I have argued already that the best way to understand any community – in history as well as in contemporary times – is to look at how people live, cook and entertain themselves [Locke, 2015]. In the historical context, our concern is with how people arranged their lives, the kind of homes they built and the materials they used to construct their houses – a key part of any historical account that tries to understand and depict a community. Water supply, drainage, sanitation, cooking, waste disposal and entertainment are also fundamental elements of understanding communities, cities, towns and villages. It is through the lens of history that we may see the future. If we understand the past, we might be better able to predict the future. People live in homes and these are the venues for many of the activities that constitute their daily lives – where they consume food, engage in cleaning, and entertainment, bring up children and perform a wide range of activities that form part of their daily lives. What housing policy attempts to do is to scale up individual homes to the level of neighbourhoods, communities and regions. As we saw in the above section on planning, the policy is being rolled out over periods. Having a historical perspective on housing might not be necessary to present-day practice, but it does confer insights that contribute to the visions being formulated for the future.

    References

    Part 2

    Contents of the complete work

  • New approaches to housing

    Today I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book

    Housing: Approaches to Housing Policy.

    11th March 2016

    My new book, about housing policy in the United Kingdom, will be published on this blog site in instalments.

    The work grew from a four-part article series published in Arts in Leicester magazine. The series, House Bricks, looked at the history of house building. It began in April 2015.

    I developed the book from these articles, adding lots of new material and discussing the subject of housing policy more widely.

    The first instalment of the new book commences with Part 1: Policy, practice and History.

    See the contents of this book.

  • House Bricks Part 3

    20th April 2015

    House bricks. Part 3.

    past, present and future

    by Trevor Locke

    Providing better housing stock.

    In Part 2, I looked at the need for join-up policies to improve the supply of housing.

    In part 3, I move on to consider the factors that we can see playing a part in approaches to the supply and provision of housing.
    Making better use of existing housing stock

    Making better use of existing housing stock

    More and more buildings are being converted into apartments. One solution to the housing crisis is to convert properties into affordable accommodation. In the city, this has met with a degree of success.  There has been a big increase in the supply of apartments created from buildings that have fallen into disuse. In Leicester, the city centre (the area known as the Cultural Quarter) has many old factories that have been converted into flats. This has renewed an urban area that had fallen into neglect and disrepair. It is a pattern that has been repeated across many cities in the Midlands. These conversions were not new-builds; they involved re-generating properties that had become empty and disused, bringing them back to life to provide homes for people who like to live in the inner city. Not the best homes for families, but more appropriate for young urban professionals, childless couples and single people. That creates an alternative supply to students and young professionals occupying properties that would be more suitable for families.

    In the rural areas, the supply of affordable homes poses problems. The typical ‘barn conversion’  is well outside of what young working people can afford.  These are conversions for the wealthier sections of society or for people who can afford second homes.  I would argue that change of use conversions could provide affordable housing in the countryside, more quickly and less expensively, to meet the growing demand for homes for working people.

    Our housing stock is not well-managed. Much of it lies empty, derelict or neglected. Local authorities have not been keen enough to identify empty houses and bring them back into use. The land-owning shires are oriented to the supply of land for new-build. Yet, a lot of rural properties are either disused, poorly used or are suitable for conversion but left empty. Somehow, the landed gentry, many of whom are members of rural councils, fail to see this. If this country had a stronger lobby for social housing, it is likely that we would also see a better management of our existing housing stock,  instead of an obsession with new-build.

    Those who loose out the most, due to the current shortfall in housing supply, are young people. Nearly half of all young people now rent accommodation, both flats and houses. In 2011 the Government published a statement on Providing Affordable Homes for Rent. The government claims that it is improving the quality and quantity of properties for rent, both in the private and social sectors. Measures being taken include that of funding local authorities to refurbish their housing stock and encouraging more investment in the private rented sector through schemes like new loan guarantees and the Build to Rent Fund, among others. These actions stemmed from the publication, in November 2011, of the policy paper Laying the Foundations: A Housing Strategy for England. It reflected the Government’s desire to get the housing market moving again and they admitted that they would not achieve this by attempting to control the housing market from Whitehall. There was a realisation that it is only at the local level that housing management can properly be carried out. If the goal is to supply a balanced mix of housing options, then only local bodies can achieve that. As some have suggested there needs to be a radical overhaul of housing associations. Private sector supply is also needed but policies need to balance the rights and security of tenants with the incentives of property owners to continue to invest in the market or to enter it. If the balance swings too far in the direction of tenants, the supply could be jeopardized. Likewise, giving too much power to property owners leads to insecurity and poor standards for tenants.

