Inside Housing’s annual table reveals biggest building associations
Fifty biggest developers to build 6,000 fewer homes
The 50 biggest developing housing associations plan to build nearly 6,000 fewer homes between them in 2010 than the previous year.
The associations’ development pipeline is for nearly 5 per cent fewer homes in 2010. The number dropped by 5,750 from 121,300 in 2009 to 115,500 in 2010, according to Inside Housing’s research.
The figures cover each association’s proposed development pipeline which includes homes that will be built several years in the future.
Jim Briscoe, head of affordable and student housing at property firm CB Richard Ellis, said the downturn was caused by a drop in private house building which meant housing associations got fewer affordable homes through section 106 planning agreements or other deals with developers.
This was despite the fact that the previous government launched the £1 billion kick-start programme, intended to rescue ailing housing schemes.
This was in addition to the hundreds of millions of pounds brought forward into 2009/10 to effectively bail out associations whose developments had fallen foul of the recession.
London & Quadrant retained its position as the biggest developer with 8,000 homes in the pipeline in 2010 - the same number as in 2009.
The top six associations - L&Q, Affinity Sutton, Circle Anglia, Genesis, Southern Housing and Places for People - remained unchanged between 2009 and 2010.
Yorkshire Housing, ranked 50th, broke into the top 50 for the first time as did Plus Dane (joint 42nd) and Network (39th).
Waterloo Housing Association increased its rank by the largest amount, rising from 40th to 29th, although it undertook a merger with Eastern Shires during the year. Specialist older people’s housing provider Housing 21 made the second largest rise in ranking from 42nd to 31st.
Jerome Geoghgan, group development director at L&Q, said it was focusing on regeneration schemes, including work on council-owned sites and land-led projects where it built all housing on the site regardless of tenure. He said the organisation had been doing fewer section 106 deals.
‘Our preference has always been to have one to one arrangements [with house builders over section 106 deals rather than bidding for them]. In the past, we have bid for 106 opportunities in sites but we would not do that today,’ he added.
Tayo Bilewu, director of new business development at Housing 21, said the organisation was continuing to work with councils, build grant funded homes and had undertaken several private finance initiatives and public-private partnership deals with councils to replace care homes during the year.
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Readers' comments (3)
Andrew Chandler | 25/06/2010 11:13 am
I really cannot imagine many people take this table seriously. There seems to be a great difference in the amount of NAHP allocations against the number of units "claimed" in Development! No doubt some ego's are well satisfied though.
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Antony Atkins | 27/06/2010 11:19 am
I'm not surprised the number of "affordable" homes given away to housing associations by private developers are falling: with the collapse in house prices and the ever-increasing costs of building new homes, especially with the requirement to build so-called zero-carbon homes by 2016, affordable homes have become unaffordable for all except the biggest consortia on large sites. The result has been a dramatic squeeze on medium-size builders and developers: there are the small firms who stay under the 15-house affordable homes limit and focus on backfill development as their only option to find developable land, and the huge firms who buy large greenfield sites and can include giving away 33-50% of their houses to housing associations in their cost models. The result? Mass-market clone housing with tiny gardens on large estates, socially engineered to force private-sector purchasers to buy unnecessarily-expensive houses that subsidise their "affordable" neighbours, beneficiaries of the client state living off benefits or qualifying as "vulnerable" key workers such as teachers and nurses.
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| 27/06/2010 12:45 pm
Spot on Mr Atkins. Under needs based allocation you can be sure that 100% of the allocations to the general needs social housing element that the developers and their customers are expected to finance are indeed "beneficiaries of the client state living off benefits". A nice stable revenue stream for the Housing Associations who get the properties but hardly an incentive to develop in the first place or an incentive to develop quality housing for sale at realistic prices is it? If the State got off the back of private developers and dropped the requirement for the so-called "affordable" social housing element then perhaps we would see more development all round. The power to tax is the power to destroy, as the saying goes, and this defacto supertax on development is a real killer.
In addition all this "zero-carbon" nonsense should really recognised for what it is. The last government was prey to the rantings and shrill voices of nearly every far left pressure group going. The entire theory of man made global warming is unravelling by the day. The lefties loved it as it allowed them to directly attack capitalism and push for ever increasing taxes and world government. A highly convenient "truth". But unfortunately for them the whole concept has turned out to be cobblers and these ludicrous and costly "zero carbon" requirements and regulations should be ditched now we have a somewhat less credulous government in office. Those with any sense in the building industry should be lobbying Pickles to deal with this pointless and dangerous NuLab industry destroying regulation as part of the Great Repeal Act. For the latest news, comment and analysis on the myth of AGW, see Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation site at http://www.thegwpf.org
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