The Week in Housing: will the Spending Review deliver?

Alongside the lobbying, the HCLG Committee is mulling over the responses to its inquiry into land value capture. Inside Housing has the key responses from the sector on how the government should go about these reforms.

Next week’s review will seal the fate of the affordable housing sector for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, a group of six housing partnerships met a major investor, a lender, a representative of the business community and a senior economist to get behind a pledge for housing to be reclassified as essential infrastructure.

Reports today suggest that ministers will not cut the £13.2bn fund to fix draughty homes and install heat pumps and solar panels. Earlier this week, Inside Housing reported that energy secretary Ed Miliband was considering overhauling green levies on electricity to encourage more people to buy heat pumps.

The Chartered Institute of Housing has published an analysis that shows how retrofit funding for social homes could save the NHS £85m a year from 2030.

In an extensive interview, Catherine Ryder, chief executive of PlaceShapers, spoke about why prime minister Sir Keir Starmer needs to focus on housing-led regeneration if he is to deliver on his promised “decade of national renewal”.

As part of the Strategic Defence Review, the government committed to spending an extra £1.5bn on improving the state of housing for the UK’s armed forces and building more homes.

The sector has also been lobbying for specific funding aimed at social landlords to complete building safety work. Many in the sector have to make difficult decisions about how to fund this work, and in some instances this has led to cutbacks in the delivery of new homes.

When funding dries up, as in the case of a high-rise block in Kirkby, Merseyside this week, hundreds of households were told to find new homes as soon as possible because of fire safety concerns. Meanwhile, plans for new post-Grenfell laws to help vulnerable residents evacuate high-rise blocks are due to be unveiled later this month.

Labour has promised a new generation of new towns, but a House of Lords inquiry heard that housing associations will find it “difficult” to take on affordable homes built in these locations if the government sticks to its target of 40%.

This session was followed by a report from the UK’s spending watchdog which found that a lack of transparency in Section 106 agreements and concerns over the quality of homes have led to social landlords avoiding taking properties on.

There was good news on development in Northern Ireland, as the latest data revealed an annual increase in the rate at which it is both starting and finishing new homes.

The Regulator of Social Housing’s (RSH) latest sector survey found that nearly four out of 10 large landlords expect to report write-downs in their accounts for the last financial year as development problems, including contractors going bust, continue to stifle schemes. The RSH highlighted how landlords have been hit by “contractor insolvency, delays on site and higher interest rates leading to additional interest charges, and the identification of additional works”.

This was demonstrated in Platform’s latest financial accounts. The housing association reported an increase in annual turnover and surplus, although delays on three schemes due to contractor insolvencies affected its development spending.

At the same time, a modular specialist that has been working on one of the UK’s largest build-to-rent schemes fell into administration after 20 years in business.

Awaab’s Law is due to come into force later this year. It comes with a demand that all urgent hazards are repaired within 24 hours.

In Wales, a government consultation on proposed guidance to strengthen the Welsh Housing Quality Standard and clarify how social landlords should respond to serious hazards such as damp and mould is currently under way. Social housing tenants in Wales have called for landlords to be given just three days to respond to hazard reports.

One call for reform has come from within the sector, as a new shared ownership code was launched in a bid to standardise the offer and drive investment. Ann Santry, chair of the Shared Ownership Council, spoke to Inside Housing about how it aims to improve customer service and drive up satisfaction.

A major new report by the Shared Health Foundation called for more effective regulation of temporary accommodation to tackle the growing scandal of children in “poor-quality” and “dangerous” living conditions.

Councils are increasingly looking at ways to improve the quality and management of temporary accommodation.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London will use up to £100m of its pension fund to buy 250 properties for homeless households. Similarly, Harlow Council in Essex is set to buy and redevelop Terminus House, a 13-storey former office block used as temporary accommodation by London boroughs.

The need for temporary accommodation is being driven by the lack of affordable housing, and wage growth not keeping pace with rising rents in the private sector. In Scotland, the number of households seeking support from a fund designed to help people at risk of hardship and struggling to meet housing costs has risen by 4.5%.

Finally this week, staff at a Merseyside-based housing association went back to work after an eight-month pay dispute with two major unions was resolved.

Have a great weekend.

Stephen Delahunty, news editor, Inside Housing

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