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Northern shift 25 June daily

Ed Cox, director at think tank IPPR North, talks to Dawn Foster about why the north of England has specific housing problems not addressed by Westminster-led policy

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What’s your session on?

It’s to do with health and housing. We did a report a little while ago, partly about older people, but also about health and housing, and how the two things relate. 

It was about the whole country, but had particular relevance to the north insofar as we have a more rapidly ageing population.

What did you find?

The broad argument was that poor housing is responsible for a lot of cost, totalling £1.3bn, to the NHS. This is due to various hazards and resulting accidents that leads older people in particular to have to use hospital services. Therefore, if we can bring housing up to a better standard, the Lifetime Homes standard (LHS), we would be able to mitigate some of that cost. 

What specific problems are you finding in the north?

About a fifth of all homes fail to meet the LHS and a particular problem is accessibility, people’s ability to actually move around their homes. Of those measures [HOMES?], only a very small proportion had all LHS measures [CRITERIA?]. Less than 10% had all of those accessibility measures, so we need a lot of adaptation to the housing stock in England if we’re going to be able to meet those standards and help people stay in their homes.

Is that one aspect of the housing crisis that gets overlooked?

Almost certainly, but part of the problem is even of the relatively small numbers of houses we’re building, we’re not building them to Lifetime Homes standards. So we’re storing up further problems for the future. 

Are there any other specific things you think are quite specific to housing in the north?

One of the general points I’d make is I think a lot of housing policy is too dominated by the needs of the London housing market, which are very different to the needs of the northern housing market. There are some similarities, because there are some areas of the north that are expensive and attractive. But the north also has a lot of what some people call ‘low value and no value’ homes and you need different policy and investment to address those issues.

So we think the solution to that is not to try and create a single housing policy where one size fits all, but instead to devolve housing policy to a much greater degree than has been the case in the past.

IPPR thinks you need strategic housing boards working at the city level, doing strategic housing market assessments for their city regions, then developing their own policies on the back of that work, rather than trying to drive the entire national housing policy from the perspective of an overheated housing market in London.

Would more focus on regional economies help housing?

Yes, absolutely. Our case has been that greater devolution will unlock greater economic growth in the north. Housing is too often overlooked as one of the key drivers for the economy. We’ve argued in other reports that we should see housing as an economic driver in a similar way we see transports, skills and other types of infrastructure. It is a form of infrastructure so requires a level of public investment, particularly to support population movement to areas of economic potential.

What else is IPPR working on?

I’m now going to say something counterintuitive - but we’re going to do a London housing commission, looking particularly at the London housing market and how that’s developing. IPPR as a whole feels that unless we address the particular problems in the London market, too many other big decisions about the state of the economy and public finances are skewed so we’ve got to tackle those problems. 

Ed Cox is speaking at a session called ‘The demographic timebomb – housing our youth’, at 11.30am in the Exchange Auditorium on Thursday 25 June


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