Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-78)
17 SEPTEMBER 2003
TRACEY HEYES,
SAJJAD HUSSAIN
AND HUGH
BROADBENT
Q60 Chairman: What does that mean
in practice, that you are taking in some places terraced houses
and knocking two of them into one larger terraced house?
Ms Heyes: Yes.
Q61 Chairman: How many are you doing
that with?
Ms Heyes: That is very small scale,
I would say a handful. We are much more now demolishing terraced
properties and replacing them with new build properties which
are predominantly rented at the moment but we have just done a
piece of research within Oldham called "Acquire" that
looks at the aspirations of the community in terms of owner-occupation
and rented accommodation and looks also at the market for that
in the sense that there is no evidence from estate agents that
there is a significant market for large family housing for sale
but there is this hidden market and through this research this
is what has started to come out and we have started to move in
that direction.
Q62 Chairman: You have done the research.
How soon are you going to see the buildings on the streets?
Ms Heyes: We are working with
English Partnerships at the moment to look at the gap funding
issue that will hopefully enable|
Q63 Chairman: You are telling me
how you are getting over the obstacles, but when are you going
to reach the end of the race?
Ms Heyes: Obviously, that is outside
our control when the funding mechanisms are not there.
Q64 Chairman: What is the date that
you hope to have some of this done by?
Ms Heyes: If everybody were to
co-operate in the way we would wish them to co-operate, then 18
months down the line.
Q65 Chairman: So we can at some future
time be asking English Partnerships why they have failed to co-operate
because they have not reached your target? Eighteen months: is
that it?
Ms Heyes: That would be an optimistic
aim but if we are going to move quickly, which is how we would
like to see it moving, yes, 18 months.
Q66 Chairman: You referred to the
choice-based lettings. Do you not think that actually makes things
worse because people look at an area and they look at their prejudices
about an area rather than even going and visiting it when they
are filling in the choice-based forms?
Mr Broadbent: The reality is that
people do that in Oldham now. There is choice in the social rented
housing market in Oldham and has been for a number of years, which
is one of the factors that is affecting many north western towns.
With our choice-based letting policy we have recognised that one
of the issues that might impact particularly unfairly on the minority
communities is their ability, through language typically, of going
through the choice-based process and making bids, so we have excluded
all our four-bedroom homes, however few they are, from the choice-based
lettings process. What we also still do is that only a third of
our properties are offered up under the choice-based arrangements.
One in three of all vacancies goes into that pot and that is to
protect those people who still have high needs and who qualify
through our points system, and not surprisingly, as I mentioned,
because we have got lots of large families on our waiting list
they accrue large numbers of points. They will still have the
opportunity of accessing properties. The reality is that there
is negative choice. People have an ability to say, "I will
not choose to live in those locations" for whatever reason,
and again our facts bear that out. Fifty-six per cent of all our
lets to people in the minority communities go to only two of our
15 housing management areas.
Q67 Chairman: Is the Audit Commission
happy with your restrictions of choice-based lettings?
Mr Broadbent: Yes. We were inspected
by the Audit Commission in April of this year as part of our arm's
length organisation inspection and we received a good two-star
rating in terms of the services we provide.
Q68 Chairman: You refer in the evidence
that you submitted to us to the problems of "white flight".
Are you managing to reduce that?
Mr Broadbent: Again, the reality
is that I do not think we are. The issue about choice is a very
powerful factor and it works both ways in terms of communities
coming to a view that they no longer feel that they can live in
a community because it is perceived as becoming more Asian than
they would wish and because that choice is exercisable, in other
words, people can choose to transfer or to buy another property,
the reality is that people can and in some cases do that. The
counter to that argument, certainly on some of our estates where
those properties that are left vacant are smaller flats, often
in some cases let to the elderly because many of them are sheltered,
is finding new people to go into those properties. We have no
tenants from the minority communities in our sheltered schemes.
The reality is that those schemes become difficult to let to the
community that we previously let them to, which potentially gives
the opportunity to convert them to larger family accommodation,
and indeed we have done some of that, but there are longer term
risks about impacting on community cohesion further down the road.
