Performing for whom? An evaluation of the welsh housing management performance indicators regime

Abstract

Over recent years the World Bank and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlement have developed a range of global housing performance measures (World Bank, 1992a)1. These performance measures have been grouped into six performance indicator modules: housing affordability, housing finance, housing quality, housing production, housing subsidies, and regulatory audit. In total, these comprise 45 indicators (Priemus, 1992). Data on these indicators has been collected in 52 countries and analysed to produce comparative league tables of housing market performance (World Bank, 1992b). Performance measurement regimes have also been developed within individual countries, over the last decade with specific reference to publicly provided services (Carter et al., 1992). These regimes have been extended to include housing. Their aim is to clarify the performance of housing management in the public sector (for example, Department of the Environment, 1990; Department of Housing and Urban Developent, 1992a; National Federation of Housing Associations, 1992; Welsh Office, 1991a). The development of performance regimes for particular sectors of the housing economy highlights a weakness in the World Bank/United Nations approach. The underlying assumption behind the World Bank model is that markets can be enabled to provide solutions to 'housing problems'. However, in countries with complex housing markets, there is often significant intervention by the state in the form of non-market, or public-sector, housing (see Maclennan and Gibb, 1993, for a more detailed argument). Housing is also used as a tool of broader economic policies. For example, in England and Wales, the 1992 Autumn Public Expenditure Statement allocated £612 million for housing associations to purchase second-hand owner-occupied properties. This initiative was primarily aimed at aiding recovery in the private-sector housing market; it was not solely designed to expand the supply of socially rented housing. These externalities have to be taken into account when attempting to analyse the performance of the housing policies of different countries, and particularly when comparing them. This problem is witnessed in the World Bank/United Nations research