Category: CaCHE
We are happy to announce that the Housing Studies Association (HSA) and UK Collaborative Housing Evidence Centre (CaCHE) have formed a strategic partnership to support the housing researchers of the future.
HSA, the UK’s longstanding membership organisation for housing researchers and practitioners, provides a forum for housing-related debate, promotes the study of housing, and seeks to encourage the practical application of research in policy and practice. During the HSA’s 2017 Annual Conference it was announced that Professor Ken Gibb and a multi-disciplinary, cross-sector consortium of partners had received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Joseph Rowntree Foundation to establish a centre for housing evidence.
CaCHE aims to influence and transform housing policy and practice through better problem diagnosis, policy evaluation and appraisal of new opportunities, and generate improved housing outcomes for all. Since launching at the end of last year, a series of exemplar research projects have commenced, four PhD researchers have started their work, and an evidence-mapping exercise across seven key themes has been started. Five Knowledge Exchange Hubs and resident voice focus groups are also being set up across the UK which will co-create CaCHE’s future priorities.
Core to CaCHE’s programme of work and HSA’s aims as a learned society is to create a legacy of new housing researchers with multi-disciplinary and multi-methods expertise to the address the housing problems of the future. It is on this task that the CaCHE/HSA partnership will focus.
The HSA’s annual conference in Sheffield on 11-13th April this year provides the first opportunity for us to work together on these shared aims. The conference is renowned for it’s supportive and vibrant Early Career Research (ECR) Workshop stream, and this year the stream will be supported by CaCHE. CaCHE are providing financial support for a number of bursaries enabling early career housing researchers to attend and members of the CaCHE team will attend the ECR sessions to support and give feedback on ECRs research.
Professor Gibb, Director of CaCHE will also be chairing the conferences opening plenary on the Politics of Housing Policy featuring Keith Jacobs (University of Tasmania), Brian Lund (Manchester Metropolitan University), Marisa Gerstein Pineau (Frameworks).
We hope to see you at the conference in April and look forward to working together on our shared aims in the future.
Professor Ken Gibb is the Director of the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence and Dr Beth Watts is the Chair of the Housing Studies Association.
Authors: Professor Kenneth Gibb and Dr Beth Watts
Published: 12/02/18
Knowledge exchange (KE) is a process that brings together academics, users of research, wider groups and communities to exchange ideas, evidence and expertise. The Research Councils recognise that knowledge exchange has societal, economic and cultural benefits, often referred to as ‘Impact’. In our approach to KE and Impact, we borrow from good practice and build on existing literature. While we are mindful of the challenges associated with synthesising and mobilising knowledge, and of assessing the quality of evidence produced, we believe that solutions to housing challenges will only emerge by harnessing the expertise of world-leading academic researchers from a wide range of disciplines, drawing on knowledge from within different professional communities, and combining the work of existing networks operating at a variety of scales and in different locales.
The UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) recognises that there are very different housing challenges to be found across the UK; it is therefore configured as a distributed ‘hub and spoke’ model, active in all parts of the country, designed to ensure geographic reach and nationwide relevance. It has a permanent presence in London, Sheffield, Cardiff, Belfast, and Glasgow. Our KE team is overseen by Gavin Smart and includes Moira Munro and Gareth James in Scotland; Ed Ferrari and Gareth Young in Northern England; Jeff Matsu and Chris Foye in Southern England; Stanley McGreal and Joe Frey in Northern Ireland; and Peter Mackie and Bob Smith in Wales.
Inspired by the Harvard model of the Tobin project, we will undertake a series of prioritisation exercises with stakeholders from across the UK housing sector, at national and sub-national levels. These exercises will take the form of intensive, expertly facilitated workshops to identify priority research questions. Prior to these exercises, we will facilitate focus groups to capture residents’ voices and feed these into the prioritisation process. We anticipate an intellectually stimulating and inclusive process which sets priorities in a way that is consensual, transparent, independent and dynamic.
The resulting projects will inevitably take several different forms and will have different durations. In the meantime, we are already working on 12 evidence reviews. The subject and the primary KE contact for each project are included in the table below.
