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A call for accessible housing

We are thrilled to have launched a powerful new campaign, led by a collaboration between Invisible Creations, our partner company PROCare, and Foundations, the National Body of Home Improvement. This initiative is calling on housing providers across the UK to create homes that are truly accessible for everyone.

Launched on July 11, 2024, at the House of Lords, our campaign aims to meet the growing needs of an ageing population and ensure that homes are designed to be accessible for all.

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The Growing Need

Did you know that 24% of the UK population lives with a disability(1), and 4 million of them are older adults with long-term health conditions?(2) As our population continues to age, the need for accessible homes has never been more urgent. At our launch event, Lord Richard Best put it perfectly, almost half of social housing residents are over 60. He made a powerful point: adapting our homes today will help people live independently and reduce pressure on our health and social care systems.

The importance of these changes goes beyond convenience. Falls, for instance, remain a leading cause of injury, particularly among older adults, with around 76,000 hip fractures occurring each year in the UK, costing the NHS over £2 million annually.(3) Preventive aids like grab rails and shower seats can significantly reduce the risk of falls, prevent emergency hospitalisations, and lower NHS costs by keeping people safer in their homes for longer.

Building the Right Future, Together

Dr. Rachel Russell and Paul Smith from Foundations, at the launch, shared their vision of affordable, simple changes like grab rails and shower seats that can transform lives. David Orr, Chair of Clarion Housing, also joined the conversation, stressing the importance of creating a national vision for accessible housing. He put it best when he said, “Let’s stop installing cheap, short-term solutions and focus on beautiful, sustainable changes that bring joy, safety, and independence.”

A Vision for the Future

At Invisible Creations and PROCare, we’re not just addressing today’s needs; we’re focused on designing homes that are future-proof. With over 20 years of experience, we’ve seen the profound impact of thoughtful design. We advocate for modern, intuitive features like sleek grab rails and contemporary, accessible kitchens and bathrooms, built in from the start to adapt to people’s changing mobility needs throughout their lives, empowering them to age in place and maintain their independence for longer. These changes can make a massive difference by promoting mobility, preventing falls, and providing peace of mind, all through thoughtful design and strategies for lasting change.

Why We Need Long-Term Solutions

The reality is that most homes in the UK don’t meet basic accessibility standards, and temporary adaptations often fail to provide lasting solutions. Many people resist accessible features until they’re absolutely necessary, often because these features are seen as low-quality and unattractive. When residents move out, they frequently remove these adaptations, leaving the property inaccessible for the next person.

This is where we need to rethink our approach to home design. What if we viewed adaptations not as short-term fixes, but as permanent, sustainable upgrades? By incorporating long-lasting materials, inclusive design concepts, and flexible components, we can create lasting solutions that benefit everyone and ensure homes are truly accessible for the long term.

A Call to Action

I’m urging all housing providers and professionals in the industry to join the Fit for Our Future movement. This is our chance to improve wellbeing, reduce accidents and waste, and make homes more adaptable for the future. Accessible housing isn’t just a temporary
fix, it’s a lasting investment.

We’re offering free resources and toolkits to help you take action and make homes more accessible for everyone. Together, we can create homes that not only meet today’s needs but are prepared for the challenges of tomorrow.

Visit www.fitforourfuture.today to learn more and get involved.

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Reform UK cannot win the argument on housing and migration

Nigel Farage MP (Clacton, Reform UK) by House of Commons is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One of the surprises of the 2024 general election was Reform UK’s first real success at a Westminster election. Few would have guessed that Nigel Farage would be finally elected after seven attempts at Parliament, fewer that he would be joined by four Reform UK colleagues. Even more notable is that they came second in 98 (mostly Labour) constituencies, with 13 within a five percentage point swing.

Whether we like it or not, beating a currently minor party with little record or accountability will be a crucial part of securing the next Labour win at the general election. We have to take on the far right.

When it comes to housing this is particularly important, as Reform UK’s platform is as divisive as it is ineffective. So, what is Reform UK’s platform and why should it worry us?

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What does Reform UK stand for on housing?

