Revival: Health of Scottish Housing (2001) by Colin Jones Peter Robson

Author:Colin Jones, Peter Robson [Colin Jones, Peter Robson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781138725287
Google: OR8uDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 39232671
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Living in an Adult World: 1989 Onwards

There were, however, three main clouds on the horizon that would have a fundamental effect on housing associations. The first was concerned with the positioning of the movement within the housing system, the second was organisational, and the third was urban policy. All were government driven; the first two were forecast in the 1987 White Paper, Housing; The Government's Proposals for Scotland (Scottish Development Department, 1987a), while the third was set out in a 1988 policy document New Life for Urban Scotland (Scottish Office, 1988).

The first was based around two premises:

•

that the association had a vital part to play in the revival of the rented sector’;

•

that associations should be given the opportunity to fund their projects from the private sector, thus improving their effectiveness.

Moving housing associations into the independent sector (ie. putting associations in with private rent) appeared to some to be a backward step. Housing associations had been treated as part of the private sector until 1980. Associations are a public/private hybrid. The Tenant's Rights etc (Scotland) Act 1980 had given association tenants all the rights of secure tenants (ie equivalent to the public sector) except for the Right to Buy, although rents were still determined by the rent officer. This had gone further when the 1987 act extended the Right to Buy to tenants of non charitable associations with more than 100 dwellings. What was proposed was that new association dwellings should be on the basis of assured tenancies, which would duffer from existing tenancies on several grounds and that associations would be free to set their own rents. The perception of associations and tenants was that these would diminish security of tenure. The government's argument was that the assured tenancy would enable associations to reassure private sector lenders of security for their loans.

The introduction of private finance was the signal that government money was not going to continue to grow at the rate it had in the past. If expansion was to take place it would have to involve private money. Private finance was not unexpected. Shared owners had borrowed private finance as part of the LCHO programme. The Corporation had begun discussions with the SFHA on how it might be applied to rented housing following the recommendations of the Duke of Edinburgh's Inquiry (National Federation of Housing Associations, 1985) and experiments in England and Wales in an effort to increase output there. The immediate implications from south of the border appeared to be that private finance would lead to reduced grant levels, resulting in either a lower quality of new build product, or the abandonment of rehabilitation (already almost as expensive as new build in some cases because of acquisition values – associations becoming victims of their own success) or higher rents, or larger associations to take advantage of scale or all four. This appeared to associations to strike at the heart of their rented programmes.

The second concerned the Housing Corporation. The Government had decided that the Scottish Special Housing

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