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From the archive - week of 3 April
Inside Housing looks back at what was happening in the sector this week 10, 20 and 30 years ago
30 years ago
The National Housing Forum issued a stark warning to Britain’s political leaders that £84bn of investment was required if the chance to house the country was not be “irretrievably lost”.
The warning was made in its report – ‘The Case for Housing’ – which formed the centrepiece of National Housing Week.
The report claimed that £30bn was needed for one million new homes, including conversions, while £52bn should be spent on repairs to existing private and public sector stock. The report was circulated to all MPs from the major parties, ahead of that summer’s general election.
The National Housing Forum told the MPs: “If the housing crisis in Britain is not tackled now, and effectively, many of the post-war gains and improvements in housing standards will be irretrievably lost”.
20 years ago
The Conservative Party pledged to transfer up to two million council homes to the private sector in the next decade under plans laid out in its manifesto ahead of the 1997 general election.
The party said the plan would “transform the legacy of soulless, decaying public housing estates” and raise £25bn. The plan would have seen council stock virtually half within a decade. In the previous nine years, just 235,000 homes had been transferred, netting £3.8bn for the public purse. Chartered Institute of Housing policy director John Perry called the plans “a little ambitious”.
He said he doubted there would be sufficient interest from the private sector to “raise that kind of money”.
National Housing Forum chair Graham Facks-Martin said that councils may be left with little option if the Tories were re-elected but warned that the proposals ignored the implications on benefit spend of rent rises resulting from transfers. Labour’s housing spokesperson Nick Raynsford said the Tory manifesto “had abandoned housing need”.
10 years ago
A report on London’s Olympic Village housing project claimed that the site earmarked for development would be too small for the number of homes planned.
A report by the government’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) said: “We are not convinced that the Clays Lane site set by the planning application site boundary has sufficient land capacity to allow for the number of units proposed and the different approaches that may emerge through the process of testing being undertaken by the development partner of the Olympic village.”
CABE recommended spreading the development over a larger area to create “an urban grain and density more characteristic of London.
It added: “This is high-density housing but with different types next to each other.” At the time, the Olympic Delivery Authority had yet to produce detailed designs for the homes to be built after the conclusion of the 2012 Olympic Games.