Reform’s housing policy is relatively detailed, including:

  • ‘Loose fit planning’ policy for large developments, alongside brownfield passports to fast-track housing on urban land.
  • A “UK Connection test” for social housing so that “foreign nationals must go to the back of the queue. Not the front.”
  • Abolishing Section 24, which limits the amount of tax relief landlords can get on their residential properties.
  • Abolish the (then) Renters’ Reform Bill.
  • Minor reforms to leasehold to provide more clarity over charging and reduce the cost of renewing leases.
  • Modernise innovative construction practices.

Migration is not the problem

Key to Reform UK’s housing policies, and broader argument, is the myth that migrants take up an unfair share of UK social housing.

Since their election, several of Reform UK MPs have submitted questions regarding how many asylum seekers are being housed in social housing in their constituencies, only to be corrected by the Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook that asylum seekers are ineligible for social housing due to having no recourse to public funds.

This is an oft-touted myth on the far right, that all social housing is allocated more favourably towards non British nationals. This has been debunked in a number of ways:

  • Currently 90% of social housing residents are UK nationals, the same as their makeup of the national population.
  • 17% of people born in the UK live in social housing, compared to 18% of people not born in the UK.
  • Even if you want to take Reform UK’s bait of ‘non UK nationals’ meaning people outside of the ‘White British’ ethnicity classification, this is also untrue. The social housing survey shows that White British people are actually more likely to be in social housing than other ethnicities, comprising 77.6% of new tenures compared to 74.4% of the population.

This myth needs to be called out for what it is – a divisive attempt to create a bogeyman to justify the positions of Farage and his colleagues.

Caving in to vested interests

While claiming to stand up for the ‘little guy’ with this allocations policy, the rest of Reform UK’s platform is a clear pandering to those all benefitting from the housing crisis.

This is something which Reform UK is proud of, with Reform candidate David McLennan  saying during the election campaign “We’re very much a landlords’ party”. This is true in more than one sense, with former Deputy Leader Ben Habib CEO of First Property Group and current Deputy Leader and MP Richard Tice still listed as a Partner at Quidnet Capital, a real-estate focused investment group.

Meanwhile, their tax policy heavily favours those with already substantial funds, including eliminating stamp duty for properties below £750,000 (over twice the national average), raising the Inheritance Tax threshold fourfold to £2m, and abolishing Section 24.

Not only would this benefit landowners in general, but specifically landlords. This has been backed up by the party’s opposition to the Renters’ Rights Bill, which eliminates Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions while keeping a number of routes for landlords to evict unruly tenants, and implements basic standards of accountability to the sector.

Finally, while the party may have a fig leaf to increasing home-building, the actions of Reform MPs have clearly shown a pandering to their most NIMBY instincts. This has manifested in a number of written questions to Ministers including about:

A charlatan’s charter

It is clear from their policy platform that Reform UK have no serious plan to solve the housing crisis. Instead, their policy is based on clear disinformation, that migration is to blame for the UK’s housing shortage and that a pure deregulatory agenda will fix it.

Instead, they represent at best a lobby group for those whose interests lie in keeping the housing crisis unsolved, seeking to milk the housing crisis for all that it’s worth while failing to come up with any real solutions.

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Modern Methods of Construction: A solution to the linked crises in housing and construction skills

The housing crisis is one of the most pressing issues the UK faces; it demands innovative solutions from both the public and the private sector.

The ambition with which the new Labour Government has grasped this agenda is welcoming, particularly with their reforms to the planning system. But to achieve this mission and deliver 1.5m new homes, we have to do something to boost the output and capacity of the housebuilding industry.

Even with a much more favourable planning policy position, the shortage in construction skills will make this a challenging target to achieve. Already this year 38% of housebuilders surveyed by the Federation of Master Builders have reported skills shortages leading to delays in completing projects.

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Given the shortage we face in construction skills, Weston Homes believes that boosting the use of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) will be essential if we are to address the housing crisis in the UK.

British Offsite is Weston Group’s manufacturing subsidiary based in Essex, operating one of the largest automated assembly lines in Europe from our 180,000 sq ft factory. This one factory alone has the capacity to produce 7000 homes a year.

Using the latest Category 2 MMC technology, British Offsite uses advanced robotic assembly lines to create light gauge steel 2D panels, which are then assembled at pace on site.

