'The drug abuse we've always dealt with. What's new is the guns and aggression'

Housing officers and neighbourhood wardens from the council and local registered social landlords walk the same streets, and face the same dangers. Their crack-house checklists include the vacant properties vulnerable to squatting and the boarded-up windows favoured by dealers to create a defensible space, and they talk to tenants to build up their own intelligence picture in the hope of avoiding another armed siege like the one in June last year at a Knightstone Housing Association flat in Bristol, or a drugs-related stabbing like the one at a Solon Housing Association home last October.

"The drug abuse we've always dealt with. What's new is the guns and aggression," says Sarah Wilde, housing services manager for Solon, which has 20 properties in Bristol.

Knightstone staff travel in pairs and rely on risk assessments and safety training. As a back-up, they have another defence system that brings into sharp focus the seriousness of the risk they take: six mobile phones with satellite tracking devices to transmit their location to a security company. Inside a property or on the street, phones are kept within easy reach; if a situation takes a particularly threatening or aggressive twist, the flick of a switch will transmit details to a trained security consultant who can record the incident and, if necessary, call the police.

Wilde says: "People feel comforted by the huge police operation, but there's concern that it's taking up a lot of police resources and will take time to resolve. There are stories about Yardies being deported, then being back in Bristol in two or three weeks."

That's the crux of the crack problem: a small number of hardened criminals can cause havoc by moving from one property to another, attracting a following of desperate addicts and radiating crime and fear. A social landlord's best legal defence – eviction for drug-dealing, nuisance behaviour or arrestable offences – is a blunt, expensive instrument that is not always effective, as the problem often involves dealers intimidating or inducing tenants into allowing the dealers to use their homes as a base.

As a crack flash-point, Stapleton Road's twin town is, surprisingly, the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea in west London. Away from the well-appointed children's playgrounds and stucco mansions of the wealthy elite, there are pockets of deprivation where crack dealers imposed a three-year reign of fear from the end of 1999. At its worst, the local tenant management organisation – an arms'-length manager for 9000 properties in the borough – closed 36 crack houses in 18 months.

Despite its successes, the tenant management organisation found it faced a problem only too familiar to housing organisations trying to tackle drugs: gaining possession of one property only to find the same face at the next address. In some cases, it was displacing the problem onto the private sector and RSL neighbours: Notting Hill Housing Group experienced at least three cases of vulnerable tenants being pressurised into handing over their keys. The borough is currently exploring various options for legal action to target known drug dealers.

Officers from the tenant management organisation understand well the hellish impact of living near a crack house: older people afraid to leave their properties, living in a state of siege; children traumatised by witnessing open prostitution; tenants forced to move around the estate in convoy to protect them from gangs looking for opportunities to mug or steal; communal areas littered with blood, faeces, needles and debris. A crack house in one tower block handled 200 deals a day and a cash turnover running into thousands of pounds.

The problems in Bristol and west London are extreme, but they are the acute symptoms of a chronic disease. It's no longer possible to talk about drugs blackspots or problem areas, because street drugs are endemic in inner-urban areas, outlying estates and quiet market towns. Wherever people try and fail to find opportunities or excitement, drugs are there as a cheap, available substitute.

As the Bristol and Kensington situations show, while the police may be in the front line of home secretary David Blunkett's war on drugs, social housing providers have been drafted in as the second line of defence. The streets that must be cleared are lined with their properties and they pay for legal costs, physical damage to properties, and dealing with antisocial behaviour. On the other hand, their sensitive allocation policies can make or break estates, and regeneration, "housing plus" and supported housing initiatives can lift tenants out of vulnerability.

The government flagged up an "end-to-end" approach to tackling drugs in last December's updated version of its 1998 drugs strategy. It recognised the role that social housing providers are already playing at both ends – from liaising with police to tackle crack houses, to providing ongoing, community support for individuals leaving treatment – by setting targets for closer partnership working between drug action teams and social housing providers.

If the government’s drugs strategy is to be delivered landlords must play a role – but smaller RSLs maynot have access to the funds 

Eamon Lynch, social landlords’ crime and nuisance group

The price of drugs
The strategy also tallied up the annual economic cost of drugs – to the health, criminal justice and benefit systems – of between £2.9bn and £5.3bn. Adding in social costs, such as help for crime victims and housing costs, produces a figure which the Home Office estimates is at least £10.1bn. In response, funding for treatment programmes, outreach work, community support and education will increase from a planned £1.026bn in 2002/03, to £1.244bn in 2003/04.

But even when there is more money in the system, there is no guarantee it will end up in housing budgets. In each area, the pursestrings are held by drug action teams (see "Who's who in the fight against drug crime", right). Social landlords, a crucial part of service provision, may not always be part of the drug action team communication loop, according to the Social Landlords' Crime and Nuisance Group.

Eamon Lynch, treasurer for the group, which pools experience and best practice, says: "For the strategy to be delivered, you need landlords to play an appropriate role.

If they're not involved, they don't get access to the opportunity for direct funding. It's a win-win, or lose-lose, situation."

Some of the UK's 149 drug action teams are better than others at forging partnerships that include housing, he says. Smaller RSLs with one or two problem patches in a wider area may be excluded from the partnerships and funds to tackle the problem.

Drugs can be a serious strain on resources. Knightstone's bills for drugs-related evictions averaged £7000-8000 each, with one case coming in at £12,000. "We can't sustain costs at that level," says Jayne Whittlestone, area services manager. Worryingly, that's substantially higher than the median figures quoted on last year's Home Office's Tackling Drugs in Social Housing guidance of £4000 per case for RSLs, and £10,400 for councils.

Knightstone, which has 250 properties in the badly affected St Paul's area of Bristol, has applied for £50,000 from Communities Against Drugs, a Home Office fund, to finance a new fast-track eviction process. But there's also the costs of repairing wrecked properties and rehousing vulnerable tenants. At Solon, Sarah Wilde is looking at the knock-on costs of abandoning a project to house single homeless people in the area. "Six of our 20 properties have been squatted and it's cost us a fortune. There are lots of single homeless in Bristol, and this isn't helping."

The social costs compel some RSLs to take action without guaranteed funding (see "Regeneration and drugs", right). Knightstone went ahead with its fast-track eviction process in partnership with the police and other agencies, then enlisted the support of local judges. Together, they agreed a package involving expedited hearings, admitting hearsay evidence from other tenants via solicitors and issuing eviction orders immediately after hearings.

Kensington & Chelsea council set up a rapid reaction protocol to short-circuit the evidence-gathering process needed to secure an eviction order. By setting out tight timescales for action between the tenant management organisation, solicitors and police, it can take as little as two months to secure an eviction. "Crack houses are still an issue, but numbers have decreased," says Ian Twyford, the tenant management organisation's neighbourhood director. Since the protocol was put in place last July, there have been around 10 evictions.

Initiatives like these show that there is hope. It seems that while drugs inspire fear and revulsion among the general public, among housing staff they inspire commitment and resolve. Twyford says: "People feel very strongly about it. You give it priority above everything else."