Key worker homes plan leaves deeper issues unanswered

A newly qualified grade D nurse working in London is eligible for a mortgage of ?51,000. The cheapest one-bedroom properties in London still cost around ?10,000 more than that. There is a recruitment crisis in the NHS. Are the two related?

The staffing crisis extends to services such as education and the police, and beyond London to the rest of south-east England, as well as areas such as York and East Anglia. Government housing and regeneration strategies aim for an ideal of mixed, stable communities, and recognise the role "key workers" ought to play. But at the moment there are not enough key workers do the work in the first place.

The housing green paper proposes to help key workers access accommodation and ?250m should be available from April 2001. The paper outlines proposals for a starter home initiative, working with registered social landlords and others, and also suggests possibilities for other schemes, which could include mortgage relief.

To some extent this kind of provision is already available. Islington and Shoreditch Housing Association has just started work on a ?14m regeneration scheme in the inner London area of Hackney, with Kensington Housing Trust providing 34 clusters of key worker accommodation for Moorfields Eye Hospital. Elsewhere, local authorities such as Newham ringfence some social housing specifically for teachers.

The Starter Home Initiative is expected to build on these models. However, the new proposals are meeting a considerable degree of scepticism. Housing agencies are broadly in favour, but they have some serious questions.

The first is over the form the scheme will take. Mortgage relief could upset the tax system without delivering the housing results. Shelter adds that working with private landlords could skew the definition of "affordable" accommodation.

Shelter, like the National Housing Federation (NHF), advocates some form of shared ownership and/or flexible tenure, to provide a "staircase" between renting and ownership.

The London Housing Federation, which has extensive experience of shared ownership schemes, cites existing projects with housing associations such as Tower and Hyde. Tenants buy a share of a property, pay rent on the other part, and buy more shares if they choose. Tim Southall, of the NHF, suggests developing this and linked forms of shared ownership into a "common product" which could meet the needs of lower-income workers.

However, not all lower-income workers are key workers. Housing agencies are keen that others in housing need are not displaced in favour of key workers - this would not do much for "mixed communities" in any case. And this leads to the central question - who is a key worker?

Hospital porters and ambulance drivers might fall outside the definition, but they are crucial parts of the service. Developments like NHS trusts complicate the issue further, even before the recent moves to outsource some NHS operations into the private sector. The situation is further clouded by the increasing numbers of self-employed or agency staff who support different aspects of the key services.

One housing specialist described the dilemma: "You can keep the definition very restricted - or widen it and skew the whole housing market." Mr Southall suggests that one way round this could be "key worker" definitions at local or unitary authority level.

The biggest issue with the key worker housing proposals is, of course, whether they will actually do what they are supposed to. Although the Royal College of Nursing advocates specific provision for nurses, it is clear that this is only part of a wider problem. The reason nurses qualify for shared ownership is they cannot afford the costs in the private housing market. Accommodation will solve that part of the problem, but will not compensate for overall salary levels.

The National Union of Teachers is even more direct. A spokeswoman said: "The profession is struggling to recruit not because housing is expensive, but because the salaries, working conditions and hours make teaching an unattractive profession to young graduates." This accords with the feeling from areas which already provide subsidised housing for new teachers - the measures they are taking do not solve the underlying problem.

Few people, if any, will query the need for key workers and most are in favour of helping them through shared or low cost ownership schemes. However, at the moment the other questions far outweigh any answers on the table.