By Rob Gershon

I don’t know anyone in my day-to-day life who gives two hoots about the machinations of who gets to lead the Labour party, or what this means for its various factions. It seems like a popular topic of conversation on the news channels, where a puzzling amount of excitement seems to animate political correspondents and the kind of talking heads whose lives won’t be materially affected whoever’s leader.

There are really good reasons to be interested in it from a policy point of view, and I’m not suggesting internecine spats don’t matter, but the focus on the political circus rather than outcomes has a very familiar feel to it: the turmoil of the previous government and their never-ending deposition of leaders. Each time it happened there was the pretence of a new government but the substance of policymaking didn’t deviate from the slightly avaricious, cruel and sometimes incompetent machine of the one that preceded it.

It was a kind of continuity populism that gave us a housing system that relies on substandard, prolific Temporary Accommodation, Universal Credit as a device that entrenches poverty and a divisive rhetoric around our relationships with people from other places that has bled into how some people treat people from our own countries who happen to look or sound a bit different.

Back when these outcomes were partly the entirely predictable result of 2010’s coalition government, the term ‘unintended consequences’ got bandied around a lot, but despite some attempts to make policy in its first two years, it’s hard to point at anything the current government has done that will materially change just these three things. Perhaps there’s scope for £39 billion of housing investment to help with the drain on resources that’s temporary accommodation, but the continuation or worsening of the situation for people who are forced to rely on Universal Credit and the ramping up of fear and xenophobia from the Home Office are set to make some things actively worse for many people, with no sense they will one day get better.

Perhaps it’s just about money. Often cited as a finite resource when it comes to people who can’t afford to pay their rent or feed their children, there’s really not an absence of money on the planet. Without standing on a soapbox and pumping a fist to the sky, Citizen Smith style, the main problem with money is just its distribution. If there were a magic money tree, it’d stand in a top-heavy arboretum, with most of it held by individuals and organisations whose business is primarily money itself. The wind blows some of it down to minor royals, TV presenters, housing association CEOs, CFOs and service vendors, with a gradually dissipating amount trickling hesitantly down to people who can just about afford their monthly bills.

It’s in these branches that decisions are made about people for whom there’s no money left over, despite them standing in the somewhat wide shadow of the mythical tree. Perhaps unintentionally, an administrative layer that busies itself with deciding how much or how little is to be distributed to people with little or nothing based on an almost impossible to navigate set of principles about who’s deserving and who’s not. A warped set of values that associates poverty with individual choices and that metes out further financial punishments accordingly.

It’s here that there’s been a lack of change, and a lack of leadership. Making announcements and even developing policies are pointless if they don’t change anything. This isn’t a frothy reflection on morality: decision-making has a living effect on people’s lives. The social housing sector might stop to reflect that it’s been an unprecedented time of policy-making, but its reluctance to adopt better practices until legislation is put in place, and then to view this as a challenge rather than an opportunity remains a problem. Lobbying against flooring in social housing while continuing to operate the treadmill of pay rises and awards ceremonies isn’t just a problem of optics.

As new leaders are put in place at the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman Service, tenants are left wondering what material difference this will make. The current secretary of state seems to think the former is involved in housebuilding and it’s unclear what they’ll make of the latter once its incumbent leader is gone. Arguably the individuals in place don’t matter if we’re expected to meander on with the same regulatory environment the last government left us with.

The impotence of the Tenant Satisfaction Measures, a failure to operate most of the new powers given to the RSH in the Regulation of Social Housing Act, and a Housing Ombudsman left to deal with an ever-increasing number of complaints suggest that better leadership decisions need to be made: where issues are being caused, not where they’re having an effect.

Yes, some of the inputs are about government’s funding and its reluctance to redistribute wealth, but outcomes are a result of the decisions made by people whose lifestyles will not be meaningfully affected by a different prime minister.