What are the chances of the government coming anywhere near to its target of 45,000 social rented homes a year by April 2011?
No chance, says a new assessment by the Construction Products Association (CPA). Maybe, if you give us £3.6bn says the National Housing Federation (NHF).
The headline graph in the CPA’s annual Achievable Targets report published yesterday makes clear that the target and forecast output are travelling in different directions. Output is set to fall from last year’s 27,000 to little more than 20,000 this year, it says, before recovering to about 22,000 in the next three.
The answer, says the NHF, is £3.2bn of public investment. That would deliver 50,000 new social homes by next June, with a quarter of them paid for by housing associations. The alternative, it says, is a remorseless rise in waiting lists until one in ten people are on them by 2020.
The case for extra investment has been unanswerable for months. There is maybe one last chance. But the problem is that, regardless of the encouraging noises that housing will feature in Gordon Brown 3.0, the cupboard is almost bare.
As Sir Bob Kerslake tells Inside Housing TV today: ‘The key thing for me is that we recognise the continuing importance of continuing to build new houses and new communities and to recognise that to do that we have to make both the affordable housing sector work and the private housing sector work. We can’t simply rely on a public funded housing boom, it’s got to come from the two.’
That’s the background to his announcement yesterday of a new Housing Finance Group to look for new sources of private finance. Bridging that gap between output and need will take everything that can be squeezed out of the Treasury, all the extra abilities of local councils after the HCA review - and then some.
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