Birmingham's in a kettle, but Gove's on the pot
Ministerial rebukes for social landlord failings feel a little off when government has done much to deliver England's housing hellscape
THERE'S something about it that feels somewhat unseemly; a senior government minister lambasting a city council over its housing failings.
The old saying about pots and kettles springs to mind; stones and glass houses might be another.
Last week, housing secretary Michael Gove took to Twitter to rebuke Birmingham City Council, saying it had “inexcusably let down its tenants”.
What provoked Gove's ire? A government watchdog, the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH), brought the authority to task, highlighting how services were falling short of expectation.
Birmingham is England's largest provider of council housing, with over 60,000 properties. The regulator says 23,000 of them fall short of the accepted minimum standard for what is considered a safe and decent home. That wasn't the only problem.
Thousands of homes have “serious” issues over the health and safety of residents. That includes 17,000 that are overdue surveys for asbestos; 15,500 late inspections to check electrical safety; and more than 1,000 overdue inspections for fire safety.
As the judgement noted: “The regulator … has concluded that Birmingham [City Council] did not have an effective system in place to allow it to meet its responsibilities both in relation to the quality of its homes, and in relation to statutory health and safety compliance across a range of areas.”
Mostly, these issues affect low-rise housing blocks, according to the watchdog, but these failings still mean thousands of tenants are at “potential risk of serious harm”.
As if that's not enough, good luck raising a complaint. The watchdog said it identified “significant failures” in the council's handling of issues raised by its tenants. Over 1,000 were overdue a response.
This isn't the first time this year that Birmingham has been castigated for its failings. The RSH took up the matter following a report from the Housing Ombudsman in January that deemed the council's complaints handling process “fundamentally flawed”.
“At every point residents are met with increasing challenge to get the landlord to put things right, while the lack of adequate policies, procedures and governance combined with limited learning from these issues means the landlord repeats the same mistakes,” said the housing ombudsman, Richard Blakeway.
“This has often led to a collapse in trust between residents and the landlord. Some residents faced living for years in homes that required repair, making repeated attempts to get the landlord and its contractors to act decisively. In one case the resident made repeated disrepair claims for over 10 years.”
In its response to the ombudsman's report, the council said: “Following the historical cases highlighted in the report, we have progressed in terms of improving the service for tenants and this will continue ...
“As a result of performance issues, we terminated a failing repairs contractor in March 2022. We are working with our repairs contractors to develop process improvements which will help mitigate against future service failure.”
The council added: “[W]e are fully committed to delivering service improvements for the benefit of all Birmingham City Council tenants.”
Poor quality housing and complaints handling ranging from indifference to contemptuous has become a sorry theme in social housing lately. Birmingham isn't the first social landlord – council or housing association – to be brought to task or publicly shamed.
Some of the biggest names in the business, such as London's L&Q, Peabody, Clarion have likewise found their reputations besmirched by their own failings. The sector appears to have become a breeding ground for a rotten culture; one which no amount of public apologies will uproot without serious structural and organisational reform.
As for the regulator's follow-up on Birmingham, it went on to say its investigation “found that the council’s engagement with tenants was ineffective, and that it did not understand or value tenants’ needs”.
“Birmingham City Council has failed thousands of tenants and it needs to act now to put things right,” said the watchdog's director of consumer regulation, Kate Dodsworth.
“It is unacceptable that so many of its tenants are living in non-decent homes, and that thousands of health and safety surveys haven’t been completed. The council also needs to improve the way it handles its tenants’ complaints.”
The regulator's findings and its language can be somewhat dry, but beneath the officialese and the monotone delivery, there are real people enduring misery. The terminology can be somewhat tepid too; “consumer standards”, it's not like tenants can simply demand their money back, or shop elsewhere.
Gove, of course, is right to demand better, but it comes with a certain sense of incredulity at the brass neck: here is a veteran Conservative politician whose party has been in government for some 13 years. In that time, it has done much to create the conditions for this sorry saga.
This is no place to go into the detail of a decade and more of housing policy, but as a sketched summation, we can single out a few points.
Starting back in 2010, the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition slashed government spending intended for the construction of new social housing by 60%. Instead, the money was funnelled into subsidising home ownership.
Over the ensuing years, the government spent billions to fund schemes intended to support struggling home buyers to achieve the dream; propping up demand and rising prices alike.
Further, the Government ramped up support for 'affordable' home ownership, encouraging the construction of shared ownership properties; something the social housing sector took to with gusto. Indeed, it had already been expanding into this market way back in the days of the last Labour government.
Then there was the Affordable Rent programme, which saw billions of pounds of government investment allocated for the construction of intermediate market-priced properties. Typically, these are let at up to 80% of local market rent levels. However, by their nature, they tend to be more expensive – and hence less affordable – than equivalent social properties.
The irony wasn't lost: that these 'affordable' homes were often anything but to those who needed them most.
Perhaps it is understandable that, faced with a 60% cut in funding for new affordable homes, the housing sector would follow the money and climb aboard the Affordable Rent/shared ownership bandwagon, but it doesn't excuse the sector all-but turning its back on social housing during this period.
You'd be forgiven for thinking it was glad to see the back of the tenure – and its tenants – as it embraced an opportunity to commercialise and go up-market.
For sure, social housing's problems predate the connivance of Conservative administrations. The Labour Party did much to set the shape of things to come too.
Stock transfer was a 'loaded gift', promising billions of pounds of investment to refurbish and modernise council homes – but only if tenants voted in favour of transferring ownership of their homes to a new housing association first. So, not council homes, then.
Councils got nothing; they had to fund work out of their own resources, if they had it to spare. Little wonder, so many tenants voted yes. The result was to deplete the nation's stock of local authority housing still further; right-to-buy had already whittled away millions of homes.
The Decent Homes standard, which forms the regulator's measure, is the legacy of this programme. It set the basic standards and expectations a home was required to meet.
Money wasn't the only factor with stock transfer. There was a lot of discontent with the record and reputation of council landlords. They were indifferent, dismissive, bureaucratic; they neglected their properties, had little regard for the tenants. Sound familiar?
Housing associations supposedly offered a bright new beginning. Yet here we are today, full circle. As we contemplate the current round of scandals and the shocking conditions people are made to endure, so much for the promise of yesteryear.
In recent years, government ministers and industry chiefs have shifted the rhetoric: back to talking up the virtues and the values of social housing. Words are cheap, of course; unlike building new homes and uprooting the structural indifference bedded in this past decade and more. Such things take effort, investment, and the political will to make real change.
Social housing providers – whether council or housing association – are certainly not innocent, but it's the Government that's in charge. It sets the terms. Ministers effectively nurtured the conditions for today's grim situation, on the fly, and often no doubt, with little regard for the collateral damage.
All told, today's sorry affair is the result of a partnership made in raw deals and cash-spangled opportunism, for which ordinary folk are paying the price.
Social tenants deserve better; the country deserves better. We need genuine social housing of a decent quality, that is safe, and genuinely affordable for people on low incomes.
For that, we need social landlords committed to the hard graft of delivering; we also need government ministers determined to step back from rhetorical games, and deliver the conditions – without the loaded pre-conditions – that enable this to happen.
That's why Gove's rebuke, however worthy, feels a little off: Government belongs on the naughty step every bit as much as the landlords.
MC