The community of the future
Brian Devlin: Director of Regeneration Services, Stirling Council
Gillian Young: Director, Newhaven Research
Gillian Young and Brian Devlin looked into the crystal ball to see what the future holds for social housing in Scotland.
Brian began the session by looking at the £120 million Raploch regeneration initiative in Stirling. The council led initiative includes a number of partners including community reps and the local health board.
Raploch is an ambitious 10 year programme to deliver sustainable mixed tenure housing that will increase levels of local prosperity. At the moment 21% of the stock is owner occupied although the target is for 40%. They also intend to increase the average household income from the current level of £6,000 to a target of £30,000.
They have developed a unique design guide that covers the houses, streets and neighbourhood layout to help to speed up planning and ensure the highest level of design.
As well as providing housing they are trying to develop the community by including a community benefit clause in the private sector contracts. This requires contractors to create a number of employment opportunities for local residents. The project has a target of 150 construction jobs, 20 apprenticeships and 100 long-term jobs.
The future holds a number of challenges and he admitted that keeping the community on side over 10 years will be hard. They are also considering moving from one year business cycle to a longer term business plan. The must also increase the business to satisfy local demand for housing while keeping the customer at the heart of the business.
Gillian young delivered a summary of the research that Newhaven Research has recently completed for the CIH Scotland on the future of social housing. The research has shown that in 1981 the population of social tenants mirrored the general make-up of the population but this is no longer the case as the sector is dominated by pensioner households, young single people and lone parents. They have also found that the majority of the sector are not economically active.
The research suggests that by 2020 things will have changed again. They predict that as little as 8% of the population could rent from social landlords. They also expect that there will be even more single people entering social housing and that we can expect fewer long-term tenancies because of the impact from recent homelessness legislation. Controversially, they say that the evidence is clear that there will be falling demand for social housing as people become increasingly prosperous and demographic changes reduce demand for social housing.
She suggested that landlords can expect to be housing more demanding tenants and may have to provide an increasing range of services. She also said that some landlords will have to ask themselves if they only want to house people with complex housing needs or if this narrow focus will jeopardise efforts to build sustainable communities.
The overall conclusion is that the role of social housing is at a cross-road and we need to start debating what future we want – a future based on residualisation or a wider remit looking at low income households.