Jon Rouse's speech to NHF Conference, 22/09/2004

The full text follows, and is also attached to this page as an Adobe PDF file for ease of printing and distribution.

Last weekend I was doing some work on a Habinteg HA property in my own neighbourhood of Southfields. It was an infill scheme, probably completed in the early 90s. providing special needs accommodation for people with disabilities.

There was a family of three living in the house we were working on, a mother recently out of hospital and now confined to a wheelchair and her two teenage sons. She was confronted with the daunting day-to-day struggle of living with a debilitating long term illness, the gnawing loneliness caused by isolation and the recent departure of her partner, and the task of trying to keep her sons on the straight and narrow.

But in the midst of this struggle were the housing association, providing and adapting this lifetime home with ongoing specialist support.

Talking to the family, which was infinitely preferable to the task of painting, I was struck by the most difficult question I face as Chief Executive of the Housing Corporation - how to bridge the day to day reality of housing association work on the ground, the reality of working with a family like this, with the perpetual policy discourse played out in the thinner air of the corridors of Whitehall. It is this clash of micro and macro, the need to implement policy in a way that somehow meets the needs of a Habinteg and the residents whom they serve, while still satisfying the relentless numerical demands of the Treasury and others. This is what keeps me awake at night.

I regard my speech today as the second half of a two-parter. The first part I gave at Harrogate at the CIH conference stared through the macro end of the telescope. It took the policy imperatives flowing from the Communities Plan, as filtered through the analysis of the Barker and Gershon reviews, to present a picture of where the Housing Corporation was heading. Its central premise was that we were moving from being the allocator of grant to becoming the procurer of new homes on behalf of Government, and from a one size fits all model of regulation to a risk-based model. It also talked about the particular demands of regional devolution, growth areas, renewal areas, special purpose vehicles and the like. You can find it and read it if you like on our website.

Here in Birmingham, I want to turn my telescope around and look at the world from the perspective of you as a sector. Using a range of examples, and here's the first, I want to set out where I think the housing association movement, (to the extent that we can still talk about a single movement), might be heading, and about how the Housing Corporation can help.

Like my Chairman, Peter Dixon, I was a huge fan of the sector long before I arrived at the Corporation. My career has criss-crossed the work of the sector, from the HA sponsorship division at the then Department of the Environment through partnership in estate renewal while working in London local government to working on affordable warmth schemes in the charitable sector, from the high policy terrain of the Housing Minister's office through the reality of building in social housing to gap funding at English Partnerships and finally, to exemplary design work at CABE.

I consider the growth of the HA sector in this country to be an international phenomenon of historic importance. I also believe that the movement is the best example of the Third Way that the Prime Minister is likely to find during his tenure, with £27 billion of public money and £22 billion of private finance now embedded in almost 2 million homes.

I am therefore firmly on your side from day one. There will be times when you doubt it, perhaps the advent of grant for non-RSLs or the harsh sting of efficiency data, but there is nothing I want more than to see this sector prosper. This support is not borne from nostalgia