When I was younger, there were always two things that I just couldn't be bothered to understand: Pensions and VAT. Obviously, as the years have taken their toll, I've found my interest in pensions has naturally increased, but I've still never managed to get that exercised about VAT. So it was amusing to me that
George Osborne's statement this week had something interesting to say on both these topics - things that may yet turn out to have real organisational significance for Housing Associations.
Naturally, it was Osborne’s mention of pensions that grabbed the headlines. The three main points were that people would have to work longer before they got their state pension, that public sector pensions would be lower than historically has been the case and finally that pension funds would be investing in large infrastructure projects. Of these, the first two were merely re-statements of very clear trends that had been well trailed. But the news that pension funds will increase the scale of their direct funding of our roads, railways and hospitals of the future (you’ll notice that housing wasn't on that list) is more engaging.
Given that we now have six, not four, years of planned public sector retrenchment (or "cuts" as we’ve grown to know and love them) and that the banks are now in the business of building balance sheets rather than advancing long-term capital, we perhaps should be saying, "thank goodness
someone is prepared to invest." That said, I'm sure it won't replace the cut public expenditure, I'm sure that over the lifetime of this parliament that infrastructure will depreciate by more than the additional investment made; but nonetheless in the current climate
any new source of private capital must be greeted with enthusiasm. Now all we need to work on is getting that kind of institutional backing into affordable housing.
So the pensions may have been the lead story, but (and this is a sentence I never thought I’d write) it’s VAT that is the exciting part. Specifically, the catchily-titled "cost-sharing exemption", through which organisations that are exempt from VAT (like most Housing Associations are for the majority of their activities) can share activities without having to charge the other organisation VAT on those activities. With VAT now at a record 20%, that's no small saving and I predict it will have two impacts within our sector.
Firstly, it will reduce the imperative to merge as that will no longer be necessary to avoid paying VAT on services provided between organisations. Secondly, it will increase the imperative to collaborate in cost-sharing arrangements with other exempt organisations, as by doing so there is the potential to avoid 100% of the VAT that would otherwise be payable. I know that a lot of the detail of this has yet to be worked through and it may well be some time before we see how the exemption gets put to use, but let’s imagine for a second what might it offer.
Of course, the "scale-brigade" will immediately leap to shared back office services. If only their passion for agglomeration was matched by the level of evidence that it really does generate efficiencies! Interestingly, some press reports claim that it is an exemption specifically for back office services - whereas
the HMRC Guidance says only that
"the services supplied by the group to its members must be ‘directly necessary’ for the members’ exempt and/or non-taxable supplies." While back office sharing might benefit from this exemption, there has to be plenty of scope within it for organisations to be much more creative than simply creating call-handling factories, where any theoretical cost-per-call benefits are wiped out by increased call volumes - because the factories focus on the cost of each call, not solving the reasons for the call in the first place.
Could there, for instance be a route here to mutual specialisation, where two Housing Associations form a cost-sharing vehicle with the aim of Housing Association Number 1 becoming an expert in say Development, while Housing Association Number 2 becomes the expert in Maintenance? Could there, too, be a route to much better neighbourhood management, with Housing Associations with dispersed and fragmented stock in a given geographical area being able to appoint on-the-spot managing agents without incurring the current 20% VAT penalty? And, in a sector that is notoriously insular, is this the mechanism through which the Housing Association world can return to its roots and its values and re-establish productive, creative and VAT-free partnerships with Community and Voluntary Sector organisations?
There’s no denying that it’s been a week of unremittingly grim economic news, however, I can’t help but wonder what my younger self would have made of the fact that it's VAT that got me smiling again.
