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The Week in Housing: the bleak reality of the housing crisis
A weekly round-up of the most important headlines for housing professionals
Good afternoon.
Just how bad is the housing crisis in England?
Well, if the stories in Inside Housing this week are anything to go by, it’s pretty bad, and worryingly it’s set to get drastically worse.
During an investigation into a complaint of one family who had been waiting half a year for its application to join Birmingham City Council’s housing waiting list to be assessed, the local authority, which is the biggest in Europe, revealed the scale of the challenges it faces.
According to the council, it receives 500 applications a week from households looking to join its housing waiting list, of which 225 are usually found to be eligible.
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Just think about that for a second. That is 26,000 applications each year and 11,700 new households being added to the list every 12 months.
It is clear that Birmingham is struggling. The complainant was not a one-off. The ombudsman found that on average it takes 22 weeks for the council to consider an application. The target is six weeks.
And it is clear that Birmingham is not alone in facing this problem. The ombudsman itself noted that is seeing an increasing number of councils in similar situations.
But is there a glimmer of hope in sight? Bluntly, no.
In fact, the situation is only going to get worse. On the same day the ombudsman’s report came out, the Local Government Association, the Association of Retained Council Housing, and the National Federation of ALMOs released a report that gave pretty depressing predictions on how the situation is likely to deteriorate. It predicts that the housing waiting list will double, with more than two million households set to be waiting for a home next year.
Much of this will be driven by the removal of some of the safety nets put in place during the pandemic. The removal of the £20-a-week Universal Credit uplift and the end of the furlough scheme are probably the two most impactful.
And this comes at a time when waiting lists are already huge. The report revealed that one in 10 households on the waiting lists have been on there for at least five years.
The solution. Well, there are a number of ways of helping to alleviate the strain, and maintaining the Universal Credit uplift would have helped.
However, at the heart of it is a supply issue. It is an often-repeated phrase in Inside Housing’s pages, but the best way out of the housing crisis is to build more social rent homes.
In 2018/19 the country built 4,807 homes of this tenure, and in 2019/20 this increased to 5,716. Over the next five years the government has promised at least 32,000 homes – around 6,000 a year.
I’m no maths whizz but when we are staring down the barrel of a two million-plus waiting list, that isn’t anywhere near enough.
Elsewhere on the Inside Housing website, we reported on one of the more shocking cladding crisis cases. Leaseholders have already been put through the wringer enough by this government, and the case of the XQ7 building in Salford is an example of hope being removed entirely.
After being told that the bill for removing all their cladding would be covered by the Building Safety Fund, months later the government confirmed that they had made an error and, in fact, not all of the work was covered.
Because of this mistake, residents, who had in the interim done things like booked a wedding, are now looking at a £20,000 remediation bill.
Jack Simpson, news editor
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