Spreading Cathy's message

It is almost impossible to read a housing blog these days without a reference to the upcoming 50th anniversary of Cathy Come Home. I’ve done it already, haven’t I? But it is the theme of this blog.

It’s not just that the anniversary is a huge thing for me and my association – like many others South Yorkshire Housing Association (SYHA) was formed in the wake of ‘Cathy’, and I personally decided I wanted to work in housing when I first saw it – it’s also that homelessness has been rising for five years, and it could be about to get a whole lot worse. 

I was at a round table arranged by Crisis last week which was attended by around 20 local authority heads of homeless services. All over the country the message is the same: private landlords are withdrawing their properties from people in housing need and/or on benefit. Landlords are switching to Airbnb or more up-market lettings and, as welfare cuts bite – the overall benefit cap reduces sharply on 7 November – poorer people’s ability to pay private sector rents is decreasing. One London borough is losing access to the private sector at the rate of 2% per month.

And we know that the supply of social housing is being choked off as well through a combination of Right to Buy, conversions to affordable rent, and the switch in the capital programme towards homeownership products.

“This is not about nostalgia, it is about addressing what is happening right now.”

The first significant comment I have heard from the new housing minister, Gavin Barwell, is to describe street homelessness as a moral outrage. Good on him. That’s where the government should be focusing right now.

But it is not good enough for us to wring our hands and swap stories about the increasing destitution being made visible on the streets through rough sleeping – we need to act.

We will all have our ideas about how to do this. Here are two that I am personally involved with. Firstly, South Yorkshire Housing Association, together with our friends at Great Places, has been working with the Sheffield City Region team to talk about how housing devolution could work locally and how we could ramp up housing supply. The local enterprise partnership’s economic strategy provides for housing supply to be trebled to accommodate inward mobility as our economy expands. In working up our response to this we had to go through an “oh my God!” moment when we reviewed the new development plans of our colleagues in local housing organisations. Far from trebling, the bids that were submitted on 2 September saw a significant reduction. The Sheffield City Region used to be right up there with the Leeds City Region in terms of new delivery. Not any more. This is not about land (Philip Hammond, you have got it wrong!). This is why devolution and the formulation of Local Plans that suit local markets and economies are so essential. Solutions developed within the M25 do not work where we are.

But we have worked up a plan which sees contributions from local housing organisations increasingly sharply, and this has now been submitted to the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) and to the minister. I was delighted that the HCA was in touch within three days asking to get round the table to talk about what we can do.

Secondly, we are working with 20 other housing associations who have set up Homes for Cathy. Check out our website. As well as commissioning theatre productions, workshops, exhibitions, showings of Cathy, events in parliament and engagement with national and local politicians, our Homes for Cathy team has developed an education pack. We want to take this issue out to schools and we are asking them to build it into their curriculum for the year. I am meeting one of the local secondary school heads tonight to ask her to do just this. We have then commissioned the Cardboard Citizens theatre company (50% professional actors and 50% homeless people) to stage Cathy 2016. They are coming up to Sheffield to put on three performances at the Crucible Theatre. SYHA will be buying 200 of the 2,000 tickets and passing them out to colleagues in, for example, local health services and schools to ensure the Cathy message burns brightly once again.

This is not about nostalgia, it is about addressing what is happening right now.

Tony Stacey, chief executive, South Yorkshire Housing Association