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Modernising Scotland's Social Housing: A consultation paper

SECTION 4 INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO HOUSING FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT

Scottish Ministers’ policy intention has been to encourage local authorities to separate their strategic housing role from their housing management function. The importance that Ministers attach to the strategic role of local authorities has clearly been underlined by giving authorities new strategic housing planning powers and also by giving them the potential to take over management of the Development Programme in their areas. Community Ownership is clearly one way for the separation to take place. But there are probably other options that could be developed, perhaps with some modest levels of Scottish Executive support being made available. In this context it is worth emphasising that debt write-off is only available for options which take ownership of the stock off the public sector balance sheet.

It was against this policy background and the new financial context for local authority housing that the Minister in her statement announced that she would be interested in seeking views on whether there are radical and innovative approaches that could be developed for application in the Scottish context. The Minister said that she did not want to put limits on the types of ideas that might be generated but to be worthwhile, it must be shown how they can:-

• promote improved tenant involvement;
• deliver the necessary investment; and
• support effective and transparent management.

This is very much an open ended part of the consultation and is likely to be the start of a process. The ideas that are generated here are likely to need careful consideration and possibly will need further development before we are ready to turn them into policies or programmes. This therefore should be seen as the start of a process that will not necessarily see any immediate outcomes although we are not ruling out the possibility of early progress.

Area for Discussion

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