Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2006
MR ADAM
SAMPSON AND
MR MARK
THOMAS
Q1 Chair: May
I welcome you to this first oral evidence session of our inquiry
into the supply of rented housing and may I ask you to introduce
yourself and your colleague before we start?
Mr Sampson: I apologise that there
seems to have been some breakdown in communication so you did
not realise there would be two of us. My name is Adam Sampson
and I am the Chief Executive of Shelter. My colleague, Mark Thomas,
is Head of Shelter's Policy Unit.
Q2 Chair: May
I start by asking you about the figures which Shelter have produced
to underpin their suggestion that an extra 20,000 social houses
for rent need to be constructed between 2008 and 2011? In particular,
you are suggesting an additional 5,330 and 4,000 for London and
the South-East, which is considerably more than you are suggesting
in other parts of the country. Given that there is already some
concern about the way in which most spending on social housing
is going into London and the South, how do you justify supporting
a continuation of that trend? Might there not be a case for reducing
rather than exacerbating regional disparities?
Mr Sampson: First of all, I am
grateful to the Committee. I should like to express my gratitude
to the Committee for the endorsement of our general overall ask
figure of 20,000. That has been immensely valuable and we are
hopeful of a positive response from the Government in the comprehensive
spending review. In terms of the detailed breakdown of where those
houses may go, there are various drivers which may push you in
different directions. On the one hand, if you used as the major
criterion for determining where investment should go, where the
need for social housing is most acute, actually that would argue
in favour of an increase over the numbers we have suggested in
London and the South-East because it is in those areas of the
country where we see the substantial majority of homeless families
in temporary accommodation, for example. They exist in London
and the South-East, but if you look at the most significant area
of the country where there is a serious level of overcrowding—and
Government have recently, and much to their credit, started signalling
an understanding of the extent to which overcrowding is a significant
problem in social housing—again, it is in London in particular,
but London and the South-East more generally, that that measure
of social housing need is most acute; so there are actually arguments
to say that we have significantly under-cooked the proportion
of the funding which should go to London and the South-East. Equally,
we are sensitive to two things. First, the growing problem of
housing need in other areas of the country, not merely in the
South West, but also in hotspots in areas in the Midlands and
the North where there are substantial areas of housing need. We
would not think it right to over-skew investment directed towards
London and the South-East. Second, it is one of the neglected
features of what one would wish to see as a long-term aim for
Government, which is re-balancing economic activity and therefore
the need for social housing supply in other areas of the country
and we should not want to see too much investment go into London
and the South-East. For those reasons, we try to steer a middle
way and, indeed, all we have suggested here is that in the estimated
annual output of social rented units in 2007-08 the same proportions
should be assigned to the increased investment; in fact we are
suggesting an increase of two-thirds on each of those regional
figures, so we are just following the prevailing trend.
Q3 Mr Betts:
Coming back to the 20,000 figure which you say the Committee has
endorsed, and I signed my brick the other day to give a personal
endorsement along with many other Members of Parliament, can you
explain how you get to the figure? Just looking at need, it seems
as though the figure may be a little less than we require. Is
it a figure that you think is actually what is needed or one that
is realistically achievable, given where we are at now?
Mr Sampson: The figure was a judgment.
You are quite right that to meet need the figure should be much
higher. We took a judgment that it was frankly wrong to ask for
a figure which was pragmatically unachievable. We thought that
20,000 was a stretch figure but achievable given what we all anticipate
to be the financial envelope available to the Chancellor in the
comprehensive spending review. The 20,000 was also tied back to
two significant existing government undertakings. The first was
to deliver to the Barker report and although Government have gone
some way towards delivering to Barker's recommendations on social
housing, there is still a wedge to deliver; 10,000 to 13,000 which
needs to be delivered there. The other element was to meet the
Government's pledge on halving temporary accommodation, so the
other element of the 20,000 figure relates specifically to meeting
the Government's obligation under temporary accommodation. The
figure we have come up with says that is what is necessary if
Government merely wish to meet their currently stated objectives.
