Pick ‘n’ mix

It is perhaps the prickliest of all terms in housing. Politicians are happy to do it, but they’re loath to talk about it. It was at the centre of the largest electoral scandal in recent history, but is becoming increasingly enshrined in government policy. And as the main parties unveil their policies in the run up to the general election, you will definitely be seeing much more of it in 2005. Yes, it’s our old friend, social engineering.

Simply put, social engineering in housing is the attempt to control the demographics of certain neighbourhoods in order to change their behaviour. The idea has been around for some time, of course, but is now moving to the forefront of government thinking as a critical tool in regeneration and the battle against social exclusion.

In November, for example, the Greater London Authority and the Housing Corporation urged London’s councils and housing associations to allocate as much as 15% of lettings to people with jobs (HT, 26 November 2004). Yet people are cagey about describing it. “I don’t like to refer to this as social engineering,” said Neale Coleman, policy adviser to the mayor of London.

But why not? Stipulating that a certain number of allocations must go to a certain group – the waged – certainly qualifies as social engineering. Later, Coleman was happy to admit that “the whole talk about ‘mixed’ and ‘balanced’ communities is a euphemism for social engineering”. It is also increasingly clear that in housing – and across the whole spectrum of government policy – the pace of the process will step up in the near-inevitable Labour third term.

So what is the thinking behind the government’s growing willingness to intervene in this way? And what is it about the term that makes politicians happy to do it, but unable to say it?

The Tory laboratory

“My particular reason for saying that was partly tongue in cheek,” Coleman says, explaining his reluctance. “I was a Labour councillor in Westminster at the time of Shirley Porter’s ‘homes for votes’ business, and one of those who referred the council to the auditors. That policy was characterised in secret papers by the Tories as being social engineering. In this case [allocating lettings to those with jobs], one is talking about motives that are not fiddling an election.”

Porter illegally targeted homes in marginal wards for sale to potential Conservative voters. This could be seen as were the practical conclusion of the social rationale of Michael Heseltine, legislative father of the right to buy. He believed that by selling council homes, and thus mixing homeowners with council tenants, the tenants would acquire the social habits of their homeowning neighbours, even, perhaps, vote with them – and this, Heseltine believed, would favour the Tories.

So the term has taken on a distinctly disreputable air. “If you embark on a housing initiative with an eye on how it will affect voting patterns, that’s wrong,” says Coleman. “It’s like saying you’ll admit people to hospital if they’ll vote for you.”

There is also a widespread sense that, whatever good it might achieve, the idea of social engineering would never be popular with the public. “In political terms, it comes down to a liberal idea that you don’t want government messing with people’s lives,” says Paul Skidmore, a senior researcher at think-tank Demos and an expert in the ways government attempts to influence people’s behaviour. “It’s a centralist, planning-based approach and that can be unpopular.”

There is a growing sense that social engineering can, and should, be used for good

An end to polarised politics

But the controversy surrounding the concept is fading and there is a growing sense that social engineering can, and should, be used for good. “If you do it right, and do it sensibly, that’s not a problem,” says Coleman. “The political situation is now so much less polarised.” Take the politics of homeownership, for example. Whereas Heseltine could be fairly certain that a homeowner was likely to be a Conservative voter, and that a council tenant was more likely to opt for Labour, that is no longer true.

So policies designed to regenerate Britain’s cities based on social engineering are not so likely to be attacked on the grounds that they are Porter-style vote-rigging. More important, though, has been the realisation among the political class that the ideology behind the allocation of social homes for the past 30 or 40 years has been, unintentionally and with the best of motives, social engineering of a disastrous kind.

In short, an allocations policy based on greatest need, although fair in principle, has had the effect of making extreme poverty an “entrance requirement” for some estates, and has thus concentrated deprivation into sink estates. “If ever I saw social engineering, it was in the allocations policy that put those poor people in those places,” says Lord Richard Best, director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. This was nobody’s intention. “It isn’t a divisive political issue. I’ve never found a politician who said that poor people should be put in separate areas.”

It is in addressing the problem of these persistent ghettos that the Labour government has brought 25 years of housing policy almost full circle. Just as Heseltine thought that social housing tenants had much to learn from their “betters”, deputy prime minister John Prescott’s department now wants to rescue the sink estates by introducing into them the relatively better-off, the employed, and those of tenures other than subsidised rental.

Skidmore says that the government is moving towards the idea that owning assets has a more positive effect on people’s behaviour than receiving benefits: “You can move little pieces of money around from one group to another, but in the long run the best road out of poverty is to increase assets. That’s the thinking behind Child Trust Funds, and also about homeownership.”

