Stately holmes

Even on holiday, Chris Holmes thinks about housing. On a recent family trip to Great Yarmouth, he couldn’t resist breaking off to check out how local property prices compared with those in London.

“We’d visited a museum and I said, ‘Can I have half an hour to go into an estate agent?’ and went in posing as a purchaser. You can buy bungalows for £125,000 there – that’s a lot less than flats across the road from here,” he says, waving towards the window of the Housing Corporation’s central London headquarters. This introduces one of his central beliefs: that social tenants might be happy to move out of the capital to the seaside if they could.

It’s ideas like this that have earned Holmes a reputation as a passionate and radical campaigner during his 30-year career in the social housing field, which included a seven-year stint as head of Shelter.

When we meet, he is gearing up to bring this experience to the corporation in a three-year spell as a board member. It will be interesting to see how Holmes translates his obvious relish of challenging established wisdom to the role.

“Joining the board is something I’d hoped to do before I left Shelter,” he says. “It’s something I can use my expertise in, a change from my other roles, and a real opportunity to contribute.”

Holmes started in housing in 1967 as a community worker with Notting Hill Community Workshop. He held mainly campaigning jobs before becoming director of housing at Camden council in north London. Under his leadership, the council cut the number of families in B&Bs from more than 1000 to zero, a precursor to its three-star status today.

Achievement

“It was a big achievement to take a top director job and make a success of it after a career in the voluntary sector,” says John Perry, policy adviser to the Chartered Institute of Housing.

Holmes’s most recent role has been as visiting research fellow for the Institute for Public Policy Research, a Blairite think tank. His IPPR pamphlet, Housing, Equality and Choice, caused a stir last year when it advocated exemption from inheritance tax paid on first homes should be scrapped. He argued housing inequality was the “most extreme form of social inequality in Britain”.

His latest book for the IPPR, A New Vision for Housing, to be published next spring, typically contains some pretty radical suggestions. “One very high priority is the 100,000 households in temporary accommodation,” he says. “That’s a scandalous number, which has been rising. I’d like to see a programme of acquisitions of properties from the private sector.” For example, he suggests, the ODPM could fund a scheme where registered social landlords were asked to buy houses from private owners, including those in which families were already renting temporarily.

He also advocates giving tenants more say in which properties an RSL buys. He was very impressed by a pilot project by Ridgehill Housing Association, before his wife Hattie Llewellyn-Davies took over as chair. Tenants were given a price range and told to find a house they liked. “That way the tenant has more input and a greater level of satisfaction,” says Holmes, his voice rising earnestly. “I’d like to see much more of that being done.”

Help to leave London

This choice could even extend to people moving hundreds of miles to different areas. “We should have a programme of saying, ‘If you would like to move to somewhere out of London, we will help you and work with you,’” he says. In his vision, tower block inhabitants could move out to a cheaper, larger property outside the city, while key workers move in; the flats could even be sold through key-worker shared-ownership schemes, generating extra revenue.

It’s a controversial idea, but then Holmes is not a man who shies away from controversy. He’s strongly in favour of regionally based management, for example, and disagrees with economist Kate Barker’s suggestion that housing associations need to merge to achieve economies of scale. “I don’t think the case has been made that it would be better to have fewer, larger RSLs,” he says. “I am really keen that the values of [regionally based management] are retained and I will be one voice in the corporation that’s saying that, at least.”

Is this a clue that he is planning to set the cat among the corporation’s pigeons? No, he insists. He’s not seeking to cause trouble and is prepared to be overruled by other members if they disagree. In fact, he agrees with the corporation’s central aim. “As I see it, the biggest challenge is to deliver the number of homes the government wants and deliver good-quality homes in sustainable neighbourhoods.”

David Butler, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, admires Holmes’s ability to think the unthinkable: “His approach to housing and his views on housing policy have always been grounded in a wider commitment to social justice. Where necessary, that’s meant stepping outside the general consensus to argue for a particular case, and that independence of mind should be an asset to any board.”

Design matters

One subject on which Holmes does agree with the corporation’s current leadership is the importance of good design, and he’s looking forward to discussing those ideas with Jon Rouse, former chief executive of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and now corporation chief executive.

“Some of the council houses of the 1920s and 1930s were actually better than a great deal of the speculative housing built at the time. The challenge is to be working within cost limits,” says Holmes, “but it’s possible to have imaginative and attractive design as well.”

His only regret about joining the corporation is that he must step down from the board of homelessness charity St Mungo’s. But he’s making up for that with a five-month consultancy stint for Brent Homeless Families Project, helping raise funds for a new community centre. He also remains a member of the Youth Justice Board.

Holmes shakes his head at the suggestion he might want to return to the practical side of housing management: he’s ready to get stuck into the new corporation role. But there’s no danger he will be stuck behind his desk for the four or five days a month he will work for the corporation.

“I’ll want to go round visiting housing associations in my region, seeing projects on the ground and looking at innovations and seeing what’s being done,” he says.

It seems however willing he may be to toe the corporation line, he has no intention of taking a back seat completely.