PARTY CONFERENCES 2013
Conservative Party Conference 2013
Adam Hewitt reports from the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. ‘For
hardworking people’ was the unavoidable phrase at the
Conservative Party Conference this year – the words were in every speech, every soundbite, every press release and written in huge letters up on the wall and at the conference centre’s entrance.
The message seems designed to subconsciously implant the idea that the other parties, specifi cally Labour, are not for hardworking people – ‘strivers versus shirkers’.
The conference’s main announcements focused on this debate, such as the proposal to cut benefi ts eligibility for anyone under 25 who is not ‘earning or learning’, bringing forward the second phase of Help to Buy, and new welfare cuts to help bring about a budget surplus if the Conservatives win the next election.
Outside the hall
As always, the real debate and the best ideas at the conference could be found not in the main hall but around the fringe.
Among the sessions attended by the PSE team was an interesting debate on the future of social housing, hosted by Policy Exchange.
Welfare reform minister Lord Freud discussed direct payments in the social housing sector and getting landlords to help tenants with “basic lifestyle skills” like budgeting and food preparation. He said: “We’re moving to a position where a minority of people in social housing are in work.”
He said there was a “misallocation of resource” because of under-supply of single-bedroom social
discussed the fi nancing of new social housing. He said there should be more joint venture partnerships and other new delivery vehicles.
Grainia Long, who leads the Chartered Institute of Housing, noted that housing associations have billions of pounds of debt that has to be funded through rents and that the sector plays a “phenomenal” economic role.
When managed well, social housing can reduce burdens on the NHS and care systems, on the criminal justice systems and improve society in other ways.
She noted a shift from capital support to revenue support for social housing, and asked: “Is that shift the best form of value for money for the taxpayer? No – there needs to be a better balance.”
housing,
adding: “I’d like to see housing associations building the homes we need, because clearly we have got a misallocation. We’re sending the wrong message.”
But Mark Henderson, CEO of Home Group, said there’s a perception that social housing is misused, but “that’s actually very rare”, and
28 | public sector executive Sep/Oct 13 Selling off high-value social housing
Alex Morton, head of housing and planning at Policy Exchange, called it a “natural desire” to own your own home, and said the current social housing policy environment was the “worst of both worlds” – not a proper market, but not a properly centrally-planned system either.
He called for sell-offs of higher-value social housing to fund new housebuilding, which could be funded through better-planned new estates. He said: “We built a lot of very bad estates…we could replace those estates with new homes, rehouse every tenant and pay for it by selling private homes on the land”.
© Tim Goode and EMPICS Entertainment
© Stefan Rousseau and PA Wire
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