CaCHE Evidence Reviews (Year 1-2017/18) & KE contacts
In addition to the prioritisation exercises and exemplar projects, we will hold up to 20 KE events annually, which will help to test, refine and promote evidence from our reviews, collaborative projects and new research. These workshops and conferences will focus on specific problems. Recent events include a workshop entitled ‘Fixing our broken housing market’ with the UK Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). Future events will include an annual housing and policy conference: the first, with Policy Scotland, will explore challenges in the Private Rented Sector in Scotland; and subsequent events will focus on the problems identified via the prioritisation exercises mentioned above. We are also planning secondment opportunities and public engagement through major annual lectures, as well as bespoke regional activities, such as our recent contribution to the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences.
This is but a flavour of what we’re doing and what we have planned for the coming years. To stay informed, you can follow this blog, sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Twitter. If you’d like to know more about CaCHE projects, join our KE network, or become involved with any of the projects listed above, please get in touch with a member of the KE team. If you think there is a gap in the evidence base that CaCHE can help fill then the KE team would also be keen to hear from you. KE is about establishing two-way communication and engagement. We therefore look forward to learning from you and to sharing ideas, research evidence, experiences and skills with you, to better understand and tackle housing problems in all regions of the UK.
Dr Gareth James and Dr Chris Foye are Knowledge Exchange Associates, and Dr Gareth Young is Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellow, for the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence.
Authors: Dr Gareth James, Dr Chris Foye and Dr Gareth Young
Published: 08/01/18
Universal Credit (UC), the Government’s flagship welfare reform, is in difficulty with ‘bad news’ stories about it abounding. It has been criticised for having fundamental design flaws, such as the absence of effective data sharing between the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and social housing landlords, and, crucially, the requirement for new claimants to wait at least six weeks for their first benefit payment.
Several recent research studies suggest that these design flaws, along with others, have resulted in a marked increase in arrears for tenants who have moved onto UC. For example, a study of the impact of UC in the London Boroughs of Southwark and Croydon and the Peabody housing stock, which examined the rent payment patterns of 775 claimants over a nine month period, found that arrears rose by £115 per claimant over course of the study, with in total, 3.4 per cent of rent owed not being paid. The study also found that the management costs associated with rent collection increased.
However, none of these findings are unexpected as they are consistent with those of the evaluation of the ‘trial’ designed to test UC: the Direct Payment Demonstration Projects (DPDPs). Significantly, in light of the apparent surprise shown by Ministers when yet more bad news about UC surfaces, it is important to note that the study, which myself and another CaCHE team member, Dr Kesia Reeve, directed, was funded by DWP. The DPDPs explored the impact of the two central tenets of UC: direct payment and the payment of housing benefit every four weeks, which is broadly in line with monthly payments under UC. The evaluation drew on a range of research instruments, including: three longitudinal surveys; an analysis of claimants’ rent payment patterns over an 18 month period, with the experiences of 7,252 claimants in receipt of DP being compared with those in a comparator sample of 4,941 tenants; and, more than 300 in-depth interviews with claimants and key stakeholders. The key findings of the study, which are presented in a recently published article in Housing Studies (Hickman et al., 2017), are:
- Most tenants encountered difficulties under DP and only eight per cent of those who were still on DP at the end of the programme managed to pay all of their rent in full over its duration.
- Many tenants found DP stressful and a source of anxiety. A telephone survey of under-payers found that, when asked why they wanted to leave the DPDP programme, 34 per cent of respondents reported that it was ‘too stressful’. A number of tenants who were interviewed in-depth highlighted how stressful they found DP, particularly when transitioning from landlord payment. ‘It [DP] did make me worry and panic … cos obviously I’m ringing them [landlord] saying: ‘this is what I’ve been paid, is it right?” And they’re: “well if that’s what’s been paid”. And I’m: “no I want to make sure it’s right. I don’t want you sending me a letter saying you owe us £15 from last week 13 from the week before”. And then it all mounts up and you’ve got loads of rent arrears and I don’t want that.’
- DP in the trial had a significant negative effect on landlords’ arrears and a total of £1.9m of rent owed was not paid over the 18 month period, which was equivalent to 2.3 per cent of their annual rent roll. Overall, tenants who went onto DP paid 95.5 per cent of all the rent owed, compared with the comparative sample who paid 99.1 per cent of rent owed (a difference of 3.6 percentage points).
