FOR
As Broadway is just coming through the "rebranding" process, I read "Hey, good-looking" with interest (30 January, page 22).

We are a leading London charity for single homeless people formed through the merger of Riverpoint and HSA last April.

We decided to look at our image because we have been defined, and defined ourselves, by the organisations we were, rather that what we sought to become.

Regardless of the end product – which we will be unleashing on the world in the spring – the major benefit of the branding work has been to bring together funders, staff, board members, service users and others to ask some really fundamental questions about who we are, why we provide the services we do and how we want to work – questions that we rarely make the opportunity to ask.

By managing this process ourselves it has not only reduced costs, as we have paid our consultants only for the specific technical input to the exercise, it has also given a far greater ownership of the end product throughout Broadway.

The ultimate success of the initiative however will be: if we respond to articles such as this, will everyone recognise what Broadway represents?

Howard Sinclair, chief executive, Broadway, London NW1

AGAINST
I must denounce the National Housing Federation's rebranding proposals which go further than a mere logo. The cost may be relatively trivial; the important thing is the soap-opera nature of the whole exercise.

It is a retreat from reality. The satraps of Grays Inn Road, none of whom live in social housing, are desperate for more visibility; so it will no longer be called social housing but something squirm-inducing like "stakeholding community homes".

Is the housing sector so insecure that it needs a new corporate identity? Usually such identities compete with other brands.

Social housing, on the other hand, seeks special status, government subventions and public support. The real purpose of rebranding is to advocate more funding for housing which fewer people want.

This rebranding will allegedly usher in a golden age. Can we now expect lots of economically active people moving into it? There is not a shred of evidence that they will. Most housing workers, even, do not live in social housing and wouldn't want to.

How will rebranding help to fill abandoned properties in the North-west? How will it alter the reality of welfare ghettoes whose only beneficiary is the housing profession?

There will be a relaunch with a minister and the luminaries of housing who will gush over the new logo and the "new dawn for social housing", but nothing will change.

The illusions are indicative of the vacuous nature of social housing rhetoric. The expensive logo – the living incarnation of social housing conjured out of the ether by the consultants – is destined to be an embarrassing memento that cannot halt the further marginalisation of social housing.

Perhaps it should be an ostrich at sunset?

Angela Pinter, London E2

Source

Housing Today