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From the archive – ALMOs reap rewards from Decent Homes funding
Inside Housing looks back on what was happening in the sector this week five, 15 and 25 years ago
25 years ago
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee savaged the Housing Corporation over its regulation of small housing associations, pressing for more inspections of accounts.
In a highly critical report, the committee said that despite staff increases, inspections had fallen behind schedule in recent years.
It claimed that small and medium-sized associations were not necessarily being visited frequently enough under the agency’s new inspection programme.
The committee also raised concerns that half of all associations failed to meet the six-month deadline for submitting audited accounts between 1987 and 1992.
The report said: “The corporation should closely examine the reasons for an association’s poor performance.”
15 years ago
Homes managed by ALMOs made up almost two-thirds of the 316,000 properties to be awarded funding under the latest round of investment in the flagship Decent Homes programme.
Deputy prime minister John Prescott unveiled three new programmes totalling £3bn of funding at a high-profile launch event. But the announcement came as a group of MPs raised doubts over whether the Decent Homes target would be met.
Members of a select committee on Decent Homes described the target, which had been to bring one-third of homes up to the standard by 1 April 2004, as a ‘Trojan horse’ designed to achieve the government’s political objectives. Civil servants confirmed that this target had indeed slipped by “a month or two”.
The ALMO part of the programme, then in its fourth round, had accounted for £1.8bn in bids, with housing minister Keith Hill pushing for a fifth round.
Gwyneth Taylor, policy officer at the National Federation of ALMOs, said that the number of successful bids was “very encouraging news for the whole ALMO movement”.
Picture: Getty
Five years ago
English councils had turned down more than 70,000 applications for emergency housing assistance the previous year, despite handing £9m of funding back to the government.
Exclusive research revealed that 153 councils underspent their Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs) in the recent financial year, while others turned away thousands of applicants and still spent well over their allocation.
Nineteen councils, all of them in the North or the Midlands, received less than £200 per applicant. Liverpool Council was one of the most thinly stretched, with a DHP pot of £2.06m and 14,355 requests for support, equating to £143 each.
Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson said the amount the council received was “woefully inadequate”.
