What Is Housing Management?

Abstract

Although this book is about housing management, as the above quotes indicate, there has in the past been little clear consensus as to what such a term actually means. A growing emphasis on value for money via competition and contract specifications has more recently provided a focus around which a common definition has become established. It has concentrated largely on output-related landlord functions, crystallised within the concept of the ‘Social Housing Product’ (see Chapter 11) introduced in the 1995 White Paper Our Future Homes (DoE, 1995b). The motivation has been to develop a series of measurable performance standards which might appropriately be applied to an increasingly diverse range of landlord organisations. This has become particularly important in the light of the political commitment to promote housing companies and the potential extension of Social Housing Grant (the replacement for HAG) to private developers. A common set of standards would in theory allow the establishment of a level playing field on which services might realistically be compared, irrespective of the organisation delivering them. However, this has generated a growing concern amongst existing housing associations that the future allocation of grant may be heavily influenced by, or directly linked to, performance comparisons achieved by the production of league tables of measured output.

‘There is no standard definition of housing management. This paper assumes that the activity centres on the landlord activities of the local authority.’

(DoE, Competing for Quality in Housing, 1992)

‘At the moment, there are no universally agreed national standards for housing management services provided by social landlords. Indeed, there is no agreed definition as to what housing management is, or as to what kind or level of service landlords should give to customers.’

(Chartered Institute of Housing, Housing Standards Manual, 1993)

‘There is no generally accepted definition of what constitutes a standard unit of housing management output and in practice there appears to be considerable variation in both range and level of services provided by housing authorities.’

(DoE, Empirical Study into the Costs of Local Authority Housing Management, 1992)