Transfer notes

Colleagues in the public sector team here have forbidden me from using the phrase “bricks and mortar”; but it seems to me that if the esteemed Jeff Zitron can put his name to an important recent report Beyond Bricks and Mortar then I too can use the phrase to draw attention to the important theme of housing and regeneration.

We have only recently got to grips with this challenge, and there were a number of reasons for this: some legal and regulatory issues to do with registered social landlord powers; and also some understandable concentration on the vital need for investment in deteriorating local authority housing stock. I guess that it is really the dramatic evidence of social and physical implosion in some inner-city areas which has lent urgency to the search for a solution.

We now recognise that without an area-based agenda and indeed a cross-tenure programme, investment in council housing, even on the dramatic scale possible through stock transfer, will solve little. I have begun to work through some ideas and structures as to how best to achieve this. The next stage is to see whether we can overcome the inevitable difficulties, which arise from engaging hitherto unconnected regulatory, legal and administrative regimes.