At last.  The Government has finally woken up to the fact that there is a repossessions crisis coming on down the track.  In interviews over the past couple of days, both Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have sought to reassure homeowners that they recognise the problems they are experiencing and are ready to step in to help.  Caroline Flint and, in her new Treasury role, Yvette Cooper, are holding meetings with concerned stakeholders.
 
About time too.  For the past three months, I have been trawling round Department after Department trying to convince Ministers and senior officials that they need to act.  Last week, it was James Purnell at DWP.  The week before Caroline Flint and a senior official from Ministry of Justice.  LSC, Treasury, CLG – we’ve done them all, sometimes alone, sometimes in partnership with lenders or other advice agencies.
 
And now they are listening.  Which is a start but scarcely enough.  What matters more is what they are intending to do.  What sort of pressure are they going to put on lenders about their repossessions practice (it is too late to put pressure on about the lending which got us into this mess)?  What money will they free up to fund good quality advice and support services for those in trouble?  How are they proposing to repair the holes in the safety net which were created in 1995 once the memory of the last repossessions crisis of the early 1990s had faded?
 
These are the challenges for Government.  It is all very well for them to make the right noises.  But they also have to take the right actions.

A humbling morning spent watching some Shelter staff trying out presentations intended for potential funders of our services.  Given that a large part of my job is spent trying to sell our cause in to various audiences – politicians and policy-makers, other professionals, donors and the general public – I should be reasonably confident of my abilities in this area.  But just in an hour this morning I saw three or four new ideas that would hugely improve my usual shtick.
 
Presentation is very much on my mind today, following last night’s hugely successful benefit night at the Comedy Store, a follow-up to the event I blogged about a few months ago.   Having had to do a ritual five minutes there myself on the last occasion, I know first hand how incredibly hard it is to walk onto the stage and construct an immediate relationship with an audience which scents blood as keenly as does a shiver of sharks (I’ve always wanted to work in somewhere the fact that “shiver” is the collective noun for a group of sharks.  Cool, isn’t it?).
 
Standing at the back of the auditorium, it was fascinating to see how the professionals do it.  Some brought huge energy onto the stage, using every inch of it, bounding and shouting.  Others were deliberately still, playing with the tension and the audience’s expectations.  But all of them knew, really, knew, the persona they were trying to construct and how they wanted the audience to react.  Those were the keys – content was less important; delivery everything.
 
And part of Shelter’s problem is that we are so obsessed by what we want to say, we forget that what matters is how we convince others to listen.  Worthy but dull is easy.  Worthy and compelling is very rare.
 
 

Not sure whether to blog about the events of the past few days. On the one hand, I don’t want this blog be the place where I (and you) debate the rights and wrongs of industrial relations at Shelter. On the other, it would be entirely disingenuous completely to ignore the subject and whitter away about something else.

What was interesting about the last 72 hours is the experience of being under fire rather than doing the firing. Going into the Today Programme studio to respond to criticism rather than dish it out was a new experience. Two weeks before, I had been there challenging Housing Minister Caroline Flint about her proposals on linking social housing to work. Now I was defending myself against similar accusations of hard-hearted behaviour from Ken Loach.

And it certainly gave me something to think about. My e-mail in-box has been busier than usual recently, with messages of criticism, concern or – gratifyingly often – support. Most of the brickbats are relatively easily dismissed: I don’t find the experience of having my morality questioned by the Wormwood Scrubs branch of the Prison Officers Association that upsetting. There is little in the usual suspects saying the usual things in the usual way which makes one stop and think.

But one or two e-mails have given me pause. Those were not the ones which just expressed outright opposition to what we are doing or merely took moral stances. The ones which hit home were those which understood the nature of the problem and suggested other approaches to responding to it. The fact that the suggestions themselves were not really workable was not the point. What mattered was that there was a possible solution on the table.

Which is a lesson for me. It is easy – and fun – to oppose. Moral outrage is Shelter’s stock-in-trade. Problem identification is also a simple game. But it is not enough for us to say that something must be done. We must also say what that something is.

An event with a Housing Association to launch a new guide to enable greater participation of service users in decisions about the services they are offered.  The usual serious speeches (with mine definitely falling into the worthy-but-dull category) and pious intentions.  And then all off for coffee and cakes.
 
Which is not to criticise the event or the Housing Association who organised it; certainly the scheme that they had been running seemed excellent.  But I am always a tad nervous about how deep the commitment to user involvement and empowerment actually goes: it is all too easy to pay lip service to the idea but not go too far beyond that.
 
After the do, I got chatting to one of the Housing Association residents who had been part of the project.  A former heroin addict, he was now looking for a job as a drugs counsellor, looking to move from being a user of services to being a provider of them.  And that is both a vital transition and one which organisations find incredibly difficult to enable.
 
I’ve seen the good and the less good.  In RAPt, where I used to work, we developed a training and placement programme to help former addicts and prisoners become full employees.  At one point, the manager of our project in Pentonville worked out of the very cell he had occupied as a prisoner.  But that was an organisation which had a very intensive relationship with its service users.  In Shelter, because we deal principally in giving advice and information, our contact is much more fleeting, with many of our service users having single conversations with us over the phone or through the web, never to be heard of again.  Growing those on to be the employees of the future is much more of a challenge.
 
But even here, we can do something.  Our tenancy sustainment projects allow the possibility of service users graduating to volunteer status and then in some cases to full employment.  The prisoner we used as volunteer housing adviser in East Sutton Park then came to work for us after her release.  Our shops volunteers, often people with few skills when the come to us, can become paid managers or deputy managers.
 
This is work in progress and we a long way to go.  But I can think of little more empowering way of relating to your service uses than offering them the chance to become service providers.

Blogging is still a new thing for me and I am still not sure about how far it is possible to meld candour with the fact that, as someone with a formal position in Shelter, I have to be a little careful that I don’t go too far and embarrass the organisation.  Over the past few months, there have been a couple of occasions when stuff I’ve written here has got me into trouble with people inside and outside the organisation.
 
The irony of that position was very much brought home to me the other day when I was privileged (and I use the term advisedly – it was a privilege) enough to share a platform at the Guardian Public Services conference with Tom Reynolds, an ambulance man whose blog, Random Acts of Reality, is one of the best examples out there.  One of the questions he was asked was about how difficult it was for him as a relatively junior member of his organisation’s hierarchy to discuss openly and honestly the issues he was facing.
 
His reply was clear.  Far from his bosses disliking his blog, they welcomed it.  They were keen to see the problems he was grappling with discussed, happy even to have him exposing some of the poorer areas of practice.  Indeed, at times his comments had been instrumental in getting things changed at work.  Above all, the stories he told of the people he encountered, the patients he helped, the misery he saw – all of these helped to explain why the service his organisation offered was so important.
 
Me – I can’t claim the same.  Removed as I am for the most part from the day to day realities of homelessness (although as I have said before I try to get to see as many clients as I can), I cannot tell the stories which show how much our services are needed or why our campaigns are so important.  Over the next year or so, we will be looking to introduce more voices to our website, including – and especially – voices from those who are facing homelessness.  Until then, you will have to make do only with the random musings from someone at the top, rather than at the bottom, of Shelter’s hierarchy.