Six of the best

Last month I attended one of the most informative conferences I have been to for many years. The conference, on poverty, was organised by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Its evidence was chilling, its conclusions thought-provoking and I hope that the actions that follow from it will be far-reaching.

Research showed that the poorest 10% to 20% of the population:

• have seen little or no improvement in their real incomes for a generation
• are finding it progressively harder to afford items deemed by the rest of us to be necessities
• suffer poorer health and life expectancy than the rest of us
• continue to have difficulties at school and to leave without qualifications
• are more likely to live in unsafe and unpopular neighbourhoods.

Why should we in social housing be especially concerned about this? Because the vast majority of those people either live in our homes or live in communities and neighbourhoods where we have a major presence. Look back at the foundations of most long-standing housing associations and they were a direct response to people living in poverty. Councils built homes to take people from fetid, squalid slums and give them an opportunity to build stable, productive and healthy lives.

Yet all that effort appears to have achieved little. Yes, few people now have no inside sanitation and most have at least some sort of roof over their head but they have missed out on the general increase in prosperity shared by the other 80% of us.

During the conference I brainstormed with Liz Cross from Harvest Housing Association in Manchester. We came up with about 100 ideas about what registered social landlords and councils could do to help things. Here are my top six:

• Accept that alleviation of poverty is our business. I will be asking the main board and subsidiary boards of Plus Housing Group to look at this issue and incorporate poverty alleviation as part of our core business. I hope that we can find ways of developing key performance indicators to look at what we do in this regard.
• Lead by example. I am concerned at the rise in salaries and perks at RSLs. Too often we compare our jobs with those that pertain in the private sector. I do not expect people to sell themselves short but some salaries are now reaching levels that are extremely difficult to justify. Look at the cost of running the homes that we provide and in particular at the savings that could be made by tenants, and not us, by the introduction of energy-efficient measures.
• Use our financial muscle to ensure that mainstream financial providers offer decent services to our tenants. Many of the estates and areas we control have no effective financial representation, leaving residents dependent on the loan shark and the catalogue. We must insist that the banks that make money from us return to the areas we work in.
• Directly attack financial discrimination by working with the police and the Trading Standards agency to crack down on loan sharks, by educating people in finance and by supporting alternative financial institutions such as credit unions.
• Take seriously the neighbourhood agenda. In Business for Neighbourhoods is a pathetic response to the problems faced by many of the tenants we house. Everyone has a right to live in a neighbourhood that is clean, safe and managed. RSLs and councils must work together to find new ways of ensuring that this happens.
• Richard Kemp is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Liverpool where he also is chair of Plus Housing Group