If we want to go further than that, if there are changes, for
example, which happen as a result of the introduction of a new
standard on overcrowding, then it may well be that the figure
has to be increased rather than anything else.
Q4 Mr Betts:
Just to meet need now as opposed to simply meeting government
objectives, would you actually say the figure should be higher
than 20,000? Do you have a figure?
Mr Sampson: No, we do not have
a figure because it seemed to us there was little point in coming
up with a figure which might be desirable but not achievable.
We have not done that work.
Q5 Chair: A brief
answer would be helpful. May I ask you which organisations you
think should have the lead responsibility for delivering this
increase in social rented housing or do you not take a view?
Mr Sampson: We talked a lot with
people such as the National Housing Federation about the achievability
of the 20,000 increase and plainly we would anticipate that the
vast majority of that increase would be delivered through NHF
and through the Housing Corporation. We would anticipate they
would be the leads but we do not, again, wish to close off any
other avenues for delivery if they appear possible.
Q6 Sir Paul Beresford:
May I take you back to your first answer? You talked about drivers
and you talked about the different speeds of economies in different
areas of the country. I am paraphrasing. Do you not think really
that an enormous effort needs to be put into shifting the speeds
in the economy? In the South-East, a very high-speed economy,
high demand, supplying the houses to meet the demand will fuel
the economy whereas if we could get the jobs moving north into
some of the more deprived areas where there are actually houses,
but no jobs, that would actually ease the demand down here in
time if taken actively?
Mr Sampson: In theory, I absolutely
agree with that; which is why it is so essential the Government
press on with their investment in housing renewal pathfinder areas
so that in areas of the country such as Burnley, which have an
excess of housing and a dearth of employment, we try to find new
ways of developing economic activity in order to make better use
of the existing housing stock. Absolutely. That is a very long-term
strategy and, it has to be said, one where we have not always
been conspicuously successful in the past. To a degree with this,
we are guided by colleagues such as members of the CBI, with whom
Shelter is in partnership through our foundation of a campaign
for more and better homes, and the CBI, the employers, have been
very keen to be involved in the partnership in order to ensure
there are the houses close to areas of existing and planned employment.
Those are principally still in London and the South-East, although,
again, increasingly this is biting in terms of employers' ability
to attract and retain staff in areas of the South-West and the
Midlands and some areas of the North, too.
Q7 Emily Thornberry:
I want to ask you about intermediate housing. I know that Shelter
have been quite critical of the move from spending money on social
rented to intermediate housing. Could you tell us what the consequences
of this shift have been, in particular on the Government's capacity
to tackle homelessness and overcrowding?
Mr Sampson: Our criticisms are
both criticisms in principle and criticisms of a pragmatic nature.
In principle, we cannot endorse prioritising meeting a housing
aspiration over meeting a housing need. If there are people to
whom government subsidy should be directed, we believe those are
those individuals who are in greatest housing need rather than
those who merely wish to get on the home-ownership ladder. It
does not seem to me as compelling an ask as for those whose life
chances are being wrecked because of their poor housing. So that
is the point on principle. Pragmatically, we have two types of
criticism. First of all, we are not convinced that the detail
of many of the low-cost home-ownership and shared-ownership schemes
gives good value for money to the Treasury. The way that many
of those schemes operate does not actually produce much return
on the investment for Government and the long-term effect of the
way some of those schemes operate is merely to enable the individuals
who benefit from them to compete more effectively on the existing
housing market. They give people additional subsidy to compete
on the existing market, thereby merely fuelling house price inflation.
The other criticism is the poor targeting of some of the individual
schemes and the fact that some of the schemes have resulted in
units which should, in theory, be available for key workers; in
practice, remaining empty and being sold on the open market to
first comers. That seems to us a missed opportunity and, where
direct government subsidy is involved, a poor use of that subsidy.
Q8 Emily Thornberry:
Do you not agree in principle with the idea of mixed communities
in areas like the one I represent in inner London, where we have
people who are very rich, who can buy in Islington and we have
the very poor, who can rent in Islington and we have nobody in
between? I hear what you say about the principle of it, but in
order to have a proper mixed community do we not need to have
a greater subsidy of intermediate housing?
