House Proud hat trick

Good news: all three of the House Proud campaign aims have been met.

There was never going to be a better time for Inside Housing and the Chartered Institute of Housing to make the case for housing to policy makers than in the run-up to a general election. We wanted 250 backers, housing featured in all three of the main political parties’ election manifestos and the sector fighting housing’s corner at every opportunity. With just a week to go before the nation goes to the polls, House Proud campaigners can proudly say: ‘We got the hat trick.’

House Proud made a promising start. Within a week of its January launch, housing spokespeople for the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties all backed the campaign assuring us their manifestos would include a housing pledge - a promise they kept when they published those documents earlier this month.

We’ve also got the party leaders on board.

Now, to make sure the prime minister as of next Friday doesn’t forget the housing sector once he has settled into Number 10, we’ve written to each of the wannabe PMs reminding them of their pledges and enclosing a copy of our House Proud petition, signed by more 250 of you. Your accompanying messages demonstrate just how important housing is. We’ve also produced a House Proud booklet summarising the campaign and the key facts and figures, which is free with this issue.

‘It is vital that politicians of all political persuasions understand the importance of housing to the health, social and economic well-being of the country,’ writes an impassioned Alan Humphreys, group chief executive of Grand Union Housing Group.

David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, points out that, unlike health and education, housing policies rarely take centre stage. ‘If politicians really want to invest in health and education, create safe places and protect jobs, the first thing to do is to invest in housing. We must ensure that housing’s voice is loud and clear,’ he says.

Throughout the past four months Inside Housing has published detailed analysis of the benefits good housing delivers to all other social policy areas. Alongside each we published the ‘CIH says’, the institute’s definitive overview of housing’s contribution and a set of killer statistics, showing how much money investment in housing can save from public sector spending elsewhere. And we added hundreds of prospective MPs to our circulation to ensure they know just how important the housing sector’s work is.

When the Conservatives effectively fired the gun on next weeks’s election back in January with an announcement on health, we pointed out that when housing fails to perform its most basic function - keeping its inhabitants safe, warm and dry - it can cause or exacerbate some of the most common health conditions, circulatory, respiratory and mental disease among them.

Next, we moved on to education, quoting statistics from housing charity Shelter which revealed that 1.6 million children - around 13 per cent of the UK’s youngsters - live in overcrowded, temporary, dilapidated, damp or dangerous homes. The charity estimates that a quarter of children living in such conditions gain no GCSEs, compared with a tenth of those housed well.

Onto sustainability and we championed the fact that social homes are already 10 per cent more energy efficient on average than private sector homes, due in part to landlords’ decent homes improvements.

Then we demonstrated how housing providers have been working with local communities to tackle worklessness. Social landlords in England invest £45 million every year to tackle unemployment, benefiting more than 67,000 tenants annually, NHF research revealed.

Housing’s proactive response to population change, including our ageing society, came next. We also highlighted how housing providers are ideally placed to address the localism agenda being pursued in various ways by each of the three main political parties. Based in the heart of their communities, landlords know what’s happening on the ground - which last week brought us on to anti-social behaviour.

Landlords use a range of tools to tackle unacceptable behaviour - from noise abatement notices, to anti-social behaviour orders - and can do so as soon as it arises.

The support our campaign has received has been incredible. Every week our 80-strong House Proud Readers’ Panel reveals which election issues matter most to housing professionals. Readers responded in droves when we asked them to invent the housing policy they’d most like to see in the winning party’s manifesto. The most popular ‘dream policy’, about funding for retrofit, came from Jim Vine, head of UK housing policy and practice programme at the Building and Social Housing Foundation - we asked the prime minister himself if he would adopt it.

With just six days until the election and with our aims met, it’s time to draw the House Proud campaign to a close. But the CIH is determined to continue to keep up the momentum, pushing housing as a key political issue to the next government. And Inside Housing will support them all the way. The campaign may be over but it doesn’t end here. Keep on making the case for housing. Be House Proud.