Inspection of housing associations; The Dutch and the English way

The subject of this paper is inspection (visitatie in Dutch) of housing associations in the Netherlands and England. In the Netherlands there is an ongoing debate about the performance and the regulation and control of housing associations. Many see inspection as an important instrument for stimulating and controlling the performance of Dutch housing associations. However, there is no common understanding of the function of and the approach to the instrument. In the first part of this paper we will clarify the possible functions of and approaches to the instrument of inspection. We will look at inspection from three perspectives on the housing association; the housing association as an agent for the central government, the housing association that facilitates the needs of local stakeholders and the housing association as an independent autonomous entrepreneur. From each of these stereotypical perspectives, we derived different functions of and approaches to inspection. In the second part of this paper we will describe the evaluation of the impact of finished inspections by Raeflex, an organization that inspects Dutch housing associations at the associations¿ requests. We will also report on the results of a telephonic survey about the English system of inspection of housing associations. This will result in a better understanding of the effects of different types of inspection regimes; the Dutch voluntary self-regulatory approach and the English compulsory and more elaborate approach. Finally, we will present conclusions about the pros and cons of the two systems and we will point out some considerations for a new inspection system in the Netherlands as well as for the existing English system of inspections.