Mr Sampson: It is hard to disagree
with the principle of mixed communities. Obviously, we agree with
that. We are suggesting here two things. First of all we are questioning
whether direct government subsidy has to be the driver for the
creation of those mixed communities when planning may deliver
a significant amount for it. Secondly, this is about the detail
of many of the schemes. There is a huge number of shared-ownership
or shared-equity or various models. I have sat now on two government
taskforces to do with low-cost home- ownership, on the Home Ownership
Taskforce about three years ago and on the Advisory Panel for
the Shared Equity Taskforce fairly recently. On the former occasion,
it was within a matter of months of me moving into the housing
sector and I sat there assuming that my complete failure to grasp
the detail of many of these schemes was to do with the fact I
was new into the sector. Having sat through the Shared Equity
Taskforce about three years later, I realise that in fact it may
not be about the depths of my ignorance, it may be that these
damn things are voluminous and complex. Bluntly, if I do not understand
them, it is really difficult to know how the end users of them
are to understand them. Some of the schemes, insofar as I have
been able to grasp, and I would not possibly claim to be an expert
on this, do look like they do give good value for money in some
local circumstances. Other schemes do not.
Mr Thomas: May I perhaps expand
slightly on that, very briefly? One of the key areas is the level
of affordability that these schemes actually provide. In many
circumstances, in actual fact, they are only affordable for people
on incomes of above £25,000 or £30,000. They are not
actually delivering for the groups that one might imagine we are
actually referring to when we talk about intermediate schemes.
Q9 Chair: May
I just stop you there? My understanding of what an intermediate
scheme is, is that it provides for those individuals whose income
is not high enough for them to be able to buy on the market in
the area they are in. In some parts of the country £25,000
just does not permit a purchase on the market and therefore they
do need subsidy if they are to get into home-ownership.
Mr Thomas: That is absolutely
true. But what concerns us is the people in the income band below,
and the schemes just are not accessible for those. Many of the
categories of people that these schemes were anticipated to provide
for, say public service workers, are not actually being able to
get onto them. On the other hand, you do have an issue of dead
weight. There is evidence that some of the people who are ending
up accommodated in some of these schemes could, in fact, potentially
have afforded to buy on the open market without any need for subsidy
themselves. Where we do actually like the schemes is where they
are targeted towards people who are in existing social lettings.
To do that, they do need to be carefully designed so that they
are accessible to people on much lower incomes than, say, £25,000
but where you can do that, you have the big benefit that you are
then also freeing up an additional social letting for a homeless
household to fill.
Q10 Emily Thornberry:
What you are saying is really interesting. You are saying that
intermediate housing should be made available for those who are
already within social housing and that that may help us with tightening
up the definition of who is eligible for social housing and it
then frees up social housing.
Mr Thomas: Yes.
Q11 Dr Pugh:
You touched on two programmes that the Government have in terms
of shared equity and also in terms of key workers, and you faulted
both programmes. Was it an intrinsic flaw in these schemes we
are talking about here, that they are just simply not what is
needed in your view, or was there something about those schemes
that could have been changed or modified that would have made
them successful and delivered some of the objectives that were
intended?
Mr Thomas: I do not think that
there is no room for intermediate provision because we recognise
that there is. I come back to the issue of the balance of subsidy
and what concerns us—
Q12 Dr Pugh:
Are you really arguing that they are dealing with a different
problem than the one Shelter fundamentally attends to, which is
the problem of absolute homelessness?
Mr Thomas: No, we are not arguing
that. What we are arguing is that those people who are not right
at the very bottom end of the scale, but are slightly above, should
not be prioritised at the expense of those who are right at the
bottom. What we need to see is more money put into intermediate
schemes, yes, and that has been happening. The concern is—
Q13 Dr Pugh:
You can do both and it would be okay, would it not?
Mr Sampson: If you can do both,
it is okay, but there is substantial evidence in recent times,
both in terms of direct government subsidy and indirect benefit
that comes out of things like section 106 agreements, that an
increased level of prioritisation has been given to intermediate
housing and social housing has lost out in both areas.
