Measures of success for social care are set by professionals for assessing the performance of professionals. Users of services see things differently and have alternative ways of assessing quality. The ‘Shaping Our Lives’ project has looked in depth at what users really want and what they think are the hallmarks of a quality service.

Plans have been announced to speed up the development of more than 1,600 new affordable homes on surplus public land in the south east and east of England. The three-year delivery programme, involving the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships, will include housing for at least 850 key workers.The Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, said the announcement meant the first benefits of the link between the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships, announced at the Urban Summit in Birmingham in October last year, were now being realised.

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Regeneration planners need to make it easier for schools to contribute to coherent local strategies rather than leaving them to work at arm’s length from renewal programmes. That is the conclusion of research carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation by a team from Newcastle University.Their report says schools often remain disconnected from regeneration initiatives in their surrounding neighbourhoods, and that policy makers who demand to know why schools do not get involved in a wider range of renewal activities may be asking the wrong question.The researchers from Newcastle spent two years studying the contribution of schools to regeneration initiatives in two areas of the north of England. They found that all local primary and secondary schools were involved in community-related activities, including breakfast clubs, making facilities available for community groups and organising courses to help parents become more involved in their children’s learning.

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This report from the Institute for Public Policy Research argues that housing poverty is the most extreme form of social inequality in Britain. It says successive governments have bowed to the pressure of nimbyism and ignored the consequences of growing inequality. The report calls for dramatic changes to close the housing “equity gap” and increase choice. Despite increased consensus amongst experts and politicians on the need for radical measures and new homes, there is often strong resistance to local change. The polarisation of housing provision also has a negative effect on school standards, public services, crime and neighbourhoods: all public priorities.The report shows that there has been a growing divide between people living in the north and in the South East and between the home owning majority and people who rent. The increase in the ‘equity divide’ has been the greatest cause of the growth of inequality: the value of the net equity of personally-owned housing increased from 36 billion pounds in 1970 to 1,525 billion pounds in 2001. Tenants living on estates of poor housing have fared worst and the most dramatic evidence of the housing crisis is the number of homeless households in temporary accommodation, which has risen from 5,000 to 80,000 since 1980.

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