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Opinion

Commentary: Deadline for adopting Czech social housing concept is unrealistic

12 June 2014
4 minute read

Three months have elapsed since the Czech Government approved its program declaration stating that social housing is a priority. We have heard from many government politicians that work is underway on the Social Housing Concept and how important it is.

The truth, however, is that the inter-ministerial commission established for this purpose has only met once during the past three months (at the start of May) and has not addressed anything essential yet. Given the inactivity of this commission, the deadline for adopting the concept by August of this year seems completely unrealistic. 

We recently brought Robert Aldridge of Edinburgh to Prague, a man who participated in the design of Scottish social housing legislation between 1999 and 2002, legislation that is considered a good example for all of Europe. What did we learn from him?

The entire Scottish reform responded to the failures of the previous social housing policy, which had worked with priority groups (mothers with young children, people living with disabilities, senior citizens, etc.). Instead, the new legislation (with a realistic schedule of 10 years), established the right to housing for all people in need of housing who are not homeless through their own will (not to be confused with what is called incidental or non-incidental need).    

The definition is a rather complicated one, but what is essential is that each case must be investigated and judged independently. Even people who have been evaluated as homeless "through their own will" have the right to advice and to temporary accommodation, as well as to have decisions on whether to award them housing reviewed.

The group in Scotland, whose members predominantly worked on a volunteer basis, had the support of three full-time administrative staffers provided by the state. During the course of two years, the group commissioned the production of 13 academic surveys, both research and thematically-focused studies.  

The group then elaborated a total of 52 recommendations which made their way into legislation. How are we approaching this in the Czech Republic?

The Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry has so far held the notion that to design this concept it will allocate just one person to be both the coordinator on this issue and to write the law on the basis of input from various working groups. Given the demanding nature of the task, this is totally insufficient:  Just like in Scotland, we need at least three staffers to arrange for the running of the commission and its working groups.

So far, no one has been appointed coordinator of the Czech commission. We believe this should be someone who is open to dialogue between the ministries, municipalities, homeless people, academia, and the providers of social housing and services.

The coordinator should be oriented in this topic and should be able to read English in order to draw on experiences and inspiration from abroad and from the academic literature. As far as research is concerned, it’s not enough to just wave our hands and say we already know everything and we just need to write this law quickly, as we often hear during meetings with the ministry.

There are many things we don’t know, but we must know how to ask about them and we must determine whether the answers we have are of sufficient quality, whether they are qualified answers. That also applies to the research of what is known to date. 

We don’t know how many available apartments with the correct parameters and locations even exist that could be run as social units given the appropriate motivation of their owners. We don’t have any data on the indirect costs of homelessness compared to social housing costs.

There is also no evaluation of the housing support programs now run by the Regional Development Ministry. There is no research into what we know about residential hotels, the methodology for supported housing, and no academically-informed discussion of housing competency in the context of individual housing users’ needs.

We have not yet heard anything about the funding for this necessary research – for the time being the only research underway is about the residential hotels, and neither its tasking nor its timeline seem fortunate to us. As members of the public, we want to help the state design this legislation, but we need at least a minimal basis on which to work – let’s not waste time! 

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