Strangled by regulation

In the case of Family First, that is quite true – an organisation that offers a holistic service of which housing is only part, we are delivering the government's inclusiveness policy and have been for nearly 40 years, yet we are constantly being distracted, having our time wasted, by immaterial regulation.

For example, the diversity policy (which never become policy but we were encouraged, if not strong-armed, to follow) wasted more than two years of senior management time in looking at mergers, restructuring and so on, when we could have been doing better things. We have been struggling to catch up ever since, with no acknowledgement from the Housing Corporation of the problems it caused us.

Perhaps the corporation should give themselves a red symbol under the "properly managed" category for that piece of bureaucratic ineptitude.

Furthermore the corporation's sale, a few years back, of its investment property portfolio, without consultation, has resulted in the waste of millions of pounds of public money in RSLs having to bear over-the-top interest rates.

We – and many other smaller bodies, I suspect – are only in the housing net because of some bureaucratic tidiness many years ago. Somebody up there needs to get their head around this problem.

Barker is right that the starting point of the Communities Plan needs to be rather higher. Housing policies should not conflict with the government's inclusiveness policies, which I wholeheartedly support.

Yet I am sure that, if past performance is anything to go on, the silo approach of the executive branch of government will continue to fail the policies.

How is it that we can only build 175,000 houses in 2001, when Harold Macmillan delivered on a promise of one million new homes in a year in the 1950s?

Let us stop fiddling round the edges of small RSLs – leave them out and get on with the big job. I am sure the corporation would be pleased to ignore the time-consuming smaller RSLs and get on with the bigger seas and fish.

Of course there have to be safeguards, so why not make it easier for RSLs to privatise their housing stock and escape the dead hand of regulation and get on and produce more housing? You'd think that we were on different sides of the fence.

Both RSLs and the Housing Corporation should feel that they have the same objective of producing better and more housing for the people of this country. It doesn't feel like it.