Q14 Dr Pugh:
Given limited resources, you would sooner they concentrated on
the very bottom of the market rather than the intermediate market.
Mr Sampson: Indeed.
Q15 Dr Pugh:
That is where government money should be going?
Mr Sampson: Indeed. Yes, that
is our principled stance.
Q16 Mr Betts:
Coming to the management of properties and effective tenant participation,
at one time we had massive local authority stocks. We have fewer
of those now; we have stock transfers, ALMOs created. Do you have
a view about the different effectiveness of participation arrangements
in the different forms of social housing that now exist?
Mr Sampson: We would say that
in many areas of the country the responsiveness of social housing
management to tenants' needs has not historically been as good
as it might be, and that is the general picture. It is important
to say that Shelter take no stance, in principle, about the existence
of ALMOs. We understand why Government have chosen to go down
the stock transfer line. We understand why that is deemed to be
pragmatically necessary. Some of the ALMOs have shown some pioneering
work in tenant participation and tenant representation which has
been very interesting and we should like to see some of that experience
replicated in the housing association sector and, if possible,
in the council housing sector. Whether those mechanisms compensate
for the democratic deficit which results from the transferring
away of stock from local democratic control is an open question
but, nevertheless, we have seen some good models of tenant participation
in some ALMOs; indeed, including one in your constituency.
Q17 Mr Betts:
Do you think now that some housing associations are just so big
on a national scale that they find actually dealing with local
problems and local groups of tenants very difficult indeed? Their
lines of communication get rather stretched.
Mr Sampson: There is something
which is potentially difficult about the increasing size and complexity
of many housing associations. They have become very remote from
the local neighbourhoods where their houses are situated and there
is an increasing tension between the In Business for Neighbourhoods
agenda and the remoteness of the central management of housing
associations from local neighbourhoods. That does throw a huge
responsibility back on the housing associations to develop very
good tenant participant and representation mechanics. Some housing
associations need to do considerably greater work in that.
Q18 Mr Betts:
May I just pick up one particular issue we have had in Sheffield,
although the Housing Corporation now looks as though it is responding,
to where the housing associations there simply have not taken
their fair share of homeless families? They have been left to
the ALMO. I went to the Housing Corporation and complained about
this and it looks as though the Housing Corporation now may be
willing to introduce a policy of targeting their grants for new
development according to the satisfaction that they have with
the current management arrangements of the housing associations.
Do you think that link-up is a good one; that we should be looking
to let the associations develop according to their current management
practices?
Mr Sampson: Certainly that would
be very helpful. We have certainly been critical in the past about
the declining proportion of acceptances in some housing associations
of homeless families and the fact that the Housing Corporation,
through the publication of its new homelessness strategy which,
while it does not go quite as far as we might wish—nevertheless
is a pretty good start—is a very useful indicator that the
Housing Corporation is now in a position to place a greater pressure
on housing associations to take homeless families as their primary
source of tenants.
Q19 Dr Pugh:
May I ask you about homelessness statistics? Obviously, you can
count the people on the Embankment; you can list the people in
the hostels, and so on; but the figure for homelessness is presumably,
in your view, greater than that because it excludes people who
are living in extraordinarily overcrowded conditions, either with
friends or with relatives. If you were to apportion them between,
say, the number of people absolutely homeless and the number of
people who are effectively homeless but actually not technically
homeless, what kind of proportions would you be coming out with?
Mr Sampson: We have been quite
critical of the use of homelessness statistics by Government,
both in terms of the rough sleeping figure and in terms of the
number of homelessness acceptances on the part of local authorities.
We have written conjointly with Crisis, Centrepoint and Homeless
Link to DCLG to ask to do some work with them to come up with
an agreed answer to the very question that you just articulated.
I could, off the top of my head and it would largely be off the
top of my head, assign proportions of people; you press me and
I will do it. I am not sure how useful that is. Secondly, partly
here we get into definitional questions of what we decide constitutes
homelessness as opposed to acute housing need. Again, what I am
comfortable about is saying we should prioritise only homelessness
as we choose to define it and if individuals are in acute overcrowding
that somehow they fall off the priority ladder.
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