Can social landlords revive the bold vision of the 70s?

It may be unfair to ask housing associations to take on more of a regeneration brief. After all, it’s not as though they don’t have their own problems, as our article on housing providers taking on the brunt of welfare reform shows.

As the last man standing in communities, they are dealing with the fallout of welfare changes such as the bedroom tax and universal credit. At the National Housing Federation’s Re-imagining Regeneration conference back in January, one housing association chief in a universal credit pilot area described the chaos his residents were going through since the changes were introduced, and the amount of time the organisation now devotes to supporting tenants through those changes. ‘Welfare reform is taking us away from regeneration’, he said.

But precisely because there is no other compelling narrative around regeneration for our poorest communities, it is falling to social landlords to pick up the baton. Many have been involved in wider work for decades, running training and apprenticeship schemes and helping tenants to be financially and digitally savvy.

Some have gone further. On the Limehurst Village estate near Oldham, and in Poplar in east London, housing associations are leading the transformation of those areas. Regional director at Regenda on the Limehurst Village estate Bill Lovat tells his fellow social landlords to look beyond today’s immediate problems and see the bigger picture. ‘If we want long-term resilience, successful housing and communities we have got to take a much more proactive role and think ahead. Don’t become too obsessed with the impact of welfare reform. Look at your role as a neighbourhood leader.’

In the absence of bold thinking elsewhere it is falling to housing associations to be the innovators of place, bringing local partners together, experimenting with new technology and new types of finance, aligning their procurement pots with their localities, partnering with local health trusts, empowering their residents and speaking on their behalf.

There are some ideas about how this can happen in this special edition of New Start. Matt Leach from Hact makes a compelling case for the reinvention of housing providers through data and technology, while Jas Bains, who heads up the Ashram Housing Association, wants government to connect the £21bn it spends on housing benefit each year with the social value created by social landlords in their areas.

The 1970s and 80s saw the creation of a new wave of housing associations, deeply connected to their communities. Their names usually identified the place from which they had sprung, often through the efforts of community activists pushing for local change. Due to mergers in the sector many of those local names have now been lost and housing associations are under pressure to move into more commercial areas of housing provision.

Social landlords are dealing with the huge changes to their businesses, to the communities in which they operate, and the circumstances of their residents; they are being called upon to be bold and create a new narrative for localities; to fill the gap as regeneration shrinks. It’s a lot to ask but many are reasserting their social mission and re-affirming their commitment to people and place, and in so doing, they are reviving that spirit of community activism and social change from which they sprang.

• To read our March issue on housing click here.