“A fresh eye”

On Wednesday, Rhun ap Iorwerth confirmed that Siân Gwenllian will be the new Minister for Local Government, Housing and Planning.  Looking back over the posts on this blog, Siân Gwenllian was prolific and thoughtful in the previous Senedd when she held the housing portfolio for Plaid.  It’s fair to say I was an admirer of the policy documents which were produced during that time, which were informed and engaged well beyond the norm in politics.  We can expect quite a lot of action, then, because quite a lot of pre-thinking has gone in to what needs to be done in Wales.  As Stuart Ropke (the CE of Community Housing Cymru) told Inside Housing (£), ““I think the benefit of not being in power and having set policy positions that you’ve been wedded to means that you can take a fresh eye.”

There are some policy positions with which all will agree, as they did in their manifestos, but also some issues which are likely to require quite a lot of thought.  For me, the two most significant issues on which policy thinking will need to move quickly are around the right to housing, and the manifesto commitment to limit rent increases.  There are also devolution issues – the extent to which we can control policy on leasehold and social security.  They want to remove refuge provision from the supported housing security provisions of Renting Homes, which I would like to talk to them about (because that is a policy mis-step imho).  But, remember also the first 100 days document, which promised, that they will “[o]utline proposals on making renting in Wales fairer, and begin the work of legislating for a Right to Adequate Housing”, as well as establish Unnos.

It will also be interesting to see what impact a “Housing First, trauma-informed and person-centred approach to tackling homelessness” will look like.  I’ve been doing some work recently looking at TV shows about homelessness administration and decision-making – did you ever watch that fly-on-the-wall series, How to get a council house? – and one of the striking things about those shows is the way common myths about homelessness are transposed and embedded in the psyche of decision-makers.  Once we get rid of priority need and intentionality, how much of a difference will that make?  I suspect academics might pull out their slightly dusty copy of Michael Lipsky’s classic, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services.  Although Lipsky’s work was conducted in the US, it has had considerable salience and cut-through in to UK academic studies of bureaucratic decision-making.  For our purposes in this context, some of the commonalities are around issues arising from chronically inadequate resourcing relative to the tasks homelessness officers are required to perform, conflicting goal expectations, and the social construction of clients.  Now, the commitment to person-centred, trauma-informed approaches will require a culture change from the ritual processing of humans in to clients, and the resourcing of this culture change will be a significant issue.  The so-called culture change in England towards “personalised housing plans” might be more readily understood as pre-formatted responses which produce a plan at a click of the mouse – in other words, more of the same.  I don’t think that is being cynical.  Homelessness decision-making (at least in England) is readily characterised as bureaucratic gatekeeping a limited resource.  It requires prioritisation, and Lipsky recognises that street-level bureaucrats sort clients.  The key question will be how these changes will sort clients in Wales.  One recent piece of academic research* suggests that homelessness services are becoming sorting mechanisms for discriminating (lawfully) between those who are able to participate in the private market and those who are not: “Our argument is that, here, assistance allocations do more than ration housing resources. They also sort people for different kinds of assistance outcomes based on assessment of their capacity for ‘market independence'”.  This is a powerful reminder of the limits of what can be done through law and decision-making in a situation where there is limited social housing stock.

The intentions are good (albeit that resources limited and partly outside our control), and the next few months will be exciting for us housing nerds.