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Housing summit: LGA ‘hopeful’ of action on borrowing caps
The chair of the Local Government Association (LGA) is “hopeful” that the Autumn Budget will see a relaxation of council borrowing restrictions, following a top-level summit at Number 10 this week.
Lord Gary Porter, one of 18 representatives at Theresa May’s meeting, told Inside Housing he had raised the issues of the Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap, councils keeping Right to Buy receipts, and flexibility on planning fees.
He added that he was “more hopeful of getting some movement than I’ve ever been for the past 10 years at least”.
The meeting was specifically aimed at answering the question of supply, with representatives including two housing association chief executives and leaders from the National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Northern Housing Consortium attending.
Attendees said Ms May listened for more than an hour to a wide range of ideas on solving the housing crisis, an aim she promised to accomplish personally in her much-maligned party conference speech earlier this month.
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At the end of the session, Ms May said she could not guarantee all the suggestions would be acted upon but that there is a collective will from government to do more to increase housebuilding.
Tracy Harrison, deputy chief executive of the Northern Housing Consortium, told Inside Housing: “There was a lot of discussion at the meeting of issues around planning. What I was saying is from a northern point of view, planning isn’t the biggest issue that we’ve got. In the North, what we need is upfront investment and long-term patient equity to be able to bring these sites forward.”
Paul Hackett, chair of the G15 group of housing associations and chief executive of Optivo, earlier this week told Inside Housing: “We talked about the benefits of flexible programmes, such as the cash programme in the early 1990s, which doubled housing association starts in a single year, and the strategic partnerships with the Greater London Authority announced in July, which enabled the G15 to increase our bid by 50% – committing to 42,000 starts over the next four years. We’d love to see this approach adopted nationally.”
David Montague, chief executive of L&Q, added that while the conversation “starts and ends with homeownership”, there is now an understanding from government “that not everybody can afford their own home, so we’ve got to invest across all tenures if we’re going to build more homes”.
