The government this week began the long process of responding to the "big conversation" it has been having around the country since last year's Labour conference. The galvanising idea that seems to have come out of the exercise is that people want more choice in their public services. Obviously, the key battlegrounds in the run-up to the general election expected next May will be health and education, but housing professionals have quite rightly been asking where they and their tenants fit in.
The Department for Work and Pensions has begun offering tenants greater choice in where they live by paying housing benefit directly to them rather than to their landlord. Meanwhile, the ODPM has also been keen to press the merits of choice-based lettings. London councils are so impressed with this idea that they want to roll it out across the capital (page 10). The government gleefully points to these policies as evidence that its mantra of "citizen choice" is being extended to the housing sector.

However, as with health and education, the principal stumbling block to all this is capacity. If the reality of the choice facing citizens is simply between the length of queues for the best hospitals or schools, what kind of a choice is that? Similarly for housing – the degree of choice is only as great as the number and variety of homes available. When Kate Barker's report concluded that there needed to be an extra 17,000 social homes built each year simply to satisfy existing demand, it became clear that choice for many was going to be a long way down the road. The almost 100,000 people in temporary accommodation (65,000 in London alone) and 510,000 families living in overcrowded homes have no choice at all, except perhaps through the ballot box.

Even where choice is exercised it may have unforeseen consequences. As Ted Cantle, chair of the Home Office community cohesion panel, warned at last week's Chartered Institute of Housing conference, choice-based lettings can result in people choosing to live in segregated communities – reinforcing the social barriers that housing professionals work daily to overcome.

If the choice is simply between the length of queues for the best hospitals or schools, what kind of a choice is that?

For housing, there is another aspect to the issue of choice, as Janet Sillett of the Local Government Information Unit argues on pages 20-21. Many councils and their tenants feel that their choice of landlord is unfairly restricted by the government's insistence that local authorities have three options to access extra funding, no matter how many stars they earn from the Audit Commission. Keith Hill replies: "There is no fourth way." Choice, it seems, is constrained by what the government will or will not countenance.

Source

Housing Today