Our panels arrive on-site with windows, doors, insulation, and fire stopping already installed. This integration of multiple components into a single panel reduces the need for various tradespeople, effectively combining the work of up to five trades into one.

Using this system, we can deliver apartments 30% faster and a single property 60% faster compared to traditional methods of construction.

Traditional building methods by comparison are slower and more labour intensive, and as we are currently facing a skills crisis in the construction sector, there are often delays and increased costs to projects as a result. We believe that greater use and support of Category 2 MMC technology in the housebuilding sector will be essential if we are to build the homes that Britain needs.

Another critical benefit of Category 2 MMC is the precision and quality it brings to construction. Factory-controlled environments allow for the production of components with exact specifications, produced in a warm and dry environment, ensuring a higher standard of quality compared to traditional methods. This precision translates to better-built homes that meet or exceed regulatory requirements for fire, thermal, and acoustic performance.

Furthermore, British Offsite’s technology is expected to exceed the requirements of the Future Homes Standard, though these are yet to be confirmed before they come into force in 2025. This will lead to better quality homes with fewer emissions and lower bills for households.

Category 2 Modern Methods of Construction present a viable solution to the UK’s housing crisis. By leveraging the speed, efficiency, and precision of MMC, we can overcome the challenges posed by skills shortages and deliver high-quality, sustainable homes at scale.

However, both Government and industry need support to scale up wider use of this innovation. The sector itself is often reluctant to move away from more traditional building models, such as brick/block and timber frame, but with more investment comes increased output.

This can come in two main forms: funding and planning. Grant funding for research into MMC and to help small companies get off the ground will help to avoid some of the pitfalls which have led pioneers in the industry to close doors prematurely. And giving weight in the planning system for developments delivered with MMC will be a win-win, supporting the sector while ensuring that more homes are delivered at pace with fewer emissions. Building for Britain will require an industrial strategy that recognises the critical importance advanced manufacturing and innovation in housebuilding. MMC is at the forefront of this transformation, offering a pathway to a more efficient, sustainable, and affordable housing market.

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A pragmatic approach to social housing, what the industry needs to develop a new generation of quality homes at pace

For more than 30 years we’ve witnessed a depletion of social and genuinely affordable housing stock, which has impacted all ages in every community in every part of the UK.

In England, when considering the shortage of social housing, we are experiencing a perfect storm. There are more than 1.2m households languishing on local authority waiting lists, an increased risk of households slipping into homelessness and a record number of households living in temporary accommodation. In addition, much of the current social housing stock is failing to meet decent homes standards, impacting the health and wellbeing of residents. It’s for that reason, we believe there’s a moral, societal and economic imperative which goes beyond party politics to address the imbalance and inequality in housing provision.

By supporting a revival in social and affordable housing across the UK, we believe it will be possible to restore the social fabric of our communities and promote a safer, healthier, and more inclusive society. For EDAROTH, this is not just about delivering new homes, this is also about trying to help address the housing challenge where it is most needed.

So, you may ask, how did we come to this conclusion, what are we doing about it, and who or what is EDAROTH?

In 2016, global professional services consultancy AtkinsRéalis was challenged by government officials to identify how it  could assist with the housing crisis. AtkinsRéalis methodically applied engineering acumen and rigor to understand the challenge, and where it could have an additive impact that would not disrupt the current housing supply pipeline. The firm immediately identified a huge shortfall in social housing compared to those being built for market sale, and the need to address that imbalance.

When considering where to deliver the additional homes needed, it adopted the same additive approach. Under-utilised and brownfield land owned by the public sector was identified as assets with untapped potential. This land is often ignored by traditional developers due to complexity and costly remediation. Linked to existing infrastructure, these sites frequently offer better-than-average access to education, healthcare, employment and economic centres. By utilising years of experience and expertise in land remediation, AtkinsRéalis recognised this as fertile ground for housing development.

Assessing the how, brought with it innovative thinking to deliver homes with minimum impact on existing construction supply chains. By adopting an industrialised approach utilizing modern methods of construction (MMC) as a preferred approach, AtkinsRéalis identified the how! This addressed some of the potential supply chain challenges and brought with it the opportunity to deliver high quality homes quicker, safer and at a reduced cost when compared like for like to traditional methods.

