The Week in Housing: Sunak, zero carbon and shared ownership

This combined with worrying news from Scotland showing that rent arrears have risen to 15% in council housing since the start of the pandemic.

Moving away from the Budget, Monday saw Inside Housing publish our pioneering research into the cost of achieving net zero in social housing – a figure which our analysis of plans obtained from social landlords puts in the region of £100bn. There are many variables to this but no one should underestimate the size of the challenge, especially larger landlords such as the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, which estimated its costs at £1.7bn. On this theme, there was news of a major new retrofit programme in Swansea – the kind of thing we will expect to see much more of in the coming years.

Causing much discussion inside and outside the sector was a BBC Panorama programme investigating shared ownership, which broadcast on Tuesday. Some of the criticisms will feel familiar to those who know the product – particularly the burden of lease extensions and high service charges. But if the sector wants shared ownership to be the successful product it believes it is, it needs to engage with these very real and long-standing concerns. (Incidentally, you can read about my own experience of shared ownership here).

Ironically enough, that programme coincided with Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey pledging 100,000 shared ownership homes if he is elected London mayor. With only a £4bn housing budget, this would leave little room for much else.

Housebuilding plans were also the order of the day in Wales, with Welsh Labour outlining plans for 20,000 social rented homes if it secures another term in office in the spring. This builds on its existing pledge to deliver 20,000 ‘affordable’ homes in the current term.

Finally, we continued to hear the latest on the cladding scandal – or the building safety scandal, as it should perhaps be known. Today we broke the news that a tower block in Manchester with compliant cladding still requires remediation work totalling £100,000 per leaseholder, begging once more the question of how deep this problem will go. Amid the latest revelations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, it feels as if we could currently be dealing with one of the greatest corporate scandals.

Sadly, that was not enough to prompt Mr Sunak to offer any fresh money to alleviate the burden in his statement on Wednesday, which sidelined the safety crisis altogether.

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Peter Apps, deputy editor, Inside Housing

Editor’s picks: five must-reads for housing professionals

1. The cost of net zero: social landlords’ decarbonisation plans revealed How do landlords plan to achieve net zero and how much do they expect it to cost? Exclusive research by Inside Housing reveals what housing associations and councils are planning, and how much it will set them back. Lucie Heath reports

2. Spending Review 2020: key housing announcements at a glance Inside Housing’s news team unpicks the chancellor’s Spending Review to look at the key housing takeaways

3. L&Q’s man: David Montague reflects on 12 years as chief executive As David Montague’s 12-year tenure as chief executive of L&Q draws to a close, Peter Apps speaks to the man himself about the organisation’s purpose and history – and what is in store for its future

4. Kingspan threatened legal action against NHBC for raising concerns over non-compliant insulation Insulation manufacturer Kingspan threatened the country’s largest building control body with an injunction after it discovered issues with its flagship product and vowed to warn others about its faults, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry heard

5. The Social Housing White Paper: what was missing? In the final part of our four-part look at the Social Housing White Paper, Inside Housing details what was missing from the 76-page document, and what the sector would have liked to have seen more on