Mr Hussain: The issue about "white
flight" is a big issue and it has probably not been appreciated
to that extent. We do have examples of Asians moving out and white
people moving out even further so that ghetto if you like becomes
a much bigger problem. That is something that we need to address.
How we address it we are not quite sure because of people's choice
and other factors coming into it, but I think it is a bigger problem.
Q69 Chairman: Is it really just a
movement away from some of the less attractive areas in the town,
full stop, or is it a race issue?
Mr Hussain: It is a bit of both,
I would say.
Q70 Chris Mole: You may have heard
us ask the NHS people about the use of contractors. Housing uses
quite a lot of contractors. To what extent do the contractors
you use reflect the diversity of local communities?
Ms Heyes: I would say traditionally
probably very little. We are working with our contractors on their
employment and training initiatives but it is very slow progress.
Q71 Chairman: So when you let a contract
do you require the contractor to indicate how many apprentices
they are employing?
Ms Heyes: Yes, how many people
they are going to employ through local training initiatives. The
problem has been in attracting youngsters, particularly from minority
communities, into that type of employment and those youngsters
seeing that type of employment as being attractive. There is considerable
work that we continue to do on that in supporting them into that
type of employment.
Q72 Chairman: When you say "work
that we continue to do", what are you doing?
Ms Heyes: We have established
an intermediate labour market training scheme to support youngsters
into bricklaying and finishing trades, and particularly aiming,
through working for job centres, to attract youngsters from the
ethnic minority communities into that type of work and supporting
them into the relevant training courses at the college, but that
is not an easy task and the success rate is very slow. We take
a lot of trainees through that programme but the number coming
from the ethnic minority communities is very small.
Mr Hussain: We have had examples
where we have written this into the contract. At one of our development
schemes in Glodwick we insisted that the contractor had to take
on four apprentices for that contract period and then move them
on to another scheme, and that was quite successful initially
but then there was lack of interest. The initial apprentices were
all from Glodwick but then we had two from Glodwick and two from
outside that area, still from the black and ethnic minority communities.
There are other issues on our day-to-day services. We do have
one or two BME contractors but competing against the mainstream
competition is difficult because they do not quite have the grasp
of the bureaucracy that is involved in getting on to the tender
list, the paperwork that is involved, and obviously we have legal
and other criteria to satisfy, so that is a hurdle in many respects.
It is not just getting them on to the list; it is nurturing them
through that process as well.
Q73 Chairman: Do housing corporation
regulations make things particularly difficult?
Mr Hussain: Yes, I would say so.
Mr Broadbent: We have just entered
into three new partnerships with major contractors to deliver
our £72 million of investment to make our homes up to a decent
standard by 2007. Indeed, we have been a demonstration project
here in Oldham for re-thinking construction and our partners have
shown through their work on diversity that they are taking on
board trainees, typically (as well as we can) trainees from the
minority communities. We ourselves employ 180 staff doing day-to-day
repairs and we have just had an intake of eight trainees and we
managed to get one of those trainees from the minority communities.
It is fair to say, and I am sure you have heard it before, that
the construction industry is not an industry that is particularly
attractive to youngsters in the minority communities. Like many,
they prefer to do other trades and the council through the SRB
have had running for some time a construction training project
targeting Glodwick with some success but again the scale is tiny.
Q74 Chris Mole: We have heard a lot
of complaints that people cannot get plumbers and so on in some
BME community areas. Is that something you are aware of?
Mr Broadbent: One of the things
that we have been doing recently has been an enormous survey of
our tenants, including satisfaction surveys on repairs. We have
got a few hundred tenants from the minority communities and one
of the things we attempted to do was maximise the information
from those tenants. Even with going door-knocking to try and get
those surveys completed with staff who spoke the language we still
achieved only 30 per cent as against 49 per cent of the tenants
as a whole. What that told us was some of the basic problems of
communication of people being able to explain what the repair
problem was, and indeed from our point of view some of the increasing
demands on sensitivity around our own staff, particularly where
they are dealing with communities where women might be on their
own, and there is clearly more to do there.
Q75 Chris Mole: Can you say something
about what effect the Race Relations Act 2000 is having on your
organisation, particularly with regard to that second element,
beyond promoting race equality into promoting good relations between
people of different communities?
