Examination of Witnesses (Questions 99
- 119)
MONDAY 15 JANUARY 2007
MR BLASÉ
LAMBERT, MR
NIC BLISS,
MR MICHAEL
GELLING, MS
CORA CARTER
MBE, MR TERRY
EDIS AND
MR TREVOR
BELL
Q99 Chair: Can
I ask the first question of the representatives of the Confederation
of Co-operative Housing, which is why you believe it is becoming
harder to use land and housing for the benefit of the community,
and maybe you could just briefly explain how you think community
land trusts help?
Mr Bliss: I think the key issue
here is that the housing asset and so on is potentially an asset
that could be used for the benefit of communities in a big way,
so with something like the Preston Community Gateway that has
recently been set up there is a situation where tenants and ordinary
communities and so on have control over a substantial asset, so
that was the framework in which we were saying that. It is difficult
because I think in terms of the wider issues to do with tenant
control and issues to do with tenants getting involved in decision-making,
whilst there has been some advantage in terms of tenants being
involved in decision-making there is still a long way to go in
terms of those kinds of areas and so on. In terms of community
land trusts the issue is about how we can establish land assets
and so on that are run by communities, and there may be different
ways of doing that and so on, but that is the principle behind
community land trusts.
Q100 Chair: So
you are not simply talking about use of the assets by the community
at large; you are talking more about the involvement of all the
tenants in other decisions relating to the housing, is that right?
Mr Bliss: I think so. The point
about this, and this is what we have seen with Tenant Management
Organisations and other community controlled organisations, is
that if tenants are enabled to take control over community assets,
it means that you create a community group with assets that gives
them the power to do things in terms of decision-making in their
local neighbourhoods and so on, which in our experience is usually
to the benefit of that local neighbourhood.
Q101 John Cummings:
Surrounding tenant participation, the Committee have been told
that there appear to be great pressures upon social landlords
to have resident and tenant participation in order to further
their aims and objectives, and the Audit Commission are extremely
keen on this particular co-operation and participation. How do
you believe that tenants can become more genuinely involved? Is
it always the case that the involvement of tenants is always advantageous?
Ms Carter: Yes, and it is dependent
on the landlords. Some landlords welcome tenants with open arms
and some do not, but it is beneficial to us because it helps us
to understand when councils have to say "no" to some
of the requests we are wanting. We understand why there is not
enough money and the involvement there.
Q102 John Cummings:
Do you think that social landlords have been pressed into this
acceptance of tenant and resident participation, or is it something
which has been freely embraced?
Ms Carter: Some social landlords
have willingly done it without any pressure at all because they
see it as the way to go, to involve the users.
Q103 John Cummings:
Do you think this willingness to embrace is applicable right throughout
Britain, or are you referring to your particular circumstances?
Ms Carter: No. I am referring
to my particular area.
Q104 John Cummings:
Do you have any experience of what happens elsewhere?
Ms Carter: Yes.
Q105 John Cummings:
And does that indicate a willingness to embrace?
Ms Carter: It is dependent on
the landlord.
John Cummings: But the question is do
you say that there is a willingness to embrace this concept or
not?
Q106 Chair: I
think Ms Carter is saying that there is for some landlords and
not for others. Would the other witnesses like to comment on what
it is that decides whether a landlord is going to participate
or not?
Mr Gelling: So far as landlords
are concerned, irrespective of who it is, whether it is a local
authority, an ALMO, a TMO or a traditional housing association,
it is down to that organisation's willingness to open the door
to participate with people, and there are huge amounts of best
practice within England, and we can only speak for England, about
how that works. It does not happen everywhere, and there are still
many, many landlords that do not participate with tenants, but
you will find that where landlords do participate with tenants
that actually supports the Government's community empowerment
agenda, because these are the landlords that go out there and
talk not just to tenants but the wider community, and initiatives
include the wider community.
