It's a jungle out there...

The victory in the courts of former housing officer Beverly Lancaster has highlighted the importance of training for front line staff. If Birmingham city council had only trained her on how to deal with tenants, it's been claimed, Lancaster might not be suffering from depression and panic attacks and the council could have been £67,000 better off.

But even if Lancaster had been sent on a course, how good would the training have been? In the week when news of Lancaster's case emerged, housing minister Hilary Armstrong was questioning the quality of training now on offer.

"Current training does not always equip those involved in neighbourhood renewal to best understand or provide the best level of service at area level," she told a conference.

Armstrong was giving a preview of the reports of the policy action teams on neighbourhood renewal. The report on housing management calls for an improvement in training and professional standards as one of its eight main recommendations.

Although the caution of the report disappointed several members of the team, the section on training is relatively forthright. It tells the Chartered Institute of Housing to review its professional qualifications. In particular it suggests that housing training is too insular - there is little recognition of the importance of cross-agency working.

Doubts about the current standards of qualifications extend well beyond that particular action team.

Shepherds Bush HA chief executive Paul Doe, who is a member of the team on neighbourhood managers, says: "I'm concerned about the way the CIH trains people. I get a lot of young officers coming to me right up to the eyeballs with qualifications. But have they been taught to empathise with tenants? Do they know how to deal with multiple deprivation?"

Before interviewing, Shepherds Bush invites would-be recruits to do a trial day's work. Doe says that if people can't cope with "tenants who shout and scream" they then have a chance to pull out. He claims the ability to cope with tenants is much more important than qualifications. "I'm looking now at people who are able to deal with people rather than people who can pass exams."

Owen Inskip, chief executive of the private housing management firm JSS Pinnacle, agrees. He claims that for every five housing managers, only two need to be qualified with technical knowledge. The other three should be "first and foremost people people."

Inskip is frustrated by the attempts to professionalise housing management, because he claims it should be seen as a job in the service sector. "Housing management is basically a relatively simple task, it is about understanding the needs of residents and meeting those needs. In many ways the housing profession has made simplicity into complexity."

Some institutions and universities have taken on a more business-like approach to housing. The post graduate certificate in housing at the University of Westminster is one of those. Course leader Bill Smith-Bowers explains: "We think of housing as a business, we are preparing our students to assist in business management which is about delivering quality services to tenants."

He reckons that the institute courses which were last reviewed in the 1991 are now looking dated. "What the review missed was the evolution of business in the 90s. The syllabuses that they are using today were drawn up in the thinking world of the late 1980s. The business world of today is very different."

Martin Winn, director of education at the Chartered Institute of Housing, says he is "surprised" by some of the criticism. He points out that the universities which teach the institutes courses have been given greater freedom to respond to change.

But he accepts that the courses do need reform, and a review of the qualifications is underway. "If the sector is going to change and the nature of housing management is going to change then clearly people are going to need to develop new and different skills."

However Winn argues that it would be wrong to say there are weaknesses. "Our starting point is not that there are things wrong and we have got to change. Our starting point is that the environment and the work requirements are changing and we need to respond to that."

To others there is a need for much more than tinkering at the edges. Consultant Gerard Lemos, who is a member of the policy action team on community self helps, calls for a complete shift in emphasis in the whole approach to housing management.

"It needs to be focused on tenants' real concerns rather than guarding landlords' interests." He adds: "The context for housing is no longer the grateful poor. Customer expectations are enormously higher - just look what is happening in the passport agency. There has been a social revolution over what people are entitled to expect and that applies as much to social housing tenants as anyone."

From this tenant point of view the narrow landlord focus of housing managers makes no sense - tenants don't want to be told that rubbish on the street is someone else's problem. Like the action team on housing management, Lemos says that housing managers need to have the ability to solve problems that cut across other departments and agencies.

"The best people I meet are the ones who hammer the phones, get in touch with the environmental health department or whoever, and really make things happen. People need the skills of bringing different groups of people together, negotiating skills, solving problems, having much more autonomy than they do now with budgets to make it happen locally."

The good news is that Lemos claims this type of skill can be taught. "We can't just wait for this type of housing manager to turn up by fluke. You can train people to be like that."

He adds: "If this is now being recognised it is not a moment too soon."