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The week in housing: fraud, cladding and the looming recession

A weekly round-up of the most important headlines for housing professionals

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Picture: Getty
Picture: Getty
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A weekly round-up of the most important headlines for housing professionals #ukhousing

Good afternoon. The most eye-catching story this week was the emergence of a sophisticated fraud targeting would-be investors in housing associations. Inside Housing was sent a prospectus claiming to offer the opportunity to make a 12.9% return by investing personal savings in a bond from leading housing association L&Q.

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But the prospectus – which was professionally designed and included an opening purportedly written by L&Q’s outgoing chief executive David Montague – turned out to be a fake. Much remains unknown – chiefly who the scammers were, whether they took any money and whether they have run similar stings using the names of other associations. L&Q has reported the episode to fraud police.


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Elsewhere this week, three finance stories signalled the potential impacts of the forthcoming recession for the housing sector, with government figures showing £227m had been knocked out of council budgets by the downturn – a combination of rent arrears and additional costs on things such as PPE. Meanwhile, One Housing Group, which sank to a surprise loss in 2019/20, says its difficult financial results will continue this year as care costs and fire safety bills combine with other financial challenges. And data from HouseMark estimated that sector-wide arrears have reached £1bn.

The building safety crisis remains one of the sector’s major talking points, and there was a key development this week with Labour calling for an intervention debate on Monday as well as submitting an amendment to the forthcoming Fire Safety Bill aimed at protecting leaseholders from costs in a substantial ramping-up of the party’s action on this issue.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that a plan would be coming soon, with the smart money on the plan from advisor Michael Wade to attempt to impose loans on affected leaseholders – a desperately unpopular policy with those affected, which has already been badged a ‘cladding tax’.

And figures from London showed the growing cost of the crisis with 2,000 mortgage applications currently on hold just within the city’s largest housing associations. This represents a financial challenge for the housing association sector, which is losing out on this sales income as well as the obvious and growing crisis for residents.

Scotland’s Budget contained some disappointing news for the sector, with affordable homes budgets cut by 16%. Housing minister Kevin Stewart blamed cuts from Westminster and said they had “protected the housing budget from this as much as we can”.

And finally, if you’re in the mood for a longer read, I have spent some time outlining the key reasons the welfare system is failing to prevent people from falling into rent arrears.

Peter Apps, deputy editor, Inside Housing

Editor’s picks: five must-read stories

  1. The holes that must be fixed in our welfare safety net
  2. A look at the year ahead: the big issues for housing in 2021
  3. Scammers seek thousands of pounds from individual investors for fake housing association bond
  4. Let’s move away from the soundbites. This is what a successful housing strategy should look like
  5. Nearly 2,000 housing association sales and mortgage renewals on hold in London due to EWS

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