Decentralised Management of Socially Rented Housing

Abstract

The housing sector is particularly interesting for at least two reasons. First, unlike the schools and hospitals, the local authority housing departments that chose to transfer their housing stock to a housing association devised the transfer process themselves. They were, of course, responding to government policy, but they chose their own route out of the public sector to become autonomous service delivery agencies. This was not at all what the government had expected; as outlined in Chapter 4, the government’s own opt-out strategy of tenants’ choice was a policy failure, producing only a few transfers and leading to the eventual winding down of the Housing Corporation’s initiative to promote it. Second, the transfers were not to a new type of agency but to a new (in a few later cases to an existing) housing association, which could take its place in a large and comparatively favoured subsector.