After four years of development AtkinsRéalis launched EDAROTH in January 2020, established with the purpose of exclusively assisting the public sector to generate social and economic value, while at the same time reducing their housing waiting lists.

But we didn’t stop there. The challenge that housing associations and local authorities are facing to maintain existing housing stock has been well reported. As EDAROTH we recognised that more needed to be done to slow the decline of existing social housing. By using digital operations and maintenance capability to provide predictive maintenance we can reduce the potential costs associated with traditional asset monitoring and repair. The ambition is to deliver improved outcomes for households, and communities, while reducing the cost burden of local authorities and housing associations.

So, who are we? EDAROTH represents both our brand name and our purpose. We believe that ‘everybody deserves a roof over their head’ and that everyone should have a place that they are proud to call home that is safe, secure and truly affordable. But, as you can hopefully see, this purpose is driven by a clearly identified need and understanding as to how and where we can responsibly have the greatest impact.  

What we need:

We welcome the Government’s pledge to deliver 1.5m homes over the next parliamentary term and vastly increase the delivery of new social and affordable homes. We wholly support the planning passport to fast-track brownfield developments, the utilisation of ‘grey belt’ land and creation of new towns to deliver the homes that are needed, where they are most needed.

To achieve the Government’s ambition, we believe that systemwide transformation is needed that takes an additive approach and avoids disrupting the existing market. While we agree that there’s opportunities to increase the level of 106 agreements with national housebuilders, we firmly believe this will not be enough to make up for the huge shortfall in social housing. Instead, government must also look towards SMEs and MMC housing developers who have the capacity to deliver the additional homes that are needed.

We believe the Government needs to reclassify social housing as infrastructure to stimulate investment. This transfers decision making into HM Treasury’s portfolio for evaluation in relation to the broader economy. This changes the risk profile to ‘Government backed’, which will attract funding at a lower rate. In conjunction with the delivery of MMC homes which can be smoother and quicker with additional cost certainty, it reduces the risk further which in turn reduce the cost of finance.

Housing policy is often subject to change and short termism. Providers of social and affordable housing confronted by inadequate funding and financial obstacles, including high interest rates, inflation, decarbonisation, and deteriorating conditions in existing housing stock. We endorse the G15’s proposal to establish a ‘Housing Commission’ as an expert body responsible for establishing housing goals and ensuring that the government fulfils its commitments.

Historical housing data proves that housebuilding in England and Wales only approached or exceeded 300,000 homes per year during periods with significant levels of local authority housebuilding. If we are to meet the demand to deliver social and affordable housing, local authorities and the wider public sector must be supported and incentivised to deliver the homes that are needed.

More must be done to tackle the temporary accommodation crisis. Analysis conducted by the Local Government Association in October 2023, indicated that the number of households in temporary accommodation had increased to its highest level since 1998, resulting in a crippling financial burden of at least £1.74 billion for councils. By utilising MMC to provide new social housing, we believe we will be able to provide the homes needed for households to transition into 50% quicker than traditional methods. This will release pressure from local authority budgets, while providing a lasting housing asset.

Restoring mandatory housebuilding targets previously scrapped by the previous Government will be a good step in the right direction. However, there is a very real need to speed up planning. Introducing a presumption in favour of social housing schemes that align with local design standards, not subject to discretionary decision will also deliver greater predictability and dramatically speed up planning permissions by up to six months. By extending that to include high quality, net zero fire-compliant MMC homes, we can drive innovation and deliver the homes of the future that our environment needs.

As an industry, we need to see a big increase in the volume and stability of the housing construction pipeline. A larger and predictable housing construction pipeline will, in turn, drive investment into growing capacity, and further drive efficiencies, while considerably reducing unit costs. Homes England has sought to address this through their strategic partnership grant programme, with all partners expected to deliver a minimum of 25% of new homes using MMC. This is a policy which needs to be fully enforced. The increased certainty will drive greater levels of private sector investment and much needed innovation within the housing sector.  