Q107 Mr Olner:
I want to turn my attention to Tenant Management Organisations
but first, is there a stick and carrot for some of these organisations
where the bad landlords are made to re-look at what they need
to be doing for the tenants, and equally some of the tenants that
do not really want to know can become encouraged to become part
of your organisations? It seems a little bit weak to me if it
is just left on a voluntary basis to do it.
Mr Gelling: I do not think there
is a stick and a carrot, and I do not think there is a stick and
a carrot currently whether it be the Audit Commission or the Housing
Corporation that regulates housing associations, but I do think
that organisations that make it happen see the benefits of making
it happen; they are better landlords for allowing tenants to be
empowered and be part of the decision-making right at the very
beginning. This is not about the colour of your front door but
about investment, procurement—about all the other activities
within the landlord structure.
Q108 Mr Olner:
What is the other side of that, where there are those landlords
that do not go down their enlightened route?
Mr Gelling: They do not see those
benefits, and they may not have as many satisfied tenants.
Ms Carter: No.
Q109 Emily Thornberry:
Do you have any ideas of how you could formalise the process?
Instead of it just being down to the goodwill of landlords as
to whether or not there is tenant participation, do you have any
ideas how it could be formalised so that tenants actually had
a right to have their voices heard? I know you have to have tenants
on the boards of national organisations but in order for it really
to work it has to be presumably on a more local level. How could
we go about doing that?
Mr Edis: We have found, certainly
in Walsall where I come from, the tenants have become involved
through tenant management, and when Walsall decided that they
wanted to go through the wholesale stock transfer the TMOs did
not want to do that so they set up their own housing trust, which
is WATMOS. This totally involved the board, it is a majority on
the board, there are eight tenants, one representative from each
and four independents, and that is total representation of the
tenant movement, if you like, being involved in the areas that
they are living in.
Q110 Emily Thornberry:
That is really interesting, but there seem to be kind of different
extremes, though. I wonder if there is another way of going through
the middle of this?
Mr Edis: Absolutely. It varies
across the country.
Mr Bliss: In terms of the work
that we did come up with, the community gateway model and so on,
which actually enshrines the whole principle of tenants both across
the whole organisation and in local neighbourhoods as being able
to get involved in decision-making, there are ways it could be
done and so on and organisations like the Preston Community Gateway,
which is the first which was set up, are showing the way that
that can be done and are beginning to tackle those matters, but
these matters could be enshrined and could be worked on to be
formalised. In terms of the questions that were being asked earlier
on there are some good landlords out there, some, but actually
the reality is that most culturally are some way behind that,
and it is a big process of cultural change that is needed in terms
of changing the way that housing association and local authority
staff work with tenants and so on. To a certain extent that is
a painstaking process that has to be gone through, but we are
a long way away from where tenants and communities are in a position
across the board where they can influence decision-making about
their homes and neighbourhoods, which is where we should be, and
I think the evidence is that that leads to benefits.
Q111 John Cummings:
What do you think the way forward is, then?
Mr Bell: I was going to refer
to tenant participation compacts. When they were introduced five
or six years ago the intention was that they would be formal agreements
between the landlord and tenants of a city or borough as to the
range of ways in which people could become involved, and they
would be mechanisms, if the landlord was not involving tenants
according to the contract, whereby tenants could say, "Well,
look, I should have been involved in that decision or should have
had the chance to set up this association". It is my informal
understanding from feedback that the compacts have not really
been stuck as enforceable and real. The trouble is, if you rely
on rights entirely, experience in the TMO world is you need a
constructive partnership, you need to have to some extent a willing
landlord. My feeling is that the compact erred too much towards
the partnership approach, in other words there was not enough
beef in it really, but it would be worthwhile looking at the experience
of tenant participation compacts and finding out if they have
not worked very well, and if not, why not.
Q112 Mr Olner:
So, Mr Bell, you would not agree with the research carried out
by the National Housing Federation through the Tenant Involvement
Commission that most tenants really do not want to be involved.
They are quite happy for managers to manage—did that one
cast a bit of bait on the water? I am just responding to research.
