The year in review

The walk of strife

After years of delays and setbackS, Grove Village, the first-ever housing private finance initiative, finally got under way in 2004. But even as it set about delivering 1200 homes in Manchester, the £90m scheme faced an almost insurmountable challenge. Crack dens? No. Vandalism? Not a bit of it. Grove Village was almost derailed by … ramblers.

The Ramblers’ Association was concerned that the project would close 300 alleyways through the crime-ridden area, blocking rights of way. It used a planning inquiry to put its case, putting a sturdy boot into the council’s timetable and raising the possibility of a hike in the project’s budget.

However, rambler David M Hunt defended the protest on Housing Today’s letters page, saying: “Of course there is a balance between accessibility and the need to stop crime, but closing 300 alleys seems excessive. Many tenants on housing estates are already inconvenienced by crime without those who should be protecting them inconveniencing them even more.”

Care cuts

It was a lousy year for Supporting People, the regime for funding council care services. It hurtled £400m over its £1.8bn budget at the beginning of the year and the rest of 2004 was a story of cuts, cuts and more cuts.

It’s driving me crazy, living like this. If I think about it too much, I’ll probably end up in a mental ward 

Tenant Elizabeth Clackson on her overcrowded home, February

Councils were instructed to slash their budgets by £45m in February, and the biggest spenders were told that they faced a grilling from the inspectors in March, even as one – Essex – was freezing its budget to cope.

A probe was launched in April against an unseemly backdrop of wrangling between the ODPM and the Department of Health over who should pay how much into the pot.

The human consequences began to emerge in May, when it was revealed that accommodation for rough sleepers could be cut by as much as 25%, and in August the National Housing Federation warned that there could be a big fall-off in the development of sheltered housing projects.

But the Audit Commission believed the source of the problem was managers. It suggested in June that care providers bidding for “unreasonable and excessive” sums for management time could be behind the ballooning budgets.

In an effort to bring overspending under control, the ODPM announced that the Supporting People programme was to be cut by £280m in the next three years. But a report two weeks ago revealed that Supporting People has saved the public purse £1.34bn – so, not such bad value for money after all.

We knew doing a transfer would be like running a marathon, but nobody told us it’d be a marathon in flip-flops, uphill, with weights on our backs 

Kevin Dodd, Wakefield director of housing, February

In the blue corner …

Homeownership. Could any policy be more true-blue territory? Well, not this year. Throughout 2004 the Tories repeatedly showed that the bad taste social housing left in their mouths was beginning to wear off.

In February, it slammed the slump in social housebuilding; in May its Birmingham branch pledged to build more council homes and in July John Hayes, spokesman for local government, said a Tory government would give RSLs the power to build housing for profit without setting up subsidiaries.

Most surprising of all, in September the party said it would let councils invest in and build housing, a reverse on 20 years of policy.

A political earthquake in the making – or just a sign that a general election is coming?

I plan to hang my MBE on the wall next to my Sex Pistols ‘God Save the Queen’ posters

Urban splash chief Tom Bloxham was a rebel with an mbe in February

Tight fit

“Elizabeth Clackson and her five children are crammed into this two-bedroom flat, and they can’t do anything about it because they’re not ‘overcrowded’ according to a statute laid down in 1935.” So began Housing Today’s “Right To Room” campaign in February. It drew attention to the anachronistic loophole in housing law that condemned thousands of families to miserable living conditions because the definition of what constitutes “overcrowded” housing hadn’t been updated since 1935.

The same week, it was reported that overcrowding was up 50% in London.

The campaign clearly touched a nerve for the sector: the following week the letters page was filled with endorsements and suggestions, as we highlighted the health problems that overcrowding can cause and exacerbate, especially in children.

Karen Buck MP, one of the leaders of the parliamentary campaign to amend the then-Housing Bill and ditch the 1935 standard, wrote: “Such overcrowding would have been bad enough 100 years ago, but the simple fact is that children are now bigger, mature earlier and reach puberty earlier, so the pressures are actually far more intense.”

Jon Rouse seems to want to be loved. He must be reminded that he is not a giant panda

A zoology lesson from Peter Rutherford on the letters page in june

In May, the government finally opened the door to changing the standard. The Clacksons were rehoused.

But there’s still work to do. In November, new figures showed that the number of people living in severely overcrowded accommodation was up 10% to 53,718.

