A report card for housing associations: must try harder

Many of the associations that I deal with do an excellent job. Some have emerged from a particular set of local housing circumstances – the legacy of 1960s private slums in the case of Notting Hill Housing Trust, or the philanthropic drive to house the working poor that led to the establishment of the Peabody Trust and the William Sutton Trust. Some have proudly continued this tradition, though adapted to modern circumstances.

But we must be under no illusions.

Just because council housing departments have been regarded as peculiarly susceptible to "producer capture" (a service becoming distorted by a provider's interests and priorities) does not mean the alternatives are any less likely to fall into the same trap. Rather more than a few have.

Add to this a potential conflict of priorities – development, management, regeneration – and there are too many associations failing to deliver what I want to see delivered: housing opportunities in well-managed properties, and neighbourhoods for tenants who, almost by definition, are in the sector as a consequence of economic or social disadvantage.

I have no intention of naming names, but in the past year or so I have faced tenants from more than half a dozen associations expressing grievances at least as strong as those I have heard from council tenants.

These grievances include the associations' limited capacity to respond to chronic overcrowding, a totally inadequate and ineffective repairs service, defensive and intimidatory responses to tenants' complaints, and a failure to respond properly to the challenges of neighbourhood management.

Where such problems occur (and I stress again that they are by no means a universal experience), the accountability offered by local authorities can be absent, especially if the association in question is a small provider in local terms, or has an off-site management operation.

Perhaps I am wrong, but it sometimes feels as if the development imperative is more important than providing local housing and neighbourhood management.

It sometimes feels as if the development imperative is more important than providing local housing and neighbourhood management

Stepping back from the tenants' perspective, I have also watched with concern as some housing associations have refused to take on certain households nominated by councils.

As a result, they have protected their own interests while leaving the councils with an increasingly intense set of problems, whether these arise from homelessness or transfer demands.

I have heard some leaders in the sector talk about the need to create "balanced communities" in their own stock, with scant regard for wider neighbourhood or even regional pressures. If everyone is stampeding for the middle ground, how will the interests of those in the most desperate housing need be met?

I sometimes wonder how strategic housing management's conflicting pressures will be accommodated if too many key players feel their own agendas oblige them to limit their responsibilities to those in greatest need.

Housing need – whether expressed in terms of homelessness and overcrowding, the decent homes standard, the management of difficult neighbourhoods or support for tenants in poverty – is not going away any time soon.

As the provider sector becomes more diverse, keeping this focus is going to get harder – not least because of the attractiveness of other important agendas, such as low-cost homeownership and sub-market provision.