To fully understand and encapsulate the overall lifecycle development value of MMC the current appraisal model should be reformed to consider: financial, economic and social benefits of delivering more affordable housing quicker. This should include the value to society of net zero, social value, environmental performance; and ability to deliver better asset performance with lower maintenance costs across the full lifecycle of a development (cradle to grave). This will encourage innovation within the sector and encourage investment from financial markets through a change in appraisal modelling. 

In conclusion

For 30 years, successive governments have failed to grasp the nettle to address the lack of new social housing being built across the UK. The imperative is there, and new thinking is needed from local and central government. To drive that change, we believe there needs to be greater transparency and accountability, with departmental resources dedicated to deliver social housing as a singular task.

At EDAROTH, we believe in ‘housing as a verb’ and something we do to provide safe, secure and truly affordable homes where people want to live, work and prosper. We stand ready to deliver against that belief. It will require collaboration, market intervention and accountability to make it a reality.

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The Renters’ Rights Bill holds promise, but beware the tailless rats

Roupell St / SE1 by Images George Rex is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“The best laid schemes of mice and men, go often askew”; a warning a century and a half ago by the poet Robert Burns, on how even our most well-intended ideas may fail or falter by virtue of unintended consequences.

It is a parable that perhaps should have been heeded 100 years later in Hanoi, French Indochina (now Vietnam). As rat populations in the city ballooned beyond control amid the construction of a new sewer system, the French colonial rulers devised a solution: a bounty programme. For every severed rat tail – proof of an eliminated rodent – the government would pay a small fee to the exterminator.

Colonial figures soon realised the oversight in their rush to quell the crisis, however. Criminal enterprises had shifted their focus to farming, as the city’s shadowy suburbs became the breeding ground of rats and a new source of income. The result was a city now overrun with more rats than ever – most of them tailless.

This analogy is not without cause. The case for reform in the private rented sector has been mounting for some time, and has been spurred after hundreds of seats went from blue to red over the summer. The new Labour Government has signalled its commitment to renters, armed with a strengthened Renters’ Rights Bill and a haste to act.

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But as the Bill passes to Committee Stage, Parliament must recognise the risk of unintended consequences.

The end of Section 21 has always been the centrepiece of this legislation. But even this – as detailed in a recent report we supported from our colleagues at the Renters’ Reform Coalition – runs the risk of a rise in illegal evictions by criminal landlords.

The speed of this Bill is commendable, but caution must persist. Those watching the Second Reading will have noted the Secretary of State’s refusal to commit to publishing an impact assessment. Given the wide-ranging impacts of the Bill, failure to produce one is unwise.

We are, however, greatly encouraged by the announcement of the Bill’s public consultation. Our contribution concerns one key issue: Ground 6A.

Ground 6A is a proposed mandatory ground for eviction that would see renters removed from their homes with no defence to the claim, in instances where a landlord has breached legislation.

The aim of Ground 6A is to provide landlords with a route to vacant possession in order to avoid a range of sanctions that could be imposed by local authority enforcement teams where a breach to housing law has been made and also, theoretically, to offer renters protections from the health and safety hazards or criminal landlord behaviour.

The Ground supposes that, should a local authority decide that a landlord’s leasing of a property is unlawful, that landlord will be subject to further fines or sanctions until the tenants are evicted, which under the new regime they cannot be without Ground 6A’s existence (unless the landlord decides to sell).

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However, in reality, it is Ground 6A itself which will force landlords to evict renters or face fines. If evicting renters was the only way to comply with enforcement action and such an eviction was impossible, the landlord would clearly have a ‘reasonable excuse’, which in the Housing Act 2004 provides a complete defence to all of the potential offences they might be charged with.

Once the option to evict tenants because of enforcement action exists, such a reasonable defence completely disappears and eviction becomes the only option, even when tenants have nowhere else to go or when the property is in good condition.

Thus, in effect the worst criminal landlord behaviour is paid for by the renter necessarily losing any tenancy rights whatsoever – a moral and logical contradiction to the intentions of the Bill.

This, therefore, will create an enormous incentive for the worst-offending landlords to evict at no fault of the renter: the very problem that the abolition of Section 21 – one of the core principles of the Bill – is seeking to remediate.

But while this potential policy outcome seems nonsensical and punitive, it is far from the only consequence.