Almo in a day’s work

Arm’s-length management organisations – the “middle way” of the government’s drive to reach the decent homes standard – had a mixed year. On the up side, they stopped being new kids on the block and started setting about what they were meant to do: it’s now clear, for instance, that the ODPM is happy with the way they’re working out because a fifth round has been confirmed and budgeted. But on the other hand, it’s still unclear whether they’re just a temporary fix to get to the decency standard or a permanent feature of the housing landscape.

The year started badly, with tenants of London’s Camden council sensationally voting “no” to their ALMO in January (see “The fourth way”, page 28). The residents of Cambridge did the same in November. But there were “yes” votes in Nottingham in July and Wolverhampton in November. In Harrow, tenants said yes but then the council said no and ditched the idea in November.

We don’t want to just stick lipstick on the bulldog

Why improvements to Westminster’s CCTV network are more than cosmetic, by Tim Hearn of Cisco Systems, May

But the real speculation surrounded ALMOs’ freedoms. While some – such as Derby, which started to export its services – were seeing how much they could do under the existing framework, others were campaigning for more scope. But the power to borrow money independently was ruled out in May when Ed Balls, chief economic adviser to the Treasury, said such a move would represent an unacceptable hike in public sector borrowing.

The ALMO movement stepped up its campaign for more freedom in September, asking for control over the revenue from right-to-buy sales, but with little joy. There was one hint at an olive branch, though, with the ODPM suggesting that the organisations may be allowed to own their own stock, something that would increase the chances of permanence after the decency deadline in 2010. It wasn’t absolutely clear, however, so this is another issue that will have to rumble on next year.

Cops and yobbos

Crime and antisocial behaviour remained political hot topics throughout 2004. To begin the year, there was dismay that the funding for neighbourhood warden schemes was to end, dealing a death blow to many projects that had had a demonstrable impact on crime. But in July, home secretary David Blunkett announced that conventional police forces would be boosted, amid a swathe of anti-crime proposals that included returning 12,000 police officers to the front line and creating 20,000 community support officers. These measures had a downside for landlords: they were to face snap inspections, requested by tenants, if they failed to tackle antisocial behaviour.

But at the same time, some of the tactics used by landlords and police to reduce nuisance and crime on estates were causing controversy – particularly, as Housing Today reported, the use of “dispersal areas” to break up gangs of youths. “Criminalising people just for being young,” was how Alex Gask, a solicitor for Liberty, described the measure, but the government wasn’t deterred by opposition to the focus of its crime-busting policies: late in October, the prime minister announced a huge expansion of antisocial behaviour target areas, with up to 50 new areas in England and Wales. So it looks as though landlords will be shouldering the burden for some time to come.

You have to avoid, at all costs, getting into a debate about how loud sex should be

Mediator George Tzilivakis grapples with antisocial behaviour in April

Wet wet wet

With fears of global warming on the rise and demand for homes pushing developers onto Britain’s flood plains, high water was high on the news agenda throughout 2004. In May, there were warnings that coastal projects could be ruined by rising sea levels, and in June leading insurers cautioned that insurance for projects in the low-lying Thames Gateway might not be forthcoming.

By July, the Environment Agency was battling with developers over a 7500-home “super-village” on a flood plain in Berkshire, and in October councils and RSLs joined the fray, dismissing the agency’s concerns as “sensationalist” and “melodramatic”.

But the issue moved out of the realms of planning and onto every front page on 16 August, when a catastrophic flash flood ripped through the Cornish village of Boscastle. Local housing authorities had to find emergency accommodation for washed-out residents and stranded tourists.

Here to stay

The accession of 10 countries to the European Union on 1 May put asylum on the front pages with a flurry of tabloid warnings that Britain would be “swamped” by migrants. But the real source of the problem lay closer to home: the home secretary’s bungled amnesty for asylum seekers was creating endless woe and by July, the Home Office had to admit that it would fail to clear the backlog of 15,000 families. Only 7500 would be granted leave to remain.

Meanwhile, a battle was raging over another brilliant Home Office idea: section 55 of the Asylum & Immigration Bill, which denied 14,000 asylum seekers housing and support. In May, the Court of Appeal ruled that forcing such people to sleep rough breached their human rights and, in June, the policy came under forced review.

Meanwhile, many of those from the new EU states were sleeping rough in London, and Westminster council was considering hiring a bus to send them home. And in November it emerged that failed asylum seekers were being left destitute by the Home Office’s failure to deport them. Government action is badly needed in 2005, but David Blunkett’s time is being monopolised by one visa application in particular …