Jules Birch
Finally! After three party conference defeats in four years, it seems that the government has at last decided to listen and allow the fourth option with ‘exciting new proposals to allow councils to play a greater role in future provision of social housing including building new council homes’.
Fourth protocol
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As Inside Housing reports this week, a draft letter from housing minister Caroline Flint to the Labour national policy forum affordable housing working group pledges that ‘for the first time local authorities will be able to apply for social housing grants’ and that councils should be able to invest directly in their stock as an alternative to transfer, AMLO and PFI.
It certainly looks like a breakthrough but does it really mean a new era for council housing? Given the government’s record on the issue, supporters of the fourth option could be forgiven for reacting cautiously. However, Defend Council Housing was quick to welcome the concessions.
But what took so long? In opposition in the mid 1990s, John Prescott worked up proposals not just to free up investment in council housing but to change the public borrowing rules that will even now still restrict investment. The early days of the new government were marked by headlines about, yes, a new era in council housing but policies that meant just the opposite.
Eleven years later, with the Scottish government too signalling a new flexibiity - reports today say Edinburgh is studying plans to build 1,100 homes - that new era may finally, ever so dimly, be about to dawn.
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Readers' comments (1)
martin haddelsey | 11/09/2008 11:23 am
How will LAs match-fund new housing development? Presumably by permitted borrowing. This will add to the PSBR and reflect badly on government. Seems to me that only those councils with significant reserves (and a huge amount of political will) will build new homes. It's academic anyway, because 2010 will almost certainly see a Conservative government voted in. I can't imagine that Cameron will allow councils to build - can you?
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