    Make better use of land.

    In our small islands, land is in short supply. There are many conflicting demands on the use of land.  Some of it has to be used for farming, some for sport and leisure and some forms part of our national heritage and natural assets and as such needs to be protected from any kind of development. Planners created the green belts as a way of ensuring that urban areas did not become conflated into concrete jungles. There is pressure now to relax local planning in the interests of housing development and green belts are under attack. In my view, this is a grave error.

    More should be done to rescue and recycle brownfield sites. There is enough land to meet the need for housing and business development, even in our finite little group of islands. There is enough land if we take an objective approach to its usage. The problem is that brownfield sites cost more to develop than do greenfield ones. To put it another way – there is less profit from the development of brownfield sites. Really, it is not that simple. Some developers have had the foresight, imagination and resilience to both develop brownfield land and make a reasonable profit from doing so. I am not referring here to heavily contaminated land or land that is riddled with mining subsidence. This kind of land is where a change of use can be effected without inordinate costs of cleaning or repairing it.

    One of the big challenges to housing management over the next ten to twenty years will be the supply of land that is suitable for housing. The floods of 2013/14 highlighted the lack of planning and foresight of developers who have built on flood plains. English housebuilders have not been good at water management when developing new-build sites on land previously used for farming. As sea levels rise, many coastal areas will become uninhabitable and people will be forced to move inland to homes on higher ground. This movement of house owners to areas not prone to flooding or coastal erosion needs to be planned for now – not when it becomes a national crisis.

    Dealing with the shortfall in housing supply.

    It is good to see builders trying something new. The British building industry has never been good at innovation;  bound to traditional ways of doing things, slow to change and reticent to innovate, British builders are not known around Europe for their leading-edge practices. In Germany, Austria and other countries builders are more inclined to try new ways of tackling housing supply. OK, there are some notable exceptions to this in Britain.

    Custom build, for example,  represents one way of thinking outside of the box. Companies that have tackled new ways of designing and building housing are breaking the mould by following projects that have been a success on the continent. Governments have not however had any road to Damascus moments when formulating their housing policies. National and local governments must become more aware of the possibilities offered by new ways of doing things in the building sector.

    In Manchester, the Great Places Housing Group is having a go at custom build. The Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Bill 2014-15 received royal assent as the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act. The government launched a loan fund (in June 2014) to enable the building of self-build homes. The encouragement of self-build is now finding a place in the policies of political parties.

    With an ageing population, demand for smaller accommodation types is changing as older people give up their large family homes and seek smaller units more suitable to two-person homes. The housing market now has to cater for the growing demand for retirement homes. Housing needs to be suitable for older people: not necessarily those who need care but retirement homes for active people who can look after themselves. Many older people move away from the large houses they had after their children have grown up, seeking small accommodation.  The problem with this is that more and more adult children are being forced to stay at home with their parents for longer periods. There is now more demand for housing extended families, where the younger generation must provide a home for their parents, grandparents and other family members. This is often ignored by housebuilders who are still focused on the nuclear family.  Changes in the birth rate have led to a decrease in household size. The ONS statistics of 2013 found that ‘The fastest growing household type was households containing two or more families, increasing by 39% from 206,000 households in 2003 to 286,000 households in 2013. However multi-family households still only represent 1% of all households.’ There will likely be an increasing trend in people living alone. All of this enhances the need to create a flexible housing supply based on needs and to provide options to people who have a variety of housing requirements.

    References

    Office of National Statistics, A century of home ownership and renting in England.

    Guy Standing (May 24, 2011). “The Precariat – The new dangerous class”. Policy Network.

    Planning Advisory Service. Objectively assessed need and housing targets – technical advice note, 2014.

    This is money (website) Blocked by the banks? How to get a mortgage if you are a small business owner or self-employed, October 2014

    The Brick Industry Association, Why choose Brick, USA

    Tudor Brickwork by Gerard Lynch.

    Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Bill 2014-15.

    Home building and renovating. The self-build and custom house building bill.

    See also:

    Introductory article to the House Bricks series

    House bricks part 1

    House bricks part 2

    House bricks part 3

    House bricks part 4