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From the archive - blown out windows and a new regulator
Inside Housing looks back at what was happening in the sector this week 10, 20 and 30 years ago
From the archive - blown out windows and a new regulator #ukhousing30 years ago
Landlords were picking up the pieces from the Great Storm of 1987, which had caused devastation across Wales and the South East of England.
Inside Housing put the storm on its front page, with a photo of a high-rise tenant in Kennington in south London, who woke up to find his window had been blown out of the wall in his 11th floor flat.
“I got up and tied the window to the wall with string – although they were two-and-a-half feet apart,” Malcolm Farrell said.
People’s roofs were taken off and trees dropped like dominos, Inside Housing reported. Ipswich Council said that a third of its stock had damaged roofs, requiring 3,500 repairs. More than 40% of Hastings Council’s stock had been damaged and the council housed 12 people in emergency bed and breakfast hotels as a result.
20 years ago
More than 17,000 of Manchester Council’s homes were impossible to let, Inside Housing reported.
Claire Nangle, then-housing chair of the council, said two-fifths of its 79,000 homes were hard or impossible to let.
Many were in an “appalling condition” and improvement funds were unlikely to be available. The only solution would be a large-scale stock transfer. First to go would likely be overspill estates in Manchester districts, Ms Nangle said.
The council had bid for cash from an estates renewal challenge fund for several of these areas of low-demand council housing, but three of the areas alone were costing the Housing Revenue Account £3m more a year than it was receiving in rent.
Other unpopular areas should be packaged up for local housing companies, the council believed.
Nationwide, a leading lender of the day, argued that hard-to-let council estates should be bulldozed and the sites sold to finance urban renewal projects. “If we have an estate that is worth £1m but we can get £5m by letting Safeway build there, it may be better to do that,” said Mark Hedges, housing services manager at the building society.
10 years ago
The Housing Corporation won a battle with the Audit Commission to be the main regulator of the housing sector in England.
A report by lenders torpedoed the Audit Commission’s efforts to secure the job of scrutinising social landlords. The then-housing minister Yvette Cooper (above) told parliament: “It is vital that the new regulatory arrangements command the confidence of lenders.”
Housing associations planned to borrow £16bn in the next five years, the Housing Corporation’s figures revealed, and they already had debts of £29.5bn. The new office – the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords – was to go live in 2009, and would initially monitor associations before council housing and ALMOs.
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