- Landlords reported that managing DP was much more resource intensive than the ‘traditional’, landlord payment, where (for tenants on full HB) benefit payments were paid directly to them. For example, one landlord noted that it had to devote three times more resource than ‘normal’ to secure a payment under DP: ‘So on average we’re putting three times the work in to get the same debit that we used to have before’. Landlords identified a number of areas where the delivery and management of DP had resulted in the use of additional resource and increased costs, with staff time identified as being the largest one.
- These findings, along with others, then, suggest that the problems currently being encountered by UC were entirely predictable and to be expected. However, we will have to wait and see if these problems become more acute as it is rolled-out to a broader, and more representative, client base.
Paul Hickman is Professor of Social Policy and Housing at Sheffield Hallam University and a member of the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence study team. He can be contacted at: p.g.hickman@shu.ac.uk.
Author: Professor Paul Hickman
Published 1/11/17
The UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) started its real work last week, kicking off with a launch event in London. Four of 13 initial projects are underway, as well as four linked PhDs.
In the next few months, the Centre will focus on completing its operational set-up, starting further projects and establishing five regional knowledge-exchange ‘hubs’. Each hub will bring together people who represent the local housing system.
We will also run our first events and start the wider work of re-engaging with the many people and organisations who told us that they want to work with us to improve housing policy and practice through better use of evidence.
CaCHE has six broad objectives:
- Establishing an independent research centre
- Providing evidence that fills gaps in knowledge
- Helping people to understand what knowledge we have in housing policy and practice
- Promoting innovation and helping researchers across the UK to generate good evidence
- Promoting use of available data through the development and sharing of data
- Learning from the past to inform the future of housing policy and practice.
CaCHE will cover the whole of the UK. We will be inclusive, multi-disciplinary and use a range of research methods. We are also committed to co-production and knowledge-exchange through five dedicated staff who share our focus on the translation, dissemination and communication of our findings.
We are organised around six research themes:
- Housing and the economy
- Understanding the housing market
- Aspirations, choice and housing pathways
- Housing and its relations to health, education, employment, poverty, inequality, etc.
- Place-making, design and neighbourhoods
- Multi-level governance
We also have an additional cross-cutting work strand on homelessness
We chose a dozen initial exemplar projects – including evidence reviews – on issues such as homelessness prevention, housing taxation and international policy transfer, that is, taking the best policies from other countries and finding out whether they could apply here too. We also have projects with complementary research investments, such as the Urban Big Data Centre.
Co-production
We want to ensure that our work is genuinely co-produced. Therefore, we will be borrowing an idea from Harvard University’s Tobin project. We will also use our hubs as intensive deliberative workshops. We know how difficult it can be to have meaningful participation from residents and citizens in such ‘expert’ settings, so we will also hold “resident voice” focus groups in each locale to find out what they think.
Our first 12 months
In our first year we are undertaking a scoping review and 12 exemplar projects, which are mainly evidence reviews relevant to housing. We are also running a number of events. For example, we are holding a meeting in Reading about the future of new-build social housing in the light of the upcoming green paper. We will also hold an annual Scottish housing policy conference.
Part of the community
CaCHE is distributed across the UK. Our administrative hub is in Glasgow but we also have a presence at universities such as Sheffield, Cardiff, Reading, Bristol, St Andrews, Ulster, Adelaide and Heriot-Watt. In Glasgow, the Centre is located in the city’s east end at the University’s social sciences research hub in Bridgeton, where we co-locate with the local urban regeneration company, Clyde Gateway, and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. We aim to work closely with our new colleagues and the local community to ensure that part of the CaCHE legacy is to make a positive impact the lives of the people of Bridgeton and beyond.
Leaving a legacy
The most important academic legacy we aim to leave is the contribution made to the next cohort of housing researchers in the UK. We will fund eight post doc housing researchers and three post doc housing knowledge exchange associates, and we will generate up to 10 PhDs linked to CaCHE. In addition, there are four early career co-investigators who are developing an early career research network for CaCHE and they will also play a management shadowing role throughout the programme. The early career focus is enhanced by an extensive programme of secondments operating in both directions between academia and policy and practice.
Author: Professor Ken Gibb
Published 25/10/17 on ESRC blog.
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