From evidence we’ve gathered, we know it is commonplace for landlords in the shadow private rental sector to routinely warn renters that the council will evict them should they complain. This is spurious and arguably a form of coercion, and without an amendment to this Ground, encourages this kind of exploitation and fatally undermines the whole purpose of the Bill: to protect renters from criminal landlords.

Just when local authorities need their powers of enforcement enhanced, this would likely diminish the effectiveness of their enforcement strategies as the worst conditions are pushed underground.

Prior to the Government’s Amendment 1 to the Bill, Ground 6A would shift the burden and costs of providing appropriate housing away from the non-compliant landlord and onto either the renter or the local authority, with costly temporary accommodation the likely destination. The amendment will order the landlord to pay compensation to the tenant where possession is obtained on Ground 6A.

An improvement certainly, but insufficient in real terms too. For one thing, the possession order is not conditional on the compensation payment being made, so many landlords will simply not pay the compensation in our view.

This would be an offence against natural justice: a landlord is in breach of the law but neither the renter, nor the local authority enforcement teams, are incentivised to pursue action because either, if not both, are faced with the social and financial consequences that should rightly fall to the landlord. Renters are thus faced with the question: do they seek action but face homelessness or continue to live under the criminal conditions of their landlord?  This is not the renters’ justice we expected.

Within the wider framework of the Bill – much of it enormously positive – it may feel finicky to focus all of our attention on the ‘small print’ of Ground 6A. But this, like Hanoi’s rat programme, could create far reaching and unintended consequences, with both renters and local authorities incentivised not to act. The criminal landlord, meanwhile – whose lies are now emboldened by law –  is free to act nefariously and with impunity.

Given the breadth of this Bill, and its public prominence, the new Government must heed the lessons of Hanoi. We do not wish for the Renters’ Rights Bill to leave the Government holding redundant rattails with only hindsight.

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The Autumn Budget: What is in it for housing?

The Chancellor visits Liverpool by HM Treasury is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Today was a first in a number of ways. It marked the first Labour budget in fourteen years, and the first budget ever delivered by a female Chancellor.

But it is also the most ambitious set of measures for the housing sector in quite some time, with a number of policies contained designed to get Britain building, deliver the next generation of social housing, and address some of the stark inequalities in the housing system as a whole.

Investing in delivery

The past few years have seen a slump in affordable housebuilding, particularly in the areas of highest need, with the number of homes started by London-based housing associations down by 92% this year. This is due to a number of reasons, including the increased cost of building, and also a focus on the sector’s existing stock after the passage of much-needed regulation including Awaab’s Law and the Building Safety Act.

It was therefore pleasing to see that one of the headline announcements from the Budget was a £500m top-up to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP). This was a programme started under the last Government to deliver £11.5bn of funding to the affordable housing sector from 2021 – 26.

The additional £500m represents a 10% per annum increase in the value of the fund from 2025-6, which will be particularly useful given the aforementioned pressures on registered providers, and should hopefully allow them to top-up existing project funding as well as starting new ventures.  This funding is also boosted by the confirmation of a five-year rent settlement for social housing providers, under which their rents will be able to increase by CPI +1%. This will provide much needed certainty to the sector after years of more haphazard policymaking.

What’s more, this budget saw additional funding dedicated towards more general housing delivery, including:

  • £3bn in support and guarantees to increase the supply of homes and support small housebuilders.
  • £128m to new housing projects to support the deliver of 33,000 homes
  • A £36m investment in the planning system to boost local authority skills provision, including recruiting the 300 new planners promised in Labour’s manifesto.
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Bringing existing homes up to date

The UK famously has among the oldest and leakiest housing stock in Europe. This is consequential for a number of reasons: consumers’ bills are higher, buildings emit more carbon, and homes are worse for residents’ health.

This budget saw a clear effort to address that, with a £3.4 billion investment into the government’s new Warm Homes Programme as part of the Government’s mission to bring all homes up to EPC C by 2030.

This programme will be transformational for consumers. It will significantly reduce bills and with it emissions from the built environment, and much of the retrofitting work entailed will have knock-on benefits for resident’s health.  

