In today's Daily Telegraph Frank Field writes about Why Labour is losing the working class: Amongst other things he places much emphasis on social housing allocation practices:

Housing remains a flash point. The working-class sense of fairness is mocked by allocation policies that put at the top of the list groups who, in the local community's eye, have less claim than other groups. A policy of housing the homeless is noble. It is the way it is carried out which is so objectionable

Certainly I am sure anyone who has ever stood on a doorstep canvassing for votes or carrying out street surveys could say that they have found people complaining about how those "asylum seekers" get the recently vacated house while they know of a friend or family member that has been on the housing list for as long as anyone can remember. Of course they're not asylum seekers - who are not allowed to be given council housing unless, and it is rare, and almost never in the south of England, there is a surplus, but he goes on...

I have never heard a constituent - even one who has waited in the housing queue for decades - argue against a policy that looks after the homeless. What so many of my constituents object to, as I do, is the way the homeless jump to the top of the queue and are able to choose the best homes. This policy strikes at the very sense of fairness that working people hold. Fairness demands that those who have striven longest should rise to the top of the queue and take the best housing. The accommodation they vacate should then be offered to the homeless

We have also had this argument in Oxford. Indeed the District Auditor and ODPM have got involved in the past in persuading the City Council to give very high levels of nominations (including up to 100% at one point if I remember correctly) to the homeless list in order the better to meet targets for reducing homlessness, of which we do have a great deal in Oxford by comparison with most other places.

But I think Frank's solutions...

Three moves would show that the Government is intent on radical reform. Move one would be to instruct all housing authorities that length of service as good tenants should be the crucial determinant of housing allocation. Other groups would be afforded the accommodation thus released by those tenants with a track record of good citizenship.

Move two would be a partial freeze on the benefit levels for single people until the rate for a couple equalled twice that of the single person. The welfare system would then be seen to cease discriminating financially against those who lived together, particularly so if they have children.

The third reform would be to impose a contributory period before welfare can be drawn. The debate should centre on how long the period should be. Linked to this should be the roll-out of ID cards so that NHS treatment was strictly linked to people's residency in this country.

...fall woefully short, at least for Oxford. I was out canvassing the other day on one of Oxford's least well off council estates. I hate canvassing at the best of times - the very idea of knocking on a stranger's door to ask them what I consider largely to be a personal question about how they are going to vote, never quite sure what the welcome might be like, strikes fear into me. The fact that I do it ought to be enough on its own to get me elected - if I feel so strongly about what I can offer to this fair city that I will put myself through that torture (Okay - once I get going it's not often torture as most people are usually very nice, but getting going is like my first day at a new school all over again, every time!)!

Anyway - I was out canvassing on one of Oxford's poorest estates and a depression set in. Here is a part of town that could be very beautiful. It sits on one side of a valley with tiers of houses facing out to beautiful countryside. But what houses they are! Much of the estate was itself built as part of the relocation estates for the slum clearances of St Ebbe's in the city centre. My impression was that the same needs to happen again somehow.

Much of the estate is made up of prefabricated post-war housing. Some of them have corrugated metal round the upper storey and look for all the world like a couple of static caravans stacked on top of each other. They are all pretty well past their sell-by date. The few brick built streets look a lot better of course and will probably last a good while, but I was astounded to hear that much of "tin town" and the prefabricated concrete housing actually already meets the "Decent Homes" standard which just goes to show how sub- that standard is.

I say we need massive investment in places like that, so that Frank's long suffering tenants with a "track record of good citizenship" which are, after all, the very great majority actually feel like they are getting value. We are building so few social rented houses in Oxford at the moment, and the rate, even if we were to fulfill Labour's ambition of building on large swathes of Green Belt, is unlikely in the foreseeable future even to meet the backlog of need for affordable housing let alone give people already in social rented housing the chance to move into better or more suitable homes.

