Autonomous Geographies: urbanpolicy

UK Housing and Regeneration Policy

Under the Conservatives (1979-1997), urban policy was dedicated to reclaiming cities as central sites for capital accumulation and elite consumption and transforming local authorities into entrepreneurial actors employing “place-marketing strategies” and “public-private partnerships” (PPPs) to compete aggressively for resources (see Harvey 1989).

Housing privatisation played a central role in the assault on municipal government. Between the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act and the late 1970s, successive governments in the UK made massive public investments in local authority-owned social housing. At its peak, council housing accounted for 6.6m homes, a third of the UK’s housing stock. The Conservative government reversed this trend by encouraging home ownership and privatising council housing, mainly through giving tenants the “Right to Buy” their council homes on discounted financial terms. The Conservatives also introduced the Large Scale Voluntary Transfers (LSVT) scheme – known as ‘stock transfer’ – that encouraged local authorities to sell off (subject to a ballot of tenants) the bulk of their housing stock to not-for-profit housing associations called Registered Social Landlords (RSLs).

Councils were prohibited from reinvesting most of the capital receipts from these sales in new housing, while their powers to borrow to invest were also curtailed. Instead, 75% of capital receipts had to be ‘ring fenced’ to repay the so-called ‘historic debts’ of house building still owed to the Treasury by local authorities. More cuts were implemented through the introduction of the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) in 1990, which obliged councils to ring-fence government housing subsidies, rents and capital receipts into a separate budget and barred them from using their ‘general fund’ on housing. This had two consequences: first, the number of new local authority homes completed fell from 86,200 a year in 1980 to just 1331 in 1994 (Balchin 1996: 224); and, second, this led to the growing disrepair of council estates like Little London.

New Labour took power in 1997 dedicated to “social inclusion, neighbourhood renewal and community involvement” (Imrie and Raco 2003:4). As Colomb (2007:5) outlines, this urban policy approach has focused on both tackling entrenched poverty in the most deprived areas, and encouraging “a design-led ‘Urban Renaissance’ agenda fostering the physical, aesthetic and economic regeneration of all cities”. These twin objectives, expressed most clearly in the 2003 Sustainable Communities Plan, are geared towards creating so-called “mixed communities” in deprived areas principally through “housing market renewal” schemes that imply large-scale demolition of working class housing and displacement of communities in order to create new private housing developments with greater tenure (and thus wealth and household) diversification (Allen 2008).

This approach has also influenced housing policy since 1997. While the Right to Buy policy was retained and options for home ownership expanded, the government promised to release new public funds to regenerate existing social housing. The government estimated that there was a £19bn backlog in housing repairs and maintenance that left some 2.1 million homes in the so-called ‘social housing sector’ below what it would later define as a ‘decent standard’.

In 1999, the government introduced a pilot scheme – ‘Pathfinder’ – encouraging councils to bid for specific estate-based council house refurbishment and maintenance projects using the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). PFI involves a private sector consortium being awarded a contract for typically 30 years to design, build, manage and finance improvements in return for a fee with performance-related criteria.

Those councils expressing an interest in the Pathfinder programme were asked to provide a submission detailing a scheme. Of these, eight local authorities, including LCC, were selected as PFI Pathfinders and invited to produce for government approval an Outline Business Case (OBC). The 8 local authorities chosen for the Pathfinder programme were: London Borough of Camden; North East Derbyshire District Council; London Borough of Islington; Leeds City Council; Manchester City Council; London Borough of Newham; Reading Borough Council; and Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council. Since then, the Government has launched a four more rounds of PFI housing bids.

The Government’s 2000 Green Paper set out its objective to bring all social housing up to a decent standard by 2010 (DETR 2000). The proposed policy mechanisms to achieve this included: a new Major Repairs Allowance of £1.6m; the transfer of 200,000 homes a year to RSLs; new rounds of PFI worth an extra £600m up to 2004; and the setting up of Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMOs), wholly-owned council companies with tenants on the board. ALMOs were offered additional funding to deliver the ‘Decent Homes’ standard if they achieved “good” inspections from the Audit Commission (DETR 2000).

The first eight ALMOs went live in April 2002. In 2003, the government’s Sustainable Communities Plan (Sustainable Communities: Building for the future) reinforced the Decent Homes agenda, promising to release more capital investment to those councils that could not meet the Decency target by retaining their stock if they agreed to pursue one or more of three options: (1) transferring the management of housing stock to ALMOs; (2) transferring the ownership of their housing stock to a Registered Social Landlord (RSL); or (3) entering into PFI contracts (ODPM 2003).

Critical perspectives on New Labour’s approach to community regeneration make two valuable observations. First, it does not intend to tackle the root causes of urban poverty but instead reinforces the government’s welfare-to-work schemes (workfare) that place the responsibility for poverty squarely onto the individual (Peck 2001). Second, the “social mix” approach, euphemistically labelled by its champions as about “deconcentrating deprivation” (Cowans 2006) is nothing less than “state-sponsored gentrification” (Lees 2003).

References

Allen, C. (2008) Housing Market Renewal and Social Class. Routledge

Balchin, P.N. (1996) ‘The United Kingdom’, ch.14 in Balchin P (ed), Housing Policy in Europe. London and New York: Routledge

Colomb, C. (2007) ‘Unpacking New Labour’s ‘Urban Renaissance’ agenda: Towards a socially sustainable reurbanization of British cities?’, Planning Practice and Research, 22:1, 1-24

Cowans, J. (2006) ‘Cities and Regions of Sustainable Communities – New Strategies’, Town and Country Planning, Tomorrow Series Paper 4

DETR (2000), ‘Housing Policy Statement: Briefing from the Chartered Institute of Housing Quality and Choice: A Decent Home for All –The Way Forward For Housing’, December 2000

Harvey, D. (1989) ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler 71B: 3-17

Imrie, R. and Raco, M. (2003) Urban Renaissance? New Labour, community, and urban policy. Bristol: Policy Press

Lees, L. (2003) ‘Visions of ‘Urban Renaissance’: the Urban Task Force Report and the Urban White Paper, pp.61-82 in Imrie and Raco (eds), Urban Renaissance?

ODPM (2003), ‘Sustainable Communities: Building for the future’, February 2003

Peck, J. (2001) Workfare States. Guildford Press

Autonomous Geographies

UK Housing and Regeneration Policy

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