2nd opinion: Reasons to be happy

Choice, neighbourhoods, empowerment. No Labour minister worth his or her salt can make a speech these days without a riff around those themes. Or try “voice”, community and participation. They point in the same direction. So if Labour wins a general election, these notions are going to move from rhetoric to hard-and-fast policy. That is bound to impact on housing organisations and the more astute are repositioning themselves for what could be a rocky few years.

“John Prescott needs us too much for his Communities Plan to allow anything much to happen to us.” You hear that a lot. But how much policy for housing is going to be made outside the ODPM? Answer: an increasing amount. Where’s the guarantee that deputy prime minister John Prescott stays in place or indeed that the ODPM survives in its present form: advisers to prime minister Tony Blair have worked out alternative scenarios on both scores.

Yet on the face of it, social housing is well placed not just to survive but even to prosper. Take neighbourhoods. Didn’t the National Housing Federation pick this one up two years ago and one of its authors, Richard McCarthy, then move into one of the policy hot seats? On empowerment, many registered social landlords can proudly point to tenant participation in their governance all the way up to main board level. As for choice, it’s easy to knock down that stereotype advanced, say, by Alan Milburn – one of the chief authors of Labour’s election manifesto – about landlords painting all front doors the same colour without consulting tenants.

Reasons for optimism, then: during a Labour third term social housing has little to fear and a lot of room for manoeuvre. What you might call its protective cover, in the Housing Corporation, survived and may even have been rejuvenated.

The sheer scale of the housing expansion in the South, to which the government has signed up, demands the full participation of RSLs as partners and perhaps as developers in their own right.

And yet the NHF and individual RSLs know it won’t be plain sailing. Again, take neighbourhoods. Just as elected councils are nervous about where this New Labour rhetoric is heading, so ought RSLs to be. In the Prescott version, ward councillors are to function more actively as advocates for micro-areas. In Milburn’s, the areas would become more self-governing, acquiring financial discretion, perhaps pulling powers away from the local authority.

The logic of this line of policy thinking could be growing suspicion of social landlords that are not genuinely neighbourhood-based. Regional operators have, at least, a public relations problem in explicating their community role;

super-regional RSLs might take flak. They are also candidates for criticism on the empowerment front. The adoption, in recent years, of new governance structures has marginalised tenants in some cases.

RSLs may complain they are in a double bind, having to take on board new “business-like” corporate governance arrangements and at the same time having to exhibit their democratic credentials. But that is their fate. If tenants’ organisations were more politically savvy, they would realise that Labour’s recent rhetoric is theirs to exploit and push the big RSLs into further revision of their governance.

And choice. We haven’t heard the last word on right to buy. The most obvious source of transferable wealth in the public domain is social housing and, despite all the practical difficulties and the implications of sales for RSL balance sheets and borrowing, this one will run and run.