Particularly welcoming was the £1bn dedicated to cladding remediation – this has been called for by those trapped in unsafe blocks and will meaningfully accelerate the removal of dangerous cladding.

Severely restricting the Right to Buy

The Right to Buy, the policy which enables council tenants to buy their homes at a discounted rate, has often been criticised as an unhelpful drain on social housing at the time when lists of people applying for social housing are at their highest. Since discounts were increased by the coalition in 2012, this scheme has accelerated to seeing 10,000 – 12,000 homes lost per year, which are often difficult to replace.

After a review over the summer, this budget saw the government confirm their intention to heavily reduce discounts for the Right to Buy scheme, alongside increasing the time period for a which a tenant has had to live in, and providing additional exemptions for newly built council homes.

This not only undoes some of the worst reforms made under the Coalition Government but places brand new restrictions on the Right to Buy, and so there is hope that sales may dip even below the rates of 4,000 – 5,000 seen in the latter years of the Blair-Brown Governments.

It has also been confirmed that councils will keep 100% of the receipts from sales, making it easier for them to build new homes to supplement those lost from the scheme.

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Taxing housing more fairly

Finally, the budget sought to change the perverse incentives which help to drive inequality in the housing market. At present, many landlords buy up property in the private rental sector as an investment, and happily admit to seeing themselves more as investors than as professional landlords. Similarly, those who are at the lucky enough to own their own homes are able to pass a substantial amount of the value of that home to their children upon death, dividing Britain starkly between those with family property and those without.

This budget saw moves to amend this inequality, with stamp duty rates for second home and capital gains tax increased, while income tax thresholds will be unfrozen from 2028. This marks a substantial change in the tax system to prioritise those seeking to get onto the housing ladder at the expense of those who earn more than property, either as a property owner or as a landlord, while supporting those who derive income from work.

Welcome progress, but more funding will be needed

All of the money delivered in this budget is welcome, and sorely needed. But more will still be needed to achieve the government’s housing goals.

The National Housing Federation has estimated that £4.6bn per year will be needed to deliver the step change in affordable housing needed to meet Labour’s manifesto goals, nearly double of the programme inherited from the Tories.

More investment is also always welcome in directly preventing and tackling homelessness, and in reviving the Supporting People Programme ended by the Tories, but which was estimated to generate £2 for every £1 spent in supporting social housing residents.

Ministers have indicated that this is only the start of Labour’s plans to drive investment in the economy, and we will have to look to the Spending Review taking place over the winter for signals of what departmental budgets will look like in the coming years. Key priorities will be ensuring that the Local Housing Allowance and housing benefit continue to be uprated so that those at the sharpest end of the housing crisis have the support they need.

But the sector must continue to call for these changes and the spending needed to support the government’s aim of ending the housing crisis.

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More Homes, Less Motor Traffic: Can We Have Both?

Park Life by stanvpeterson is licensed under Pixabay content license

The Government has been widely praised for its ambition to build 1.5m new homes over the coming parliament. However, it must now seize the opportunity to make them attractive, sustainable and affordable to live in, by locating and designing them so that people can easily get around without always depending on private cars.

This means doing things very different from the low-density housing sprawl which has spread across the countryside over the past several decades, with poor public transport access and with large amounts of land given over to car-parking.

Not only does this starve communities of attractive public or green open spaces, but it makes it harder to provide economically-viable public transport services.

It also means that schools, shops, healthcare, green open spaces and other key destinations end up being further from people’s homes. If these facilities aren’t within an easy walk, people will inevitably jump in their cars.

Yet that in turn makes it even more unattractive and dangerous to try walking or cycling, or to allow your children to do so. The streets become filled with motor traffic but little else – with nowhere for children to play and no street life.

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Motor traffic on Britain’s roads has nearly doubled since 1980 and has increased 10-fold since 1950. Car-dependent planning has contributed greatly to this problem. Alarmingly, these trends are set to continue – government projections suggest motor traffic could carry on growing by up to 54% more by 2060.

Rising motor traffic undermines all of the alternatives. It makes walking and cycling more unpleasant and dangerous, while slowing down public transport and reducing the number of people using it. As the frequency and reliability of public transport worsens, ridership falls further, causing a downward spiral.

