The Autumn Statement's put rented back on the agenda - Great!

It’s good to see that rented homes are back on the agenda. For a long time the political message has been that home ownership is the only tenure that makes you a valuable part of the market. Those in rented were forgotten and perhaps seen as slightly outside of the economy. We all know that people are in rented properties for a diverse number of reasons, including some who have a range of support needs; some of those, even with the best intentions are unlikely to get the opportunity to purchase a home on the open market. And so if organisations like Sentinel aren’t providing those, because there isn’t the funding to do it – whose going to? The answer is nobody!

And that’s why we’ve been doing market rented and market sales homes  - to replace the grant that we used to get so that we can continue to provide low cost rented accommodation. Phillip Hammond’s announcement illustrates a clear shift in government that accords more with us and with the sector overall, including the National Housing Federation: a need to provide a range of tenures whilst giving us the flexibility and authority to build homes that meet a local need. So the government will be providing the money and will be judging us on our outputs, which is our contribution to the 1 million homes by 2020. This is regardless of whether we bring extra cash that we can invest, to make them rent, shared ownership, market sale or whatever tenure mix.

So for me the key benefit from the Autumn Statement is that it appears that decisions to determine what mix of new homes we should be providing, is coming back to us on a local level. And that we can get public subsidy to support that, which means we’ll be able to deliver more homes.

We’ve worked with the National Housing Federation over the past year to help them with different models, looking at a variety of rent-to-ownership scenarios; but the number one demand, if you walk into any local authority across the country is rented housing. So to see it back on the agenda is great.