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The Week in Housing: Development down, arrears up and ‘soft-touch’ associations get taken advantage of

A weekly round-up of the most important headlines for housing professionals

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Picture: Getty
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Missed any of the major headlines this week? Here is our Week in Housing bulletin to keep you up-to-date with all the big housing stories #UK,housing

Good afternoon. It has been another busy week in the world of housing and here is our digest of all of those headlines you may have missed. I’ll start, shall I?

The Social Housing Annual Conference and Homes UK once again acted as the finishing point to the sector’s conference calendar. But while the pandemic may have pushed them online, it did little to diminish the illuminating discussions coming from the dozens of sessions spread across the week.

On Tuesday, at Homes the chair of the Affordable Housing Commission, Lord Best, led a panel discussion on the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) law and how it was working in practice. What the panel revealed was a network of ‘no-win, no-fee’ lawyers knocking on front doors in estates across the country, telling tenants to not allow their landlords to carry out repairs and then pursue a claim under the act. Lord Best, chair of the Affordable Housing Commission, said councils and housing associations are often seen as a “soft target” because the law firms hold an outdated and offensive view of the tenants as “gullible” and “sometimes lazy”.

The Social Housing Annual Conference also turned out its own revelations. A session on building safety on Tuesday saw concerns raised over the time limits social landlords have been given to bid for the government’s £1bn Building Safety Fund. A session on Tuesday also proved the Planning White Paper is still looming large in the thinking of many associations, with directors from Sovereign and Aster warning the proposals put forward could lead to a further shift away from Section 106 by landlords.


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Elsewhere, there were a few stories this week that highlighted the true impact of COVID-19 on social landlords so far. On Tuesday we ran a piece looking at the six-month accounts of some of the country’s largest associations, with Notting Hill, Platform and Peabody all reporting large rises in their rental arrears, while the English regulator’s quarterly survey report for the sector, covering the three-month period between June and September, showed that year-on-year development spend had dropped by 20% for registered providers across the sector.

On Wednesday, Savills’ survey looking at the cost of decarbonisation for the social housing sector pointed to some issues associations may face in the future. According to the consultancy, it will cost the country the eye-watering sum of £3.5bn to make all social homes carbon neutral by 2050. This figure closely resembles Inside Housing’s own estimate of £104bn over the next 30 years, based on 207 social landlords. You can read that extensive research here.

Friday saw a big story from our development expert Lucie Heath, revealing that regeneration projects could become unviable under the Greater London Authority’s new £4bn affordable homes grant programme. Under the new regime, associations will no longer be able to secure grant for replacing old homes on regeneration schemes and can only secure cash for additional homes. The move was described as a big change from previous programmes, with G15 boss Helen Evans saying that estate regeneration, which already involves demolition and loss of rental costs, could become more expensive and “unviable in some instances”. Read our analysis on the other changes under the new programme here.

But it is not only in London where changes to the social housing landscape are afoot. Two features this week highlighted how the Scottish and Northern Irish sectors were changing after major turning points. In the first one, Inside Housing takes a look at landlords in Scotland and the conundrum they face in setting rents in a COVID-19 world. While some believe a rent freeze is needed, others see it as “irrational”. The analysis looks at who will win out.

The other takes a deep dive into the decision to change the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the country’s biggest social landlord, into a co-operative. The change will provide them with more financial freedoms, but could it lead to the executive losing its public body status and becoming a housing association?

It was also a week for big deals. The highest profile was the news that housing association giant L&Q was in talks with resident-led community housing association Phoenix about transferring 1,500 homes in south-east London. Meanwhile, Man Group, the global hedge fund giant, continued its play for a more significant role in housing by signing a £31m deal with modular home builder Ilke Homes for 227 factory-built homes in Grantham.

Jack Simpson, news editor, Inside Housing

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