social housing

Do women leaders of nonprofit public service organisations help to reduce the gender pay gap?

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By Rhys Andrews

It is often assumed that female leaders are motivated to actively represent other women within the organisations that they lead by helping them to achieve promotions, pay rises and improved working conditions. In the public sector, such leaders are thought to act as ‘femocrats’ advancing gender equality through their deeds and decisions. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the potential for women leaders to actively represent female employees in the nonprofit organisations that are now responsible for many public services in the UK and elsewhere. In my recent article in Policy & Politics , I examine the role that women leaders might play in reducing the gender pay gap in Welsh housing associations – nonprofit public service organisations that provide most of the social housing in Wales, and which have a strong commitment to gender equality.

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Thinking beyond the market: housing, planning and the state

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Allan Cochrane
Allan Cochrane

by Allan Cochrane, Open University, UK

Everybody seems to accept that there is something wrong with the way that housing is delivered in Britain, particularly in England. In some parts of the country house prices are stubbornly high and rising; elsewhere there seems to be housing nobody wants. All political parties are committed to enabling people to live in homes that they own, yet levels of home ownership are falling as the proportion of the population living in private rented housing rises. More people now live in private rented accommodation than in social or council housing. The massive decline in council house building since the 1980s has not led to a significant rise in the building of new homes for sale.

The solutions on offer by the major political parties seem to circle around the provision of some sort of subsidy to first-time buyers, as well as looking for ways of persuading (sometimes effectively bribing) local authorities and neighbourhoods to allow developers to build in their areas. Under the last Labour government, regional and local targets were introduced for new housing, albeit with few levers to ensure that the targets would be met. The latest proposal from the Conservative Party is to allow tenants of housing association properties to buy the homes they live in at discounted rates, with little reflection on the extent to which the sale of council houses has brought more private rented property onto the market, rather than increasing home ownership.

There is a powerful rhetoric that blames the planning system for the problems. Planners are said to be too slow to grant permission for development and to Continue reading →