The name of this book is 'Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing'...

In summary, then... The title of my new book is Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing. It's available through the New Writing North website and also Amazon.

The book came about in late 2013 when I was invited by New Writing North and by Isos Housing, a leading social landlord in my native north east England, to investigate Isos's business and the broader story of social housing both as a modern-day 'sector' and a historical 'movement.' Illustrated with photographs by Sally Ann Norman, the book tells the 150-year history of subsidised housing in Britain, offers a case study of how a social landlord is required to operate today, and reflects, too, on what all of us could do to resolve our housing crisis.

It does affect us all - there's no escape. How the British people are going to access and afford the roofs they need over their heads will be a major socio-political problem for the foreseeable future. So for me as a writer it was a really vital, instructive experience to take a close look inside what Isos does, and to talk to its tenants about their experience of social housing – the form of provision that is feeling the keenest edge of our national housing crisis.

Probably the strongest feeling I came away with was that there are millions of people in the UK who will always need a socially rented home. Housing associations are the best-equipped vehicles to answer that need, yet what they do (and why they do it) is imperfectly understood, both by the public and politicians. Their virtues are not uniform across the sector or the length of the land; but I believe they deserve our support.

Me, in the Journal, defending social housing

Photographer Sally Ann Norman & RTK with our shared endeavour

Yesterday I continued to develop the arguments made in my new book Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing, with an article for the Newcastle Journal, given a headline just as bald as me: 'Writer Richard T Kelly on the need for social housing in the North East'. I'm told that the print edition had a picture of me on the front page with the strapline 'Leave your snobbery at the door', the idea of which appeals enormously. The feature itself ran over two full pages in the Agenda section in the middle of the paper.

Here is a pair of paragraphs as a sample of the whole:

'... By this analysis, housing only takes its place in the larger set of socio-economic problems that have beset the North East for all my life. We still routinely have the highest unemployment rate of all the English regions, and the highest proportion of employees in the public sector. Not that there are too many public sector jobs in the North East – we want all the jobs we can get. But as Lord Adonis identified in his North East Independent Economic Review of 2013, we need more (better-paid and higher-skilled) private sector employment to begin to dream of significantly more new housing.

As we know, this region still makes things and exports them, manufacturing generating about 15.5% of the region’s total Gross Value Added. Nissan, though, comprises a notably big chunk of those figures. New businesses, especially hi-tech ones, are now getting born in the North East at an encouraging rate, and people who instinctively believe that ‘not enough is done’ for the region might yet be surprised by what people in the region can do for themselves. But that growth remains a work in progress.'

Me, in the Guardian, defending social housing

Lynemouth, Northumberland, where Isos rent 200 homes

Last Wednesday was a bit of a red letter day round mine - my first ever piece in the Guardian's 'Society' pages, headlined 'Why we should be shouting from the rooftops to defend housing associations', and marking my debut as a commentator on public sector finance and provision, so fulfilling a boyhood dream... The photos illustrating the piece, as above, are taken from my book Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing, and all are the work of the estimable Sally Ann Norman. As to the argument therein, here are a couple of preview paragraphs: 

'Social housing, then, is a cause that needs defending. Whereas mortgaged home ownership is thought to be one of our national obsessions, social housing is dimly viewed as a “residual” tenure of last resort – a political stepchild, too, its constituents uncourted at election time, unlike all those owner-occupiers in key marginals.

While Ken Loach’s 1966 BBC play, Cathy Come Home, did much to strip the scales from Britain’s eyes about the calamity of homelessness, Cathy’s fictional plight seems unlikely to greatly detain audiences of today, more routinely tickled (if not feigning to be outraged) by Channel 4’s Benefits Street. Whether we have a national consensus that social housing is an essential service, or whether societal attitudes have hardened to the point where more of us believe people have to lump whatever shelter they can access – I must say I’m not certain...'