A woman of power

Professor Anne Power is aptly named. It is said that she currently has more influence over housing policy than the rest of the housing lobby put together. This is a fairly extraordinary claim, and Power herself strenously disputes it, but it is difficult to challenge.

For a long time she has been known in the policy and academic community for vigorously promoting a particular set of ideas.

But it is only now that most of her preoccupations are also those of the government: tenant empowerment, intensive housing management, low demand, high density, open allocations and a distrust of municipal control.

On a formal level Power, who is professor of social policy at the London School of economics, is a member of three influential government panels: the Urban Task Force; the housing minister's sounding board; and the Social Exclusion Unit's policy action team on unpopular housing.

She is known to be a powerful force on each of these groups, but it is the more informal connections where her influence is perhaps most strongly felt.

The Social Exclusion Unit's report on neighbourhood renewal, for example, was seen as "very Anne Power." She has the ear of housing minister Hilary Armstrong, she has impressed officials, and at the moment, according to housing management guru David Page, "she can walk through any door in Whitehall".

The civil servants on the SEU policy action teams were apparently keen to promote Power's views. Michael Beverley, a tenant member on the housing management team, said: "DETR civil servants had their own agenda - Anne Power was certainly stamped across that agenda." When the team came to report, a number of causes that Power has been championing featured prominently: super caretakers, concierges, tenant involvement, and a review of allocations on the basis of need (Housing Today, issue 137).

Power and some of her colleagues at the London School of Economics appear to be enjoy an unrivalled status with the New Labour Government. The school's director Anthony Giddens is apparently Tony Blair's favourite academic. Power's partner welfare expert John Hills is also frequently consulted by government and was particularly involved in the Comprehensive Spending Review. There are some couples in Britain who are more influential, but not many.

The government's current partiality for Power is reminiscent of the last government's fondness for Alice Coleman - Margaret Thatcher's favourite housing academic. While their views are poles apart there are similarities in their styles.

Coleman infuriated the housing profession for the single-minded way she set out to prove that most of the problems on housing estates were linked to modern design. She caused even more resentment when her views were taken so seriously by ministers.

Power is also attacked for being singleminded. "She's dogmatic in the sense that she's like a dog with a bone," said one fellow adviser.

Like Coleman, and unlike many academics, Power believes that there are solutions to the problems on housing estates. It is probably because of this positive outlook that ministers have taken on her ideas. Government after all needs practical solutions not academic scepticism.

The view among some housing academics is that her influence is unwarranted because the evidence does not support her conclusions.

"A widespread view in the analytical community is that she gets away with the most dreadful generalisations," says one.

Power's latest research on low demand for the Joseph Rowntree is seen as a case in point. The Slow Death of Great Cities - a characteristically punchy title for a Power report - contains a series of radical conclusions, but it is based on only four case study areas.

"It's not many districts on which to launch a magnum opus," says a critic. Others point out that it was no surprise that the areas in Manchester and Newcastle show evidence of dodgy demand because they have been identified as unpopular for years.

Power hotly disputes this. "Case studies are always limited but it depends how closely your studies reflect wider trends. We tried to relate the case studies to what was going on in the cities overall, and then relate that to the regions and the country. I think our figures showed that."

Low demand expert Brendan Nevin from the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies claims that Power "managerialist view" can't be applied everywhere. "It's a very London-centric view to say that areas of deprivation just need to be managed properly - in the north of England the level of change is quite dramatic and there is very much more radical intervention required."

CURS director Alan Murie agrees. "There's a body of work, including material by Anne Power, and quite a lot of work by the JRF, which assumes that the root cause of problems is about the management of housing. In my view the research evidence does not support that. It's important that politicians, civil servants, and housing professionals look carefully at that work and don't take it as the last word on the issue."

Power stresses that her work does emphasise social and economic factors alongside housing management. But she adds: "My research is very ground level, so if I see rubbish on the streets my instinct is not to say this is because of the closure of a mine, it's because the rubbish collection is not working properly."

She also dismisses the idea that her work lacks empirical rigour. "I don't know any body else who has been to more estates than I have, or has documented them as carefully."

She adds: "In Estates on the Edge I went to a huge amount of trouble to get very detailed evidence from five different countries in three or four different languages. The DETR and European Union have checked on what I'm saying, I have never been faulted, nobody has ever found that I have reported inaccurately."

While Power's work may be controversial, most agree that she has been very successful in raising the profile of a number of key issues.

National Housing Federation chief executive Jim Coulter says: "When I was at university reading history, A.J.P Taylor was very unpopular with academics because he was considered too populist. Anne is something of the A.J.P Taylor of housing. She is someone who cannot be ignored."

And although Power's work may not be in the same style as other academics, as a former housing practitioner, her front-line knowledge is more extensive. In the 1970s she co-ordinated a street rehab project, and in the 1980s she lead the Priority Estate Project. It is this background that gives a campaigning zeal to her work, but also formidable on-the-ground knowledge. She sites precise details of individual housing blocks or management schemes to back her arguments.

This kind of information could be seen as more important in a discipline like housing - a practical activity rather than an exact science.

Former housing academic and Council of Mortgage Lender deputy director general Peter Williams says: "There is an inevitable tension in housing between changing the world and analysing it - Anne like many of those who try to straddle this divide will recognise that tension."

If Power's influence is anything like as strong as it is claimed she may be on the verge of successfully changing the housing world. But before her ideas are adopted wholesale, it may now be time that the government also listened more closely to others in the sectors.

As Murie says: "There is a desperate need to genuinely pull together the disparate contribution in this whole area. The government hasn't done that partly because it is so dependent on people like Anne. We ought to be trying to take a fresh look. It would be really valuable to get some synthesis from the different contributions, and for them all to be taken on board."

That may help to redress the balance of Power.