Introduction

The 1988 Housing Act introduced new funding arrangements for the house-building programmes of associations, reduced security of tenure for new association assured tenants, and removed the requirement to set ‘fair rents’ on new tenancies. Associations could now use private as well as public funding to provide more social rented housing. The Act had effectively privatised housing associations. The 1989 Local Government and Housing Act followed. This changed local authority funding, reducing even further their power to build. Given these developments, the local authority in this study decided to work with five associations in a consortium to undertake a large building programme up until the mid-1990s. A number of ‘beneficiary’ associations also worked on specific sites. This was politically more acceptable in this Labour authority than the alternative of a large number of individual associations freely competing for development opportunities, although it was not quite the pure ‘quasi-market’ envisaged by Le Grand and Bartlett (1993).

Nearly 2,000 new rented homes in a wide variety of locations were built. Most were for families as this was the preference of the local authority (see Watson, 1986, for a broader discussion of this tendency). Although the associations owned the properties, the local authority retained 75% nomination rights to the lettings made by the associations for the next 20 years. A new hostel for homeless women was also built on the same basis. In 1997/98 a total of 2,041 association lettings (relets and new lets) were made across the city. The lettings made by the three associations in this study represented about one third of that total lettings figure (716 out of a total of 2,041). The total number of households nominated and rehoused by associations across the city in the same year was 723. The three case study associations housed about a half of the total of nominated applicants who were rehoused (361 out of a total of 723).

As far as homeless applicants who were rehoused were concerned, out of a total of 723 nominations made to associations across the city, 179 were statutory homeless and 93 were non-statutory homeless applicants. Homeless people made up 37% of all the nominations rehoused by associations in that year. In the case study associations, Tulip HA rehoused by far the most homeless people at 58% of its total lettings (109 out of 189).