Helping to make a start

There’s a saying in local government. If you scratch an economic regeneration officer, you’ll find a planner underneath. These days I’m wondering whether you’ll find a new-born economic regeneration strategist under a housing association senior manager. Everybody’s talking about it. Housing is important, but the people in it, even more so. How do we get the unemployed into sustainable employment? Senior managers are not saying it because it's the thing to say: many have got wise to the fact that relying on a welfare-dependant customer base is not sustainable and not that good for the neighbourhood where the housing stock is either.

The residualisation of social housing - allocating the diminishing supply of social housing to the most needy - has increasingly concentrated not just the poor, but the very poor in social housing. The 1997-8 Core report on new lettings of existing and new stock in the independent sector shows 25 per cent of heads of households were in full time employment with 7.5 per cent in part time work. One in three heads of households were unemployed.

This is not new stuff, and the government is wise to this, hence its emphasis on education (education, education), training, jobs, Sure Start, New Start, lifelong learning, and so on. But will it be enough to meet local needs? And how can national strategies really be effective and relevant when localities vary so much?

Recent reports from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and offer a depressing picture of employment for young people. Young men may have an awareness of the distinction between "crap" jobs and "career" jobs, but aren't willing to use career and education services. Stories of a young man earning £12 for a day's work at a bakery or a young woman doing an 18-hour day in a restaurant at £3.20 an hour are breathtaking.

Common agreement centres on this: as people miss opportunities when they are young, it becomes progressively more difficult and more expensive to reconnect them to the mainstream. And while the New Deal for the Unemployed has been successful up to a point, was it ever going to deal with the needs of people who have not only been unemployed, but are locked in a culture of worklessness?

To describe the long-term unemployed as an unskilled, out-of-work group or an underclass is to ignore the complexity of the challenge. A picture is emerging of similarly disenfranchised groups with little in common except their unemployability and the poverty that goes with it. Lone parents; people who suffer from alcohol and solvent abuse; middle-aged unemployed people who lost their jobs when they should have been at the peak of their working life; new and old black and minority ethnic communities (and sub groups within them); care in the community clients... the list is a long one. As these groups become more excluded from the mainstream and residualised, the more intractable their situation becomes. What can be done?

The National Housing Federation’s own membership - housing associations in the main - have become increasingly involved in the business of delivering sustainable employment. A grand way of saying that housing associations are creating jobs, you might think. But it's more than that. The federation today (Thursday) publishes a policy/good practice document, More than just a job, which focuses on training and employment schemes from Portsmouth, St Vincent’s, Warden and St John Kemble Hereford housing associations and Notting Hill Housing Trust.

The process of getting young people involved in building houses from scratch; building and running a foyer; running a local labour in construction scheme; setting up a selfbuild scheme; and delivering the New Deal are no mean tasks. But the associations and their partners have done just that and are doing it well, despite problems along the way. What comes across also is how the partnerships are not only helping socially excluded people to help themselves - because many of the participants are not socially excluded. They're helping young people make a start and helping them not to become socially excluded. Engaging them early, training and educating them, getting them on a productive path is all part of that process. The proactive element is crucial. The key to the whole regeneration game is not simply about remedying ills, it's about preventing them now and these schemes are achieving that.

The numbers passing through the case study schemes are modest, but the federation has 1,400 members, primarily operating in urban areas where deprivation is concentrated. Many have a particular focus - a neighbourhood, a city, special needs, black and minority ethnic - which makes them especially well-equipped to deal with the needs of specific groups in the community. And it's usually the social landlords - independent and local authority - that are housing those in need of new opportunities.

Looking at the independent, private and public sectors, where else will you find the skills and flexibility to mix private and public finance; organisations which are people-focused; the ownership of a significant asset base and income stream? Simply put, the independent social landlord movement does not have a peer in any of the sectors, and is well placed to deliver, in partnership with others, some of the more difficult elements of the new regeneration agenda. Most of the national and regional agencies have a good idea about what the challenges are, but don’t have a fixed idea on how to deliver the remedies. As the government looks around for organisations with a regeneration ethos to deliver the new agenda, they might do well to have a look at what independent social landlords have quietly been getting on with in the field. The government has indicated it's interested already by widening the ‘permissible purposes’ of registered social landlords. This will enable a registered social landlord to deliver services to people who are not its own tenants. How that pans out will depend much on how the consultation on the Housing Corporation’s Regulating Diversity pans out also. If greater diversity means unnecessary red tape then the omens are not good.

But all of this does fit into a bigger picture. Call it ‘The Project’ or the ‘Third Way’, independent social landlords have an enhanced role to play in the emerging regeneration agenda. The urban task force report has confirmed this. But being good landlords - valuable though that is - may not be enough to convince the key players who matter that independent social landlords have got a bigger role to play. The case studies above should be replicated many times over where they're needed to convince the government, the regional development agencies, the employment service and local authorities that independent social landlords have a natural, not incidental, role to play in the new agenda called regeneration.