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The week in housing: homeless deposits, development figures and combustible insulation
A weekly round-up of the most important headlines for housing professionals
Good afternoon. The most eye-catching Inside Housing story this week was about the extraordinary comments from Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey. He told us that many families in temporary accommodation “could” save for a £5,000 deposit and buy a shared ownership home.
The story sparked a range of responses from anger to ridicule on social media and resulted in follow-ups by The Guardian, The Metro and many others. While Mr Bailey did say he would have struggled to save for a deposit when he was sofa-surfing, he was clear on three occasions in our interview that he believed shared ownership was an option for many of the capital’s 62,000 homeless households.
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Really, Mr Bailey is suffering from the limits of a homeownership-focused housing policy, which is always prone to crash into the iceberg of the country’s homelessness crisis. Mr Bailey is not the first senior member of his party to make such a claim.
Perhaps a more realistic assessment of the plight of those in temporary accommodation in the capital came from the Local Government Ombudsman, which sanctioned east London borough Redbridge in relation to a case in which a homeless family was required to share a bed for a year.
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In other news, housebuilding figures showed that output recovered following a slump in the first lockdown when many builders closed sites due to fears about safety. These numbers come from a statistical series that has been frequently panned for undercounting – but does serve as an earlier tracker of movement in the market than the annual figures.
Elsewhere, 18 housing associations joined forces to form a collective to take on more modular work in the North of England, providing a boon to the offsite sector. In less positive news, contractor Kier announced £89m losses in its housebuilding arm.
Kier was not the only organisation to announce losses this week. London housing association One Housing Group reported an £8.6m loss for the financial year 2019/20. Losses (unless resulting from accounting anomalies) are incredibly rare for housing associations the size of One Housing, and there are further questions to ask about why this happened and what it means for the business.
In fire safety news, questions were asked of Notting Hill Genesis’ (NHG) decision to leave combustible Kingspan insulation on a high rise it is remediating for fire safety issues in north-west London. It was revealed before Christmas that the product, among those used on Grenfell, burned “ferociously” in a secret 2007 test. NHG and Hill Group say they are repairing fire breaks in the building’s system to make it safer.
And the Welsh government put forward its building safety strategy, which it claims will give the country the most comprehensive building safety programme in the UK.
Peter Apps, deputy editor, Inside Housing
Editor’s picks: five must-reads from this week
- Shaun Bailey’s pitch to London
- Lockdown 3.0: the current guidance for the housing sector
- The key challenges for housing policy in an age of destitution
- 2021: the year when housing and climate policy collide
- Fire safety costs and care arm struggles contribute to £8.6m loss at London housing association
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