On 7th April Grant Shapps announced Tenant Cashback; there was the press release with footnotes saying that three housing associations thought it was a good idea and they would be happy to pilot the proposed scheme.
The media got exited, Mr Shapps was interviewed and largely repeats the press release and commentators give their views.
But if you try to find any details behind the proposals there aren’t any! The idea has been thrown into the arena for people to pull and push about, to put it to the test and to expend time, effort and money to see if it is a practical idea.
Surely there should be a responsibility on government to provide a little more detail
Of course nobody wants to say that tenant choice is a bad idea, and few want to offend the Minister, so most formal responses are prefixed with ‘We are very much in favour of tenant choice and welcome the proposal…but we need to look at what the difficulties may be’ or words to that effect (see the Chartered Institute of Housing and National Housing Federation responses).
Surely there should be a responsibility on government to provide a little more detail when making proposals and at least be able to demonstrate that the proposals have been evaluated to some degree before being announced.
There has been comment that tenants will be able to claim up to a thousand pounds a year for repairs that they do themselves, or commission themselves, but this was not in the press release (and I can find no other formal information about the proposals); the press release said that social landlords currently spend a thousand pounds a year in repairs per household – it didn’t say this was how much each household would be allowed. But even this figure has been disputed by Abi Davis, from the CIH who, speaking on BBC Radio 4′s You and Yours programme, said the figure is more like five to six hundred pounds and HQN, who were reported on the Inside Housing website as saying that on average homes have three response repairs a year valued at one hundred pounds each. I give this as just one example of how the nature of the announcement causes confusion and uncertainty that wastes time and money when it can least be afforded.
This isn’t a blog entry about the Tenant Cashback scheme itself, that will follow when I too have spent time and energy developing my own response to it, but this is about how responsible government should develop policy.
Posted by Peter Bird 
