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From the archive – government homelessness review slammed
Inside Housing looks back at what was happening in the sector this week five, 15 and 25 years ago
25 years ago
The government’s homelessness review was slammed by swathes of the housing and homelessness sectors. As the public consultation on the review came to a close, it was understood that the Department of Environment had been swamped with hundreds of responses.
The National Housing and Town Planning Council said it was “hard to make sense” of the recommendations, which it claimed would increase the cost to the public purse.
The National Federation of Housing Associations said that the government “had not offered a shred of evidence to back up its claims that the current system was failing”.
Homelessness pressure group CHAR called the proposals “a retrograde step” that would trap homeless people in “a revolving door, moving backward and forward between the streets and temporary accommodation”.
15 years ago
Housing associations were gearing up for a massive uptick in development after the Housing Corporation unveiled its largest ever investment programme of £3.3bn over two years.
The investment body’s new pilot partnering approach saw 80% of the record allocation distributed to 71 housing associations or groups of associations, with the government targeting 67,000 new affordable homes during the 2004-06 programme. The remaining 20% of allocations went to 195 associations under the traditional route.
Funding per unit across the programme was down 10% on its previous iteration.
According to Inside Housing, the rush to persuade associations to use the untried pilot partnering bidding route meant that few of them in high-demand areas, such as South East England and London, had time to form consortia with each other. Associations had been given less than two months to prepare for a bid deadline of 5 December 2003.
One source said that the two-month timescale was “unrealistic” and claimed that all but one major London housing association entered solo bids.
Picture: Getty
Five years ago
Councils in England were set to return more than £1m to central government after failing to spend large chunks of Discretionary Housing Payments, made to help tenants affected by welfare reform.
An Inside Housing investigation found that Wandsworth Council in London was returning more than £500,000 to the Treasury, with a spokesperson saying that the government had overestimated the impact of welfare reform on the Conservative-run borough (above).
Another council – North Lincolnshire – was found to have spent just 17% of its allocation of nearly a quarter of a million pounds.
Other cities spent their entire allocation and were being forced to dip into council funds to make additional payments to hard-up tenants.