Mr Broadbent: From our point of
view it has been a wake-up call. We have attempted to mainstream
our work on community cohesion. We have set ourselves three straightforward
targets around employment, a representative board and getting
more tenants in minority communities. We are rapidly developing
a fresh race equality scheme and we have appointed a senior manager
who works directly to me through an internal working group to
drive and mainstream all our efforts to improve community cohesion
and social cohesion within our organisation and amongst our customers.
Mr Hussain: From our point of
view it is just carry on with what you are doing and try to improve
what you are doing basically. We have always had that agenda of
community cohesion and co-existence between communities, and the
legislation really backs up our cause in that respect.
Ms Heyes: We have aimed in the
last few years to make it an integral part of every officer's
work so that the equality and diversity action plan that we have
developed, which covers, in a similar way to Hugh's, things like
board membership training, service delivery, etc, is integrated
within individuals' action plans so that it is not just an add-on
piece to the association; it is an integral part of the way people
work within the association.
Q76 Dr Pugh: You are coming from
the social housing sector. There is a big private sector. I wonder
if I could ask you what your views are about how all this operates?
Can it constructively contribute to the solution of problems or
does it compound problems locally?
Mr Broadbent: In my previous role
I was the Director of Housing for Oldham Metropolitan Borough
and we had responsibility for private sector housing as well,
so I suppose I have some experience in this area. The opportunity
through the Housing Market Renewal Fund to intervene in the private
housing markets and those that are volatile for a range of reasons,
including reasons concerned with race, is the best opportunity
Oldham has ever had with Rochdale to address some of those issues.
The fact of the matter is that the power of the market without
any intervention, with people making individual choices, is such
that you get what you see on the ground in a town like Oldham,
and some of the things that Sajjad said about "white flight"
and people voting with their feet are very powerful forces and,
without something like the Housing Market Renewal Fund which can
provide that counterbalance to those market forces in a way that
is generally perceived to be in the longer term the right way
forward, we would continue to struggle to see some real progress
in the private housing market in Oldham.
Q77 Dr Pugh: We have received some
anecdotal evidence from some residents that private landlords
are fairly relaxed about depressing the property market because
that enables them to purchase more properties at the end of the
day. Have you any evidence of that or is it purely anecdotal?
Mr Broadbent: Yes, I think there
has been evidence of that in various parts of Oldham where property
values have been depressed. Again, it is difficult in any market
situation to say which is leading and which is following, but
the reality is that many older terraced areas in Oldham have switched
from the majority being owner-occupied to substantial portions
of private landlords, and their activities often, in terms of
the tenancies and the management of those tenancies (or not),
destabilise communities because, if you like, the market feeds
on itself and that is what I mean about the market doing its own
thing very rapidly and very powerfully and the intervention that
is possible through the Housing Market Renewable Fund should be
able to prevent that.
Q78 Chairman: Most of your answers
to those questions have been about the low demand areas and the
problems. If you are going to get a much more integrated community
is it not important that you look at the way in which people from
different backgrounds can get into some of the more expensive
housing within the town? Would it not be reasonable either for
the housing associations or for the council to be looking at your
arm's length organisations to be making some purchases of property
in other parts of the town so that you can let those to people
from different backgrounds?
Mr Broadbent: Tracey mentioned
the "Acquire" scheme and I will let her reinforce that,
but another thing that the council has done broadly is that through
its planning powers under section 106 it has achieved discounted
property prices. There was one scheme recently in Copthorne Park
which attracted much local interest where a 40 per cent discount
on the market value was achieved through the planning arrangements
and those properties were made available, subject to certain criteria
based on income and income alone, and so that has enabled people
who otherwise would find it difficult to buy a high quality larger
family home to do just that.
Ms Heyes: Significantly, at the
moment the ADP is not targeted at developing large scale new developments
or purchasing properties in more expensive high demand areas,
and certainly our programme in terms of new development, although
it has sought to meet the aspirations of the communities, has
been in the traditional areas in which we have worked, mainly
to address areas of properties that are no longer in demand that
have passed their sell-by date. The only way within the existing
funding streams and the existing environment within which we operate
that I see we could move into those higher demand areas with rented
accommodation is through the section 106 agreement route.
Chairman: Can I thank you all very much
for your evidence.
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