Block-by-block Accounting for High-rise Housing: A First Step Towards Resource Accounting in Action

At the start of the new millennium, mass housing for many local housing authorities will represent one of their biggest challenges and, in financial terms, an increasingly expensive legacy. A big reduction in demand from those households that traditionally sought to live in council housing is one of the principal reasons for extraordinarily high vacancy rates. These voids are dramatically exposing the latent vulnerability of high-rise housing. It is argued and shown that decisions about their future must embrace a more strategic appreciation of costs and benefits based upon, amongst other things, newly devised block-by-block revenue accounting. Such resource frameworks do not simply replicate the traditional housing revenue account (HRA) for individual blocks, but by using simple economic theory of costs it is possible to model the future of blocks according to a set of decision rules. Crucially, by adopting this 'new' accounting convention it offers the potential to empower those interest groups currently excluded from appreciating and understanding financial data: tenants and tenants' groups, local housing officers and even local councillors.