This obviously adds to the crises of physical inactivity, road casualties, air pollution and climate change – surface transport is now the largest emitting sector of the UK economy. It also makes life much harder for those without access to cars or who, for whatever reason, cannot drive.

If we want to avoid the aforementioned predicted 54% increase in motor traffic, we must adopt a very different approach. We need to take inspiration from housing developments elsewhere in Europe – though there are also a few great home-grown examples of good practice too such as Marmalade Lane, a 42-home car-free development on the outskirts of Cambridge.

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The Low Traffic Future alliance brings together a range of organisations with interests in the environment, health, road safety and sustainability. We have proposed that new housing should take the form of “close-knit communities”. These would be places where:

  • Schools, shops, doctors, dentists etc are close to where people live;
  • People can reach these and other key destinations easily by walking, wheeling or cycling and/or by local public, shared or community transport, from the moment the development opens; and
  • Motor traffic is therefore kept in check, because the alternatives are easier, safer, pleasanter and cheaper.

This approach would fit far better with Labour’s 5 missions, by:

It requires us to build to ‘gentle densities’. That means neither the dehumanising high densities of tower blocks nor the unsustainability of low-density suburbs. Instead, it means building spacious apartment blocks of around 6 storeys, preferably with shared garden areas.

Gentle-density housing can look attractive, have plenty of space both indoors and outdoors, while taking up less land – research by think tank Create Streets has shown that the same number of homes built at this density can occupy just 40% of the land needed for standard UK-style housing.

Encouragingly, the Government’s new draft National Planning Policy Framework proposes a ‘vision-led approach’ to transport and land-use planning. This is intended to replace the old ‘predict and provide’ approach, which assumed that road traffic would inevitably grow in the future, and therefore required roads to be provided for that growth. That, of course, has been a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy.

But if this new ‘vision-led approach’ is to work, government needs to spell out the ‘vision’ that it wants local authorities and developers to be led by – and to do this in a way that will hold up when tested at public inquiries.

The ‘vision’ must be one where developments produce no net increase in motor traffic, thanks to high but ‘gentle’ densities and good sustainable transport connectivity to key destinations. There must also be a transparent test of density and sustainable transport connectivity which local authorities, developers and local communities can all use to determine which proposals are suitable and which are not.

There is one other really important benefit of getting this right. By avoiding adding to motor traffic pressures on local roads, ‘close-knit communities’ are far likelier to be popular and far less likely to face objections.

They would also be good for our health and wellbeing, good for the local and global environment, and good for getting plenty of homes delivered with minimal loss of land and minimal objections. What’s not to like?

If you agree that future housing developments should take the form of ‘Close-knit communities’, to help reduce car-dependence, please email your MP, via https://lowtrafficfuture.org.uk/closeknitcommunities

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How social landlords can support residents and reduce health inequalities

A great deal of the conversation in housing policy often rightly revolves around how we build and maintain the homes we need.

But for many social housing providers, getting residents into new homes is just the start of the journey. In 2024, this has proven to be the case more than ever. With the acute shortage of social housing meaning that those who are able to make it off tortuous waiting lists and into secure tenancies are more likely to be in a vulnerable position and require active wellbeing support from their landlord.

I spoke with Connie Jennings, Director of Stronger Communities at whg, a social landlord based primarily in Walsall with homes across the Midlands, about what social landlords can do to directly address issues of resident health outcomes. She portrayed a challenging landscape for many of those who find themselves in need of social housing.

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Over half of social housing residents in England live in the 30% most deprived neighbourhoods and healthy life expectancy for people living in these communities is almost 20 years shorter than the UK average. They are more likely to be underserved by existing healthcare infrastructure, due to carriers such as transport or language , and are increasingly likely to be disenfranchised by moves to digitise healthcare provision. This can lead to an increasing number of social housing residents going straight to A&E because they find it harder to book GP appointments.

In response to this, whg is deploying targeted, evidence-based and person-centred approaches. In Connie’s experience, “working with housing is the best way to connect with  to this group of people”. She presented the issue of diabetes, which disproportionately impacts Walsall’s South Asian population, some of whom live in whg properties. Local healