If that sounds pantingly erotic, forgive me, but both the chancellor and the prime minister, in their different ways, stoke the fires of fidelity, even amour fou. With Gordon Brown – intensely charming in small groups, most unlike his TV persona – there's a tremendous Calvinist sense of joining with him in the right church. With Tony Blair, you get washed in bonhomie and you just have to be in his gang.
As it happened, Brown wasn't at the seminar. He had just lent the upstairs meeting room at Number 11 to Wilf Stevenson, director of the Smith Institute, for the think tank's event.
The seminar's theme was public health, one of a series run by the institute in the wake of the Wanless report on the future of the NHS earlier this year. Housing was mentioned several times. No surprise there. The conditions in which people live evidently has a causal relationship with their physical and psychological wellbeing. Speakers made the point, unsurprisingly, that governments should monitor the effects of housing policy as part of a joined-up approach to health.
What was surprising, though, was the absence of housing voices at the event. OK, it was principally a health seminar and the health scene is awash with organisations and spokespeople. But although health is hugely diverse, people in the field seem to network and communicate easily. They usually find no problem in articulating the interests of health to the wider world.Why does housing not have such unity?
Housing seems to lack the capacity to speak out. Instead, conversations are too often inwards-directed. The problem is, in part, the gulf between the tenures. No single organisation speaks for housing as a physical entity, regardless of ownership. And no one speaks for owner-occupiers as a group. That was shown by the ease with which mortgage tax relief was abolished, the absence of a national dialogue about the material condition of owner-occupied estates and the glaring non-relationship between house prices and house condition.
Social housing also lacks spokespeople. The National Housing Federation makes points on behalf of registered social landlords, ditto the Housing Corporation. But both find it hard to accommodate the sector's diversity and differences of interest that exist between the biggies and the tiddlers; besides, the NHF is currently engaged in an existential think-in. The Chartered Institute of Housing is an invaluable source of expertise but it represents a group whose interests may not always be coeval with those of social housing. Besides, it is held back by the differences of allegiance between people in local government and people employed by RSLs. Local government has its own representative bodies, among them the Local Government Association. But it, too, finds it hard to reconcile the divergent interests of its members, divided as they are by political affiliation, size and – after last week's revision of the grants formula – competing claims for available money.
The upshot is that, at my seminar, no one spoke up for housing. That's a shame, because voice does matter. In our society, where media projection is so important, the silent may find their interests neglected.
Source
Housing Today
Postscript
David Walker writes for The Guardian and is a non-executive director of the Places for People Group
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