The Communities Plan needs new thinking

The Deputy Prime Minister is due to announce his Communities Plan in January. The document will put flesh on the bones of the comprehensive spending review. Understandably, expectations are high.

Albert Einstein once said: "You cannot solve problems with the way of thinking that created them." Clearly, we need new thinking if we are going to increase the provision of housing, guarantee the supply of high-quality affordable housing in the South-east and fix the dysfunctional markets of the Midlands and the North.

Increasing supply is the obvious way of breaking the cycle of rising prices and declining affordability. Equally, most people agree that cities cannot work if the people that operate their infrastructure cannot afford to live there. The Challenge Fund was a recent spirited government attempt to begin to improve supply of affordable housing in the South-east. Mobilising English Partnerships' support for additional housing supply is also an important step forward.

Another issue that should be given great consideration in the Communities Plan is segregation, a growing concern for many of us. A recent Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors report was highly critical of "gated communities". The UK, it said, is heading towards social polarisation of the kind that exists in the USA, where about 12% of the population live in gated communities.

One of the major tasks facing us is enabling our tenants to grasp the same opportunities as those who live in any other form of tenure

Some other things that ought to be considered in the Communities Plan include:

The availability of grants for site purchase. Control of the site is crucial to ensure that the design standard and build quality is high and that the affordable housing doesn't get pushed into a corner. Grants that would be paid anyway should be available to help land purchase.

A recognition in planning that design is important. While design is much talked about, it needs to be enforced with the same rigour as the Building Regulations. Also, standards ought to require that there is no discernible design difference between homes built for different tenures.

Housing associations should be freed to provide truly mixed-tenure developments, including homes for outright sale. However, they should only be allowed to do this if they have the infrastructure, skills and funding to make it happen.

Existing housing grant should be depreciated by the government to release equity against which housing associations can borrow to boost further the supply of affordable housing. A reform, which would yield faster results, would be to write this grant off if it is older than 15 years.

There should be a widespread use of compulsory purchase orders to bring land and buildings into use. This, together with tax incentives to develop land and buildings as housing, would be a significant move forward.

We should be required to identify the community benefits of development, not just the housing benefits. For example, one of the major tasks facing us is enabling our tenants to grasp the same opportunities as those who live in any other form of tenure. Figures from the labour force survey show just 5% of council tenants and 7% of housing association tenants work mainly from home, compared with 11% of homeowners and 14% who own outright. Also, it is important for children to have the space to do their homework if they are not going to be socially disadvantaged at a crucial time in their lives.

These are all important issues in themselves but they also highlight wider questions about the role of housing organisations in creating opportunities for individual residents and communities to develop themselves, create jobs and move forward. At a time when so much development and redevelopment is needed, if we do not seek to create workable neighbourhoods we run the risk of creating the unpopular places of the future.