Mr Bell: I understand that. It
depends how you ask that question. If you say to people, "Do
you want to go to endless meetings and knock on people's doors
all day in order to get a decent repairs service?" then people
answer one way, but if you ask people, "Do you want some
influence over housing in your life"—why do people
choose to buy their houses? It is about influence and a sense
of control over their lives, and if you pose that question in
a different way most people would say they do not want to be entirely
dependent on their landlords to make all sorts of decisions that
affect their housing and environment.
Mr Lambert: Really the key issue
here is where the choice lies, but at the moment very much the
choice lies with the landlord. If the landlord chooses to engage
with its tenants then it can be a positive issue; if it chooses
not to then the opportunity is not there, and it is to an extent
balancing that choice equation up so that you allow the choice
to swing towards the tenants. Mirroring what Trevor was referring
to there, if the choice that is on the table is "Would you
like to choose the colour of your front door?" then a lot
of people would say: "Well, that does not interest me",
whereas if you move that choice over to allowing tenants and communities
to define where they would like to be involved and in what areas,
you may get a different set of results.
Q113 Mr Olner:
So out of 100 people in a tenancy issue, how many would be involved?
Mr Gelling: That depends where
you live, on what the issues are, it depends what the landlord
is like, it depends what the problems are in the area. There is
no answer to that question, because where are these 100 people?
Q114 Mr Olner:
It was not a trick question.
Mr Gelling: It is not a trick
answer, either, it depends where you are. But coming back to the
question about tenants being on boards, just because a tenant
is on a board does not mean that the organisation is empowering
tenants; it means that the tenant is on the board. The other point
is that for local authorities, section 105 of the 1985 Act gives
direction to local authorities to consult with tenants. Now, empowerment
is more than consultation. It is about building on whatever legislation
is already there. We are all of the same thought here; we believe
there should be more enshrined to empower tenants, because we
see that as the first step to actually really empowering communities.
Q115 Emily Thornberry:
If one of the reasons why it needs to work is because you need
to have a willing landlord, if the landlord is not willing to
involve tenants what about allowing the landlord to own the land
but allowing it to be managed by someone else, perhaps another
registered social landlord who is willing to engage with tenants?
Is that the sort of idea that is worth thinking about?
Mr Bliss: We perhaps ought not
to be funding landlords of that nature. Can I point out that in
terms of reading that report I do not think that the conclusion
of that report is that most tenants do not want to get involved.
I think the conclusion is that all tenants want to see decent
quality services, which is pretty obvious in the 21st century,
but actually there are a significant number of tenants who also
want to be involved in being able to shape decision-making, and
that is in that research. Therefore, in terms of that report,
I think it is quite important because it is the National Housing
Federation, the trade body for the Housing Association sector,
saying they have to do more to deal with the get-what-you-are-given
culture that they have identified is the way a lot of Housing
Associations are coming across at the moment, and that is also
probably the case for a lot of local authorities.
Q116 Mr Olner:
Whatever the figure was, and I agree it is an impossible figure
to mention, what are your tenants' organisations doing to educate
and keep involved all of the tenants that are there? Are you doing
an on-going education process saying: "Look, if we are all
together on this, this is fine"? We have all been in the
syndrome where it has been very easy to leave it to the shop steward
if you have not educated the troops behind it.
Ms Carter: Where landlords and
tenants have signed up to a partnership, you will find those areas
are better places to live. We as tenants do not want the crime
and nuisance on our estates; we do not want the shoddy workmen
coming on to our estates, and where there is a partnership there
it is a better place to live because the crime is down, the quality
of the work done on our homes is better because tenants are there
as inspectors on the estates. All these things have been going
on for so many years, this tenant participation, and because some
landlords took it on board others have followed because they have
seen it is the best way to go to talk to the people that they
are supposedly serving.
Mr Edis: Where tenants have had
a bigger say in the running of their estates, it is creating communities.
If you create a community you keep people on estates, so therefore
you are not a transit estate, so it cuts down on all the things
that go with transit estates like antisocial behaviour and rent
arrears and everything else, so you build a community, and that
is what tenant management is all about, and tenants getting involved
in that way want more say in the running of estates, not less.
