Providing and managing proper social housing demands complex skills – we urgently need real housing professionals, writes LORCAN SIRR

FROM policy to management, the area of social housing is a complex one. It requires specialised skill, and will increasingly do so in the next five to 10 years. Yet neither local nor central government appears to have any professional housing staff. This is a significant problem.

What we do have, however, are more than 80 housing authorities, an amount which urgently needs reducing, and a waiting list of more than 98,000 applications, representing more than 150,000 individuals.

These figures do not simplistically divide into the 300,000 vacant houses across Ireland, partly because many of these houses are in places where people do not want to live.

Instead of housing professionals, authorities, architects, engineers and administrative staff look after the provision and maintenance of social housing, currently over 100,000 units.

Being able to design a house or develop a maintenance schedule, however, does not make a professional housing person.

Housing professionals understand not just housing design, but also social policy, landlord and tenant law, national, regional and local housing strategy, funding, delivery mechanisms, regulation, appropriate long-term maintenance, and the regeneration of new and existing locations for housing.

It is telling that the main organisation for housing professionals, the Chartered Institute of Housing, is not in the Republic of Ireland (although it is in Northern Ireland).

The fragmented delivery of social housing across the country is part of the problem.

Each of the 80-plus housing authorities in Ireland pretty much does its own thing in its own way.

The upside of this is that they are aware of, and can respond to, local needs as they see them.

The downside is the fact that many of these housing authorities are too small to have any sort of worthwhile scale. In Ireland, a small housing authority might deal with fewer than 100 housing units. In the UK, a small housing authority might deal with thousands, a large one with the high tens of thousands of units.

The small scales involved mean there is no long-term scope for staff to develop or train as housing professionals, and, crucially, no recognised profession and no career path. Hence no housing professionals in housing authorities.

This system also belies the lack of a regionally co-ordinated mechanism for sharing resources or maximising cost efficiencies, through, for example, negotiating price reductions for large-scale work.

Continuity of staff is another problem. In central government, a plethora of housing generalists, once they’ve chalked up their few years, are moved on to different pastures, wastefully bringing with them whatever they’ve learned about social housing to waste management or drainage.

In local authorities, housing staff often move on before they have acquired a useful amount of skill or knowledge, frustrating the creation of long-term trust between social landlords and social tenants, and relationships between housing associations and local authorities.

The larger housing associations, which are separate from local or central government, but which also provide social housing, are better equipped with professional housing staff.

It is significant, however, that many senior executives in these organisations come from the UK, where housing is regarded as a profession – with a career path – in its own right.

Housing policy is changing too. Acknowledging that the push for home ownership “has had a considerable role in leading the Irish housing sector, Irish economy, and the wider Irish society to where they are today”, the Government is currently distancing itself from traditional support for home ownership in favour of other forms of tenure and housing delivery mechanisms. These are very tricky issues.

With significantly changing policy and large numbers seeking social housing (ironically alongside a national surplus of housing), it is increasingly evident that the long-term provision and management of Ireland’s social housing stock needs to be tended to by housing professionals. The 80-plus housing authorities urgently need to be amalgamated into a much smaller number for efficient delivery of national policy and economies of scale. This will also help provide a proper role as well as a career path for professional housing staff.

At the same time, institutes such as DIT, UCD and others need to introduce suitable undergraduate and postgraduate programmes – not just training – for novices and experienced practitioners alike.

Social housing is very much part of our future, and local and central government needs professional housing experts. Without them, the value of any changes proposed is far less, and getting reduced returns these days is not much of an option.

Dr Lorcan Sirr is a lecturer in the Department of Real Estate at Dublin Institute of Technology, and editor of Dublin's Future: New Visions for Ireland's Capital City, published next week by The Liffey Press