David Bookbinder: Behind the toxic protests lie big challenges and worrying trends

Up until a few days ago it seemed to have gone largely unnoticed elsewhere in Scotland that a number of community based housing associations in Glasgow have been the target of extremist protests over the summer, backed up by frighteningly toxic, intimidating social media campaigns.

The protests culminated in the appalling fire last weekend at a block of flats being refurbished by ng homes – an unthinkably evil act if it is proved to have been deliberate.

We can easily dismiss and condemn protests based on vigilante tactics, racist views and blatant creation and spreading of misinformation. But behind all this are two issues we can’t ignore: the real impact of the housing emergency, and a worrying trend that’s seeing local housing associations as a target for pretty much anything that people want to blame them for.

The primary focus of the protests has been ‘who’s getting the houses?’. If you can get beyond the wilful misinformation being pedalled by a tiny minority, you’ll find more genuine concerns about the difficulty in accessing social housing. It’s a plain fact that if many associations are giving 60% or more of their lets to homelessness, local people on the housing list stand even less chance than they did a few years ago.

This is the key issue, not refugees or asylum seekers, albeit the Home Office’s fast-tracking of asylum applications hasn’t helped Glasgow in its efforts to manage demand at a time when the legislation means anyone can apply as homeless to Glasgow from elsewhere in Scotland and the UK.

And once you’re a target on one issue, the bandwagon’s rolling and you start being castigated on other fronts, most notably the state of the local environment. Local associations care deeply about creating and maintaining great places to live in, but perversely, the more they do to try to fill the gaps left by declining public services the more they seem to be in the firing line.

Recently the GMB union called for Glasgow associations to be charged for depositing bulk items picked up from their areas, even though much of it is left out by non-tenants. So not only is the union happy for us to do what the council have stopped doing – they want us to pay for the pleasure! We used to joke that we’ll be emptying the bins next, but this feels too close for comfort now.

We have no immunity from public scrutiny, and rightly so. Maybe we just have to live with the fact that the more we do, the more we raise expectations and have to absorb the flak that was once the preserve of local councils.

So where does this leave community based associations?

• They’ll grit their teeth and focus on what they’re so good at – providing highly responsive landlord and wider community services
• With police support they’ll deal with protests as best they can, knowing the protagonists are often not tenants and sometimes not even local people
• They’ll continue to assess the impact of the housing emergency on community cohesion: giving 60% of lets to homelessness simply isn’t sustainable in the medium/longer term
• They’ll be as up-front as they can in countering misinformation and communicating basic facts about how homes are allocated and services provided
• As a sector we work closely with our local authority partners but we need to be wary about any trend towards linking funding with prescription on how we allocate particular blocks: this needs to be handled sensitively on a scheme by scheme basis
• We need to review existing legislation and its impact on demand, and learn the lesson that having the most liberal homelessness laws in Europe means very little if as a nation we don’t have the resources to meet our duties
• We need to build and acquire thousands more homes than we’re currently doing, and if planning and infrastructure delays are severely restricting the new build programme why not radically ramp up acquisitions of existing private homes?

We can hope that the protests might subside as summer disappears, but the sheer poison spread by unfiltered social media content is likely to be an ongoing fact of life. We’ll need to be thick-skinned, continue to manage the tensions and, most importantly, focus on everything we do brilliantly in our communities.