2nd opinion: Let the people decide

According to the prime minister, all our society’s problems have their roots in the 1960s. Wasn’t that the decade when children ceased to be disciplined by their parents or schools; when the Pill created a sexual revolution with consequences in terms of a higher divorce rate and thereby more single parents; when recreational drugs became more easily available?

I was a child in the 1960s and remember it differently (and certainly, at my school the teachers were in charge).

I don’t think it’s sensible to blame a particular era for the ills of today. But trends and patterns have occurred over the past 50 years that relate to rising affluence and rising expectations, and now we believe we have a right to choice.

So how do we reconcile that right to the need to use public resources wisely?

My family weren’t poor, but – in the 1960s – I was brought up in a house without central heating. Such a house would now be deemed below the decent homes standard. A kitchen more than 20 years old and a bathroom more than 30 are also reasons why a property can fail to make the grade: by this token, are most of the stately homes of England condemned?

We need to distinguish between what’s truly necessary and what we aspire to.

My grandmother’s death was hastened by the terrible winter of 1963, so I have no problem with seeing the provision of central heating as a necessity. But a bathroom can live longer than 30 years, as the survival of many avocado suites from the 1970s can testify.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to give our tenants a high-quality product that’s well maintained – indeed, my association spends around £1100 a home every year to achieve this.

But to achieve the decent homes standard for more than 95% of our stock we have had to move our programme of improvement and refurbishment away from items chosen by tenants, such as new front doors, to those proscribed by the government standard. And now we’re threatened with “decent homes plus”, a higher standard that would mean investment in yet more stuff that tenants may or may not have chosen themselves.

The majority of the British population own their own homes and can make personal choices about how they upgrade their properties, so it seems a backward step to remove the right of tenants to make similar choices. Of course we need a basic standard but above and beyond that minimum, should we not be devolving the power to decide how the money is spent to the people who live in the homes?

There’s only one pot of money after all – it comes from the rents, and these are pegged down to an affordable level. So if the government makes the choices, the tenants can’t.

If introduced, decent homes plus will be a major cost to many associations with large numbers of older homes that have been converted into flats. The standards likely to be set for thermal and noise insulation will be difficult to achieve in Victorian properties that do not have cavity walls and were never designed for today’s use of TVs and stereos. To achieve such a standard, will we have to pull them all down and start again?

It’s ironic that in the owner-occupied market, older houses with character can be more highly sought after than the bland boxes often built today.

In life we all have to compromise over the decisions we make, we rarely get it all. Giving people choice is about giving them the power to make the compromises they are willing and able to live with.