Environmental health departments may have struggled to see how their work slots in to the best value for housing regime. Here, the chief inspector of housing, Roy Irwin, explains how the Housing Inspectorate's even-handed approach to local authority work will mean nothing is overlooked

In the housing context, the run-up to the introduction of best value has principally focused on housing management (reinforced by the Tenant Compact requirements); the differences between the statutory framework for local authorities and the voluntary framework for registered social landlords, as overseen by the Housing Corporation; or even the red herring of a single regulator/inspector of all social housing. What has not featured so highly in all of this is the application of best value to all the private housing services provided by local authorities. These have received little or no attention and this may have fostered a misplaced belief that those authorities who have, or are planning to, transfer their housing stock, need pay little or no attention to the remaining housing services, either in general or in respect of the application of best value.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Best value applies to all local authority housing services and the work of the Housing Inspectorate will cover all of the housing services provided by housing authorities, irrespective of the organisational structures adopted by councils. This will take the inspectorate, in the next five years, into every London borough, district, unitary and metropolitan authority and no doubt into every form of service structure - all encompassing housing services directorates, such as the one I had the good fortune to lead in Bristol, more traditional public sector housing departments and private sector environmental health departments as well as the broader collectives that are beginning to emerge, covering housing in conjunction with social services, community services or planning. This is a trend that may well continue as cabinet structures start to take hold and also as a by-product of stock transfer.

As the Local Government Association quite rightly points out in its recent submission to Government entitled Accommodating change: "Housing authorities have many direct responsibilities including: housing needs in all sectors, identifying the need for and in many cases financing, new housing provision from housing associations, providing assistance and advice to homeless households, enforcing minimum standards in private housing and providing grants to low income house owners and landlords."
The same publication goes on to say: "Over the last decade housing authorities have increasingly taken on a more holistic and corporate approach towards their responsibility as the local strategic housing body." Under best value this holistic approach needs to continue and develop further.

As Chris Mullin, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, says in his foreword to the DETR's recently launched Best value in housing framework: "Best value needs to embrace housing in the widest sense - the housing management function on the council housing stock where authorities retain ownership; the strategic and enabling roles that all housing authorities, including large scale voluntary transfer authorities, must undertake across all housing tenures; and the important role housing has to play in addressing wider cross-cutting issues."
This document, read alongside all the service guidance on best value issued by DETR in December, clearly spells out the obligations of housing authorities to pursue continuous improvement in all service areas and also that every service area should be covered by best value by the end of March 2004. In order to ensure this 100 per cent coverage, one of the roles of external auditors in their audit of each authority's best value performance plans (BVPPs) is to track, on a year-by-year basis, the total value of service encompassed in best value reviews (BVRs).

In response to the housing-related BVRs undertaken by housing authorities the Housing Inspectorate aims to provide an inspection service within three to nine months from the time the review has been completed. For large authorities, who intend to deal with their housing services in specific chunks reviewed in different years, this will give rise to an equivalent number of inspections. Where an authority chooses to put all their housing services into one review then only one housing inspection will take place. This is unless one of the outcomes of that inspection is a requirement for future visits from the Housing Inspectorate to follow up on the authority's resultant action plans.

The context in which a local authority housing service sits is increasingly dynamic, and the future requirements on housing authorities to positively influence their local housing markets to benefit all sectors of their community will grow, as our understanding and responses to the following come to fruition:

• the need for a more co-ordinated management of our urban centres to make best use of the infrastructure that supports our towns and cities
• the continuing trend to transfer stock from the local authority to the RSL sector which has the effect of placing thousands of properties into the private rented sector for which the authority still has a strategic responsibility
• the shifts in demand, across all tenures in many towns and cities
• the continuously ageing housing product which, subject to market forces, needs to be nurtured to sustain existing communities and to conserve scarce resources.

This may, over time, move the best value regime into increasingly thematic and locality-based ways of considering how to improve the quality of services in a meaningful way, to produce a positive impact on the quality of life for the communities which authorities serve. These cross-cutting reviews could well impinge on housing to differing degrees. In these settings housing, obviously including private housing in all of its forms, does not necessarily have to be centre stage but in every case will have an important role, since "decent housing is the foundation of social wellbeing", as the foreword to the Best Value in Housing framework document clearly states.

With 80 per cent of all the housing in the country already in the private sector, and the prospect of that increasing through local authority demolitions, transfer, and right-to-buy purchases, as well as any RSL or private developer new-build, the strategic housing activities of local authorities will feature heavily in the inspection work of the Housing Inspectorate.

The policy, practice and performance of authorities in respect of these activities are already being built into the inspection framework the inspectorate will be using and are set out below. The approach taken to all these matters will differ between authorities, but the principles of inspection adopted by the Housing Inspectorate will not. In all cases we will endeavour to establish whether the strategies and plans of an authority manifest themselves on the ground, whether the service standards they espouse are delivered effectively and whether the views of the local community have helped shape and sharpen service focus and efficiency. Where this is not the case we will work with authorities to bring these about, to implement best value in housing services.