Power struggle over Green Paper contents

A Whitehall power struggle has broken out over the content of the forthcoming housing Green Paper.

The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions is understood to be keen to broaden the remit of the paper beyond rents and housing benefit.

It wants to add a raft of other measures including an overhaul of allocations, as well as proposals on resource accounting and leasehold.

Sources close to the government claim that the move is part of a political manoeuvre by the DETR to ensure that it controls drafting of the document, rather than the Treasury.

DETR ministers and officials are known to be anxious to gain control of the paper as a way of heading off some of the Treasury's policy ambitions for housing benefit.

Treasury statements calling for 'shopping incentives' in the housing benefit system have alarmed the DETR as well as the housing lobby.

One source said that a broader remit would allow the DETR to "stop Treasury taking complete control of rents and benefits."

Another said: "There are some disagreements within government that are not simply turf wars, they are about genuine policy differences. The DETR is inevitably more pragmatic because they have to deal with the consequences."

But a wider scope for the Green Paper would also mean that it could absorb the recommendations of the Social Exclusion Unit's policy action teams.

The team on unpopular housing is expected to call for a new allocation system to create more economically mixed communities (Housing Today, issue 131). It also expected to recommend short-term tenancies as way of making better use of housing stock. Primary legislation will probably be needed to enforce such measures.

A DETR spokeswoman said it had always been the government's intention to discuss broad housing policy in the green paper.

But Chartered Institute of Housing director of policy John Perry said the paper's scope was still unclear.

He said: "The rents and benefits issue is one that needs to be developed and a consensus is needed, so it's right that the government devotes time to developing its ideas. There are other housing issues which could go ahead on a faster track including allocations, resource accounting and licensing HMOs."

National Housing Federation chief executive Jim Coulter said: "All of these issues of rents, demand, allocations, benefits, and subsidy are connected and need to be addressed comprehensively, because otherwise we will just be discussing one subject at a time."