Rising to the challenge

It's included as one of the essential ingredients of neighbourhood renewal in the Social Exclusion Unit's Bringing Britain Together. But it is also being treated as a "stand-alone" activity - with the expectation that new management initiatives will be paid for by the management savings they generate. Constricted in this way, it will not be able to fulfil its potentially pivotal role in neighbourhood renewal.

Already the management of social housing is being stretched in new directions as we discover what it takes to reinvigorate Britain's less hospitable estates. The starting point for this must be the residents themselves - already "joined-up" thinkers who understand the complex connections between low incomes, drug dealing, break-ins, low skills, high voids, low rent collection and so on.

They don't have the power, resources and perhaps the confidence to act decisively on their own.

In looking for help though, they will have little patience with the neat divisions of responsibility that professionals are prone to erect - tenants just want the job done.

This is where housing managers can play a pivotal role. As difficulties on an estate mount up, so do the interventions from educational psychologists, social workers, probation officers, health visitors, and police as well as structural surveyors, glaziers and lift engineers. Usually each will be drawn in only as problems arise and only to work within their own field - necessarily giving them a partial view.

Unlike them, housing managers have a regular relationship with all the tenants and charge payers on their estate, a relationship which at least in theory, is not just problem based. So the housing manager is a natural focal point when strategic planning begins, and the ideas of residents are being matched up with the spread of professional and financial resources available.

This doesn't mean housing managers are god-sent experts on regeneration. They aren't. But their role is unique, and when you look at estates that have been transformed, housing managers have usually been key players in that success. To achieve this, they have needed new skills as motivators and facilitators , as well as an understanding of many disciplines that were previously off limits.

Places like Broadwater Farm show that investing in a wider role for housing management pays off handsomely in the bigger project of neighbourhood renewal. And the more intractable the problems are, the greater the management investment needed.

Yet none of this squares with the way the government is financing housing management now. Next year council supervision and management allowances will be frozen for the fourth year running - implying that costs should be driven down further rather than increased. Meanwhile, for the first time, management allowances have been separated out from those allowed for maintenance.

Although the government's emphasis on repairs is understandable, it also claims this change will make council spending more transparent to tenants. Yet if it wants an integrated response to regeneration, why is it isolating management costs, and trying to drive them down? "Joined-up" thinking should presumably lead to "joined-up" action and that in turn demands some kind of "joined-up" cost benefit analysis.

Look at the cost benefits of a concierge scheme for example. Staffing a block of flats all day is an enormous management cost. Yet the benefits can also be enormous - a drop in crime (savings for the police), less stress-related illness (savings for the health service), less vandalism (savings on maintenance). There will be big housing management benefits too - with tenants who feel more satisfied and more secure. But cash savings? Fewer transfers and voids maybe, less neighbour nuisance even - yet the savings on the housing management account are tiny compared with the cost.

With investment in housing management having such diverse benefits, it is not right that tenants should cover any extra costs through higher rents. At the moment, the government claws back a big chunk of councils' rental income, allowing them to keep less than 60 per cent for the management and maintenance of tenants' homes. A smaller government claw-back could generate increased management allowances - with the greatest increases going to the areas where there is most work to do on social inclusion.

Councils should account for any increased management spending. Because the aims of such spending may be complex - often not susceptible to statistical measurement alone - the Tenants Compact and Best Value will provide a framework for tenant scrutiny.