Q117 Mr Olner:
The setting up of a TMO from looking at it seems to be fairly
bureaucratic and long-winded. Are there any suggestions you can
think of to short-circuit that, because I agree with everything
you say about tenants being part of a community, but how do we
encourage that and remove the many bureaucratic walls that people
have to jump over so that we can make it easier for likeminded
people to form themselves into an organisation?
Mr Bell: The Federation of TMOs
has certainly welcomed some of the proposals in the Local Government
White Paper, where the current right to manage process is extremely
long-winded. It can take three, four or five years to establish
a TMO compared with, say, a year to transfer the stock of a large
local authority, and we are part of a CLG task group which is
currently looking at how the process can be streamlined. So it
is very important that community organisations going down that
road get proper training and proper preparation, so as not to
make it something you can do at a whim but so that it gives people
a sense of achievement in a reasonable period of time, so I think
we welcome that. There are areas, though, for example in the RSL
sector where it is still very difficult for communities interested
in tenant management.
Mr Edis: The sooner we get the
likes of managing the RSL sector the better it will be for us,
and that is giving the tenants the right for that. It happens
obviously in the local authority sector, so to us there should
be no reason why it cannot be transferred to the RSL sector. Trevor
is right, and I would not like to see the process too watered
down. When TMOs are doing their training they have to go through
all sorts of training, be it finance, housing law, lettings—you
name it, they have to do it. It is public money that we are spending
when we become a TMO, so it is right that the TMO should have
the training to do that and do it properly and wisely. If you
take a local authority, for instance, they could have someone
go and get a job on the Monday morning and by the Friday they
are giving advice out on housing issues, so the process is from
one extreme to the other, if you like. So although I think it
can be cut down because of, as you said, the bureaucracy and everything
else, I would not like to see it watered down too much.
Q118 Mr Olner:
Could you hazard a guess as to why it takes so long, 3-4 years,
for you to get your system in place, and as little sometimes as
12 months if they want to opt out?
Mr Bell: It is not a case of hazarding
a guess; it is because the current right to manage involves normally
three ballots at three separate stages, and the regulated process
is designed to take that long, and in some cases you will have
a local authority perhaps who is not overseen on a TMO developing,
and if they drag things out and do not provide information when
it is needed they can double the length, and there are some TMOs
that have taken six years to develop. When that happens the people
involved have to be really dedicated to stick at it and to have
that sense of long-term purpose. To a large extent, therefore,
it has been the regulated process which has been very long-winded.
Mr Lambert: I wanted to comment
on a question a moment ago that generally feeds into this, which
is around social landlords retaining the ownership of the land
and the asset, and the management being able to freely move around,
which touches on what was being said about local authorities wishing
to extend the process because of their own outlook, and it is
moving to a situation where you allow communities and groups of
residence to have that element of power and control over who is
going to provide that local service to them. If I and my neighbours
are dissatisfied with the company supplying our gas to us we have
the ease and availability to change supplier; if we are not happy
with the company we get our mobile phone from, again, we have
that ease to change supplier. Now, that ability to change supplier
or to choose which management model is going to be applicable
to our area, our neighbourhood, is not there unless the landlord
organisation itself chooses to allow us to go down that line,
and unless that is balanced there will continue to be those organisations
that have an outlook that is positive towards this, that give
that choice and that power to their tenants, and those that do
not. To speak for a moment on the Housing Association model, when
organisations have been set up, sometimes 100 years ago, with
a particular paternalistic view towards doing good for the deserving
poor, unless those organisations' cultures are shifted to viewing
the people they are delivering services to in a different way,
then you will never get that level of engagement across the board.
Q119 Chair: I
have one question specifically about co-operative housing. What
do you think are the additional advantages of co-operative housing
management over other forms of tenant management, briefly, if
that is not too big a question?
Mr Bliss: I think a lot of the
advantages of housing co-operatives are similar to Tenant Management
Organisations, to be honest.
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