It's the hottest ticket in town. Everyone is jostling for a seat on the nine regional housing boards, the new bodies that will steer housing strategy and decide how funding is carved up across their areas. English Partnerships, regional assemblies, regional development agencies, the Housing Corporation and the government office are guaranteed places, but the remaining seats are to be allocated on a region-by-region basis and there's no pattern emerging as to who is making up the numbers. The board for the North-east, for example, includes tenants and housebuilders.

This approach makes sense in theory. Middlesbrough's problems, after all, will be different from Bristol's. But it is creating all kinds of rivalry between those with a seat on the board and those without.

Perhaps the best way forward is not to expand the boards but to keep them exclusive to the strategic bodies. The downside of this is that none of these groups are accountable to the local electorate; the upside, that there is bound to be less tension if the groups getting the funding, such as housing associations and councils, feel none has preferential treatment. The place for the more partisan organisations, surely, is on the regional housing forums,where their needs can be forcefully expressed. Each regional board could keep a place for the chair, say, of the housing forum.

Perhaps the best way forward is not to expand the regional housing boards but to keep them exclusive

The other thing to bear in mind, of course, is that the decisions of the regional boards will create winners and losers. And would councillors be so keen to sit on the boards if they realised it means taking the flak for returning to their constituents empty-handed?

Anyone doubting the scale of the task facing the boards only has to turn to page 20, where our series on the Communities Plan concludes with a focus on the Newcastle Gateshead market renewal pathfinder. As with the other schemes we have featured over the past three weeks, the challenges it faces are enormous. In the coming months, we will be following the progress of Newcastle Gateshead as well as Poole council's bid to set up an arm's-length management organisation and Cambourne's plans for growth.

Source

Housing Today