Memorandum from National Housing Federation (DAR 09 - 06)

 

Introduction

 

The rapid turnover of ministers in recent years has made it more difficult for the sector to build long term relationships with the Department. Performance, and indeed the degree of openness and engagement, not just with ministers, but across the whole department, has differed between ministerial regimes.

 

The Department has worked well with the Federation on operational issues and has a good level of interaction with the housing association sector in responding to issues as they arise. Historically, on strategic policy such as the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) there has been a tendency to form specific proposals behind closed doors and publish them before opening discussions with stakeholders as to how they should function in practice. This has resulted in extensive refinement of the policy proposals through the parliamentary process and in consultation with the Department which has delayed implementation and affected performance.

 

Enabling input from stakeholders in forming policies and testing ideas at an earlier stage in the process would have improved their effectiveness and allowed more focus on implementation. However, there have been recent improvements in this area, with the sector working effectively with the Department to develop and implement, for example, mortgage rescue schemes.

 

How good is the Department at consulting its main stakeholders on policy issues?

 

In our view CLG largely meets its statutory obligations with regard to formal consultation protocols, processes and timetables. However, CLG makes less use of informal pre-consultation discussion than it should. For example, the first detailed consultation with the Federation on the Housing and Regeneration Bill 2008 was on the day it was published. This lack of consultation and discussion prior to the publication of the Bill resulted in a huge number of amendments, many purely of a technical nature, having to be made to the Bill during the parliamentary process. This crowded out space for longer discussions about the fundamental principles underlying the Bill.

 

There is also not enough interaction between the sector and top ranking civil servants, with the Permanent Secretary and, to a lesser extent, Directors General not being visible and accessible enough to stakeholders.

 

Does it take reasonable account of stakeholder views / responses to consultation?

 

We are concerned that CLG's response to some consultations fails to demonstrate that it has grasped the seriousness or urgency of issues for stakeholders. For instance, the housing association sector has been extremely concerned about the potential for the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) to undermine delivery of new affordable homes. Despite Ministerial commitments to Parliament to explore an exemption or reduced rate of CIL for all affordable housing and address these concerns, the Department's actions to date have not demonstrated that they have the will to address this issue. In the case of CIL this has also been compounded by failure to fully understand the concerns resulting in time and resources being wasted commissioning legal opinion addressing the wrong questions. A more open approach to discussion and sharing information would have done much to avoid these problems and arrive at a workable solution.

 

Does it deliver what it says it will deliver?

 

The Federation's experience is that there are individually some excellent civil servants within the Department but overall performance is patchy. The Department worked closely with stakeholders in successfully bidding for additional resource for the National Affordable Homes Programme during the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review and delivered on commitments around the number of homes to be funded from this programme and the implied grant rates. It also worked with the Homes and Communities Agency to introduce grant flexibility to counteract the effects of the economic downturn. However, in other areas this is not the case. For example, the Government announced a Housing Reform Green Paper under the Rt Hon Caroline Flint MP and the Department asked for suggested policies. The Federation submitted proposals and attended a number of meetings to discuss our ideas but the Green Paper never emerged.

 

How influential is it within, and outside, Government, when pressing the claims of its main stakeholders, and its own policy agenda?

 

As an organisation external to the Government, it is very difficult to comment on how influential CLG is in its relations with other government Departments. However, our impression is that CLG tends not to be predominant. This may be inevitable given that it is not a high spending Department in comparison to some of the others.

 

October 2009