I reckon that Oxford City Council's housing stock sits on land worth perhaps a billion pounds. Yet nobody is allowed to do what the private sector does all the time - use the value of the land to finance building projects. At least not while the council is owner of the housing stock and bound by Treasury borrowing rules. I feel very sorry for any tenants of these houses who have exercised their right to buy - they have been landed with a lemon (contrast with those who bought a Barbican flat under right to buy and what they might be fetching today).

So what's the answer. We know that Oxford City Council's tenants voted overwhelmingly last year to stick with the council as their landlord in the stock options appraisal. But what alternatives were they offered...

• Large Scale Voluntary Transfer - where a Housing Association takes over the ownership and management of the stock and can borrow against it to invest. What's wrong with that? Well these days many housing associations are becoming more and more remote from their tenants. Our largest in Oxford, Ealing, has become part of a huge housing conglomerate run far from Oxford with little direct accountability through any kind of democratic structure to the people that occupy their homes. Even the city council, where if you don't like what your landlord is doing you have an opportunity, every few years, to try to vote them out of office in local elections, is better than that prospect.
• Transfer to something called an "Arms Length Management Organisation" which traditionally has effectively been a specially created housing association. It can invest and can attract government funding, but your council landlord has to be of a certain standard - providing at least a "two star service" - before it can be trusted to construct such a scheme. And guess what - you won't perhaps be surprised to learn that Oxford has not achieved two stars, and doesn't really look terribly likely to do so.
• And then there's a Private Finance Initiative - well, the least said about that the better - as we have seen from hospitals, schools, roads, almost all the capital investment this Labour government has made, the PFI is a profiteer's charter. And why should big companies rake in huge profits from our social housing stock? I'll blog later about why I think the new "new build" PFIs are an outrageous waste of government resource - transferring yet more tax-payers' money to the already asset rich through profitable schemes that end up with the provider owning the asset and the land on which it was built by them.

So, between a rock, a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, the tenants unsurprisingly elected to stay with the devil, for it had the single advantage of being known to them.

But what if, hypothetically for the moment, there was a mechanism that could:

• Ensure or even enhance democratic control and accountability of the management of the housing stock. Putting control of the stock into the hand of the people that use it - the residents themselves. After all, there are only 20% of the votes that elect the City Council living in council houses - they can be outvoted by all the others and not be able to boot out a badly performing political party controlling their housing - so the current system is far from an ideal democratic accountability.
• Release the sort of levels of equity in the valuable land to carry out vast improvements - even to the extent of rebuilding whole swathes of the estate with top notch modern homes, enabling the least able to afford the forthcoming huge increases in things like energy costs to benefit properly from the modern technologies that make new homes potentially more sustainable and cheaper to run.
• Provide a mechanism where those who wanted to could invest more than their rent in their home, just as in right to buy, but without going into mortgage debt and without taking those homes permanently out of the affordable housing market and handing them to profiteering landlords, for example.
• Include those who have bought their homes under right to buy, enabling them to keep the equity they already have whilst getting new housing for old and an investment in something that is going to stand up longer than they are.

...would it fare any better either in the court of the tenants' opinion or in the council chamber? Maybe not. But the simple fact is that they weren't offered it. Yet this marvelous animal does indeed exist. It's an extension of the work I've been involved with at Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts, and is called the "Community Gateway Model".

So, if we are at all ambitious for the least well off in Oxford, and as I say in the introduction to my personal manifesto if as a city we are to reach our full potential we have to help enable every last citizen to reach theirs, we owe it to them to explore and if it proves viable to offer such an exciting option to them. Let's use the riches we have, in land, in people, in vision, and give long suffering tenants the opportunities they deserve for not just a decent home, but a dream home.

You may be right on housing Frank, but don't try to persuade us that an ID card is part of beating the BNP and their nationalist ideology. ID cards and national registration databases are part of that ideology. What's wrong with your multi-billion pound NHS records system to ensure that the right people get the treatment they are entitled to?