SHI deserves a B+

I am very glad you suggest that the Starter Home Initiative should be awarded a "pass" rather than be branded a failure. Boy, that makes us feel all the work we are doing is really worthwhile!

The slow progress on SHI was initially because registered social landlords had to liaise with more than 50 different employer contacts, each with their own specific eligibility criteria and their own very specific requirements. That took time to untangle.

Rather than just broad-brush selling, we target resources where recruitment and retention was particularly bad; and if we had accepted direct nominations from employers that would give rise to taxable benefits and national insurance contributions having to be paid. So, our marketing had to be general but to very limited, local, groups of staff. To advertise widely would have simply ended up with thousands of disappointed key workers who were ineligible for assistance because they did not meet the criteria.

Secondly and most importantly, since the time RSLs bid for SHI in April 2001, house prices in the lowest quartiles in London went up, on average, 45%. Given that the grant was, in effect, fixed (to achieve specific out-turn units) and limited to certain value limits it is hardly surprising that sales have taken time to effect. In between all of that we have had to cope with a dilatory response in help with marketing from at least 30% of key employers, a flattening of the market due to the uncertainty in the gulf, the dire warnings of a housing crash for the last year and so on.

Your article highlights the fact that keyworkers from overseas are ineligible for SHI. What needs to be done is to ensure that there is more intermediate rented homes available for that category of key worker. I am sure this will happen through Communities Plan funding assuming the regional housing boards make it a priority.

The lessons to be learned for the future, apart from each local authority and key employer having detailed and robust,

up-to-date information on the needs of the intermediate sector as they do on the social rented sector, are:

• for there to be clear, local and accountable champions who will facilitate marketing
  
• for grant to be more flexible to suit local needs
  
• for conditions and restrictions to be minimised so providers can get the job done and help make a difference to public services.

I would say we deserve a B+ so far. To all those negative whingers who complain about low take-up, about how SHI isn't working, I say: tell that to the key workers whose lives we are changing.

It might not be working as well as we had all hoped, but it is money for housing, it's a pilot and there is a lot more money earmarked.