Ruling classes

So Number 10 wants to regulate – or rather rationalise — the regulators.

The Audit Commission may find itself bundled together with the other inspectors who regularly call at the town hall, looking for benefit fraud, code infringements and the like.

For registered social landlords, chopping and changing regulation may not seem a big deal. The transfer of housing inspections from the Housing Corporation to the Audit Commission went smoothly enough. Chief inspector Roy Irwin has been Mr Continuity.

Yet these regulatory changes, if they go ahead, could be a further sign that the “special status” claimed by some housing associations is just not recognised by the government. Some big RSLs have allowed themselves to dream of a white Christmas with public limited company written above the mantelpiece; official thinking is going in the opposite direction.

As far as Labour ministers are concerned (and the same seems to apply to their shadows in the other parties), associations are adjunct parts of the public sector. They answer to the same fiscal and regulatory logic as local authorities. And they will do as they are told when the government changes rents or regional administration.

Talking of regulators, I was thinking recently about those organisations that could be said to be vital to public service provision but which are audit free. The example in mind was the National Housing Federation. With its head Jim Coulter retiring, there’s a valedictory note in the air. Imagine inspectors visiting head office. How might his tenure be assessed? What performance criteria could be said to apply to a membership-based organisation?

Jim might say the NHF is already “audited” – RSL boards and executives must periodically renew their subscriptions. They stay because they respect the work it did, for example, on rents convergence. The NHF is the only body that offers collective representation for RSLs but the big associations can and do represent themselves individually to, say, John Prescott.

It’s an achievement of the Coulter era that we haven’t seen the emergence in social housing of some equivalent of the Russell Group of top universities – the dozen or so research institutions whose vice-chancellors used to get together for coffee in the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury.

So what would the “auditors” say about the NHF? They would certainly pick up on In Business for Neighbourhoods and wonder if, a year on, it has had discernible results, on the ground or in policy.

Back to the real auditors. Under steady chief executive Steve Bundred the commission isn’t going to let its dismay at Labour’s possible third-term plans to rationalise it get in the way of rolling out phase two of the comprehensive performance assessment. The methodology is being revised to include new dimensions of local life. The most intriguing of these is “community cohesion”. How might it be measured? Is lack of crime a good proxy; can the quality of race relations be reliably assessed? Good, demanding questions.

Here is mine, for the NHF: has your work on neighbourhoods made any real impression?

Perhaps to gauge that we must wait and see whether RSLs who signed up to the In Business agenda do actually figure in the commission’s rating of cohesion as major local players.