You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
If the government gets reform right, housing could be a test bed for devolution
Better housing needs to be at the front and centre of the national recovery – and that means moving away from a ‘Whitehall knows best’ approach, argues Sir David Bell
This year has shown us, beyond any doubt, the value of a good-quality home.
We’ve all spent a lot more time at home this year than ever before. For some, despite all the pain of the pandemic, it has been a time to reflect and reorientate. Others have enjoyed the novelty of working from home and cannot foresee a time when they would want to return full-time to the workplace.
But we know there has been no such opportunity for many who live in overcrowded or poor conditions because their – often low-paying – jobs do not allow them to work from home or they have no suitable space or technology to do so.
So, as we look ahead to recovering from this pandemic, better housing needs to be front and centre of our thinking. Windy rhetoric is one thing, but I know from my time in local and central government that it’s all about delivery.
“It is a besetting sin of national policymakers to look for neat, national solutions and assume someone in Whitehall knows best”
Housing associations are at the heart of the national mission to create more good-quality, affordable homes that meet people’s needs. The new five-year Affordable Homes Programme means there is a real opportunity for change.
Already there is discussion of how the programme will work and the tenure mix it will deliver, as well as whether it will address the demand we see in the areas we serve.
That last point is very important because conditions in the North of England are very different to those of central London. It is a besetting sin of national policymakers – and I was guilty of this – to look for neat, national solutions and assume someone in Whitehall knows best.
The current proposals concerning shared ownership give us some concerns on this front. We understand people aspire to affordable homeownership, but is this new model really going to deliver that? If the government demands a uniform approach across the country, will that meet local needs?
A more nuanced approach would see the development of local and regional plans, based on good market intelligence, to identify what works best in different places.
READ MORE
So while I welcome the government talking about providing housing for families, key workers and young people, I would urge it to focus on how best to deliver that ambition. It might be the case that shared ownership is not the best method of getting the number of completions required.
In the past couple of years, Rent to Buy has been a real success story in the North East, and my colleagues at Karbon have delivered hundreds of homes of this kind. They have found that it opens a route to homeownership for our customers who want it and can afford it.
At the same time, they have successfully combined it with affordable rent or social rent homes on mixed-tenure developments, depending on local circumstances. I visited one such development at Springfield Meadows in Darlington recently and it was as good as – if not better than – anything the private sector is doing at the moment.
There is a lot of focus on house builders being freed up to build the homes the nation needs, but that can only ever be part of the story. Rather, we’re going to need a more rounded approach to delivering the homes we need.
“So housing, with its need for local solutions, could be a great test bed for devolution, as we seek to make our country less centralised”
That applies to planning, too. The government’s recent white paper gave us some sense of its forward direction. It was good to see a sense of momentum being generated but there were some gaps.
For one, while house builders are very good at building homes for the market, we know they need to work with social landlords to provide mixed-tenure developments effectively. That was underplayed somewhat.
The white paper also fudged some key issues that would help us build more: more availability of land, lower land costs and a recognition that not all the homes we need can be built on brownfield land.
Any changes to planning law must recognise that the country needs more genuinely affordable homes. The way to deliver those homes is to legislate to ensure there is land to build them, provide the funding to get them built and provide easy means for registered providers to deliver them.
That is what we are good at across the country, but we don’t need to do it in a one-size-fits-all way. So housing, with its need for local solutions, could be a great test bed for devolution, as we seek to make our country less centralised and more responsive to the needs of individuals and the communities in which they live.
Sir David Bell, chair, Karbon Homes