Social capital

Underpinning this is the idea that sink estates not only contain poverty, they perpetuate it, which is in turn bound up with notions of “social capital” originating in the USA. Put simply, this is the social and economic benefit people reap from those around them and the networks they operate in. You are more likely to find a job if you know someone who has one. This notion emerged in the early 1990s in the USA and was popularised by Robert D Putnam, a US professor of public policy and author of Bowling Alone, the definitive text on the subject.

By 2001, the notion of social capital had jumped the Atlantic, along with the mixed-tenure ideals of US housing regeneration projects such as Hope VI. In 2001, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation commissioned former journalist and policy analyst Nicholas Schoon to write a book about how to bring about urban regeneration and coax people back into stigmatised inner-city areas.

The next phase of government policy is likely to be more direct intervention in neighbourhoods

In The Chosen City, Schoon came down forcefully in favour of mixed tenure and mixed communities. Social capital formed a large part of his rationale. He wrote: “Poor, unemployed people who live in deprived areas and depend upon state benefits lack useful connections and networks that the rest of us take for granted. Because they are short of both work experience and contacts inside the world of work, they find it much harder to get jobs. Because their income is low and their address has a bad reputation, it is difficult for them to get credit. Potential employers may also reject them because they come from a bad neighbourhood.”

Schoon’s solution was that all developments of nine or more homes for private sale include a proportion of homes for social rent, and vice versa. This, slowly and surely, would blur the boundaries between the ghettos of the deprived and the better-off as they infiltrated each other’s domains. “Tenants would prefer to live in more mixed communities, in places which look and feel like ordinary streets,” he wrote. “The aim should be to turn every council and housing association estate into a place where owner occupation is the dominant form of tenure and where most people would be happy to live.”

Central government caught on to the idea of engineering social capital back into social housing in April 2002, when a discussion paper by the Performance and Innovation Unit at the Cabinet Office said that “the life chances of disadvantaged individuals can be transformed by the presence in their personal networks of even a single employed individual”. But even as it talked of the dispersal of social housing via planning gain contracts with private developers and the purchase of more property in wealthier areas by RSLs, it added a gloomy footnote: “The benefits of such dispersal policies would not be immediate and might take decades to realise.”

At the Joseph Rowntree Foundation centenary conference in York last month, professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick’s keynote address dealt with themes of tenure mixing and social capital under the title “Poverty of Place”. Clusters of poor wards, she said, affect not only the scale but also the nature of poverty in Northern cities, creating “a sense of almost insurmountable distance to opportunity for some of those living within them. They [young people] think there’s no jobs here, so there’s no jobs anywhere.”

Fitzpatrick noted that the “best” solution would, of course, be the outright abolition of poverty, but “we should not await a more egalitarian society before attempting to ameliorate the problems of those who suffer poverty-related hardship. As long as spatial concentration is one of the factors which exacerbate this hardship, then I would argue that there is scope for ‘place’ as well as ‘people’ policies.” These “place-based” strategies should include initiatives that would connect people to job opportunities and raise community expectations and aspirations, and also a drive to create mixed communities.

Stepping up the pace

The government has admitted that current planning and allocation policies will lead to change only very slowly, but there are signs that it is beginning to consider policies that will speed the process up. Since social engineering is likely to be ingrained in John Prescott’s five-year housing plan, due to launch next week, what can we expect?

The next phase in policy is likely to be more direct intervention in neighbourhoods to change behaviour, says Skidmore. “The government is becoming more prepared to use sticks than carrots and sermons,” he says. “The smoking ban is a prime example of this.” In neighbourhood terms, this will mean a change in emphasis. “At the moment, the government is locked in a very ‘hard’ phase, spending a great deal of money and building houses; with that in place, it will start to look at what softer solutions are available and what they can do … things like the Home Zones initiative.”

“Home Zones” changes the use of residential streets by a variety of measures including traffic calming and encouraging children to play in streets by making them safer. These measures, aimed at bringing life back into streets, getting neighbours interacting and boosting social capital, are “soft” approaches to social engineering that were floated in the Performance and Innovation Unit paper back in 2002. It suggested closing strategic alleyways and throughroutes on “problem” estates . The paper also suggested that residents be given more power to purchase and run areas of semi-public space – for instance, communal gardens.

Softer approaches are extremely likely to be the centrepiece of the next phase of government housing policy, as social engineering moves closer to the heart of New Labour’s agenda. As for the expression “social engineering” itself, don’t expect to hear it in any ministerial speeches any time soon. But do expect to see it, in an increasing number of ways, in every element of social housing policy. HT