Tag Archives: Benefit Cap

View from the front line – 3 years of pain (and why it’s worth it)

Three years of pain (and why it’s worth it)

Zoë Kennedy, Styles House TMO, styleshouse.org.uk, @styleshouse

After suffering the trauma of council organised major works, we finally decided we’d had enough and we were becoming a TMO. We’d thought about it for years, but it seemed such a big step and a lot of work, so we had always put it off for another day. Finally though, we realised the amount of effort required to get a good service from the council could be put to something positive.

There is no getting around it, becoming a TMO is long. You might think you can do it quick, but you can’t. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing though as there is a lot to learn. You won’t just be running the estate, you’ll be an employer running a small business with things like payments to the HMRC. That’s pretty big and scary and you need to be trained in how to do it. What we found though, was that there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do and as a group we always had someone who had skills in that area.

img_1108It’s important to keep focused on why you are becoming a TMO and what you want to achieve. We had decided that it would be easier to be a TMO than fight with the council to get anything done and luckily the council kept reminding us of this every time a repair was needed. The most useful experience, however, was visiting other TMOs. We met people, just like us, who were successfully running their TMOs.  We realised that it didn’t take any particular skill, just committed people and a good manager.

We also spent time picturing what our TMO would look like. We knew we wanted an onsite manager and a regular cleaner. Once we made the decision it was easy to come up with a structure and budget. We over estimated everything, which I think was the right approach as it meant we were cautious when spending money and managed to make savings which we have invested back in the estate.

It’s also important to write as many policies and procedures as possible wile you are setting up the TMO. Yes it’s boring, but you’ll be thankful later when you are busy running the TMO that you don’t have to write them. I am currently rewriting our disciplinary policy and really wish we had done it properly the first time around.

Finally, don’t worry about conflict in your group. We had a lot of conflict and were (and still are) a very argumentative group. I would rather that we weren’t but it doesn’t cause any major problems and it’s the reality of being democratic, you just won’t all agree.

It’s all about the money, money, money

images

As Jessie J said we all have a price tag. There have been a spate of money related articles and reports that highlight how the conversation on Social Housing is increasingly being framed in economic terms. This is not entirely surprising as most of this is aimed at a Government that primarily uses, sometimes blunt, economic tools to deliver its policy. One of many worries here is that policy and the numbers are at odds.

Peabody and the CBI recently produced a report which attempted to quantify the contribution to London (£15.3bn) of social tenants. Just a while later we get the great and the good Moodys, downgrading the credit rating for Places for People and Genesis because more risk has been introduced because of diversification away from Social Housing. We also have the thresholds for Pay to Stay, £31,000 outside London and £40,000 in London. So it seems that the argument for social housing is now being fought on the numbers playing field.

The latest indications on what government grant will be available point clearly to a policy that is about fiddling at the edges of market intervention on build for sale and is not about increasing social housing supply. Indeed, as the details emerge on the Right to Buy for Housing Associations and the money effectively being removed from Local Authorities another avenue for increased building is shut off.

So we have a situation at best where social housing rental supply will be at best static. It seems that supply will be met by using Pay to Stay to push people out into the private market and ‘free up’ units. Mmmmm, there are a few issues here that don’t quite make sense:

  • An already overheated private rental market and lack of affordable sale properties for those being pushed into leaving the social rented market
  • Brexit pushing properties off the market
  • HA’s risking more borrowing costs because effectively they cannot build the level of social housing they would like and therefore higher build costs = either less supply of new homes or inflated costs

Throw in Housing Benefit caps and (if ever) Universal credit and the numbers look less like adding up.

Maybe we need a bit more advanced economic modelling which really takes into account the benefit brought to the economy by workers accessing really affordable housing and what the impact on our economy of the multiple squeeze on this group will be.

One other important point made by CIH and NHF, in the last recession virtually the only significant building was of social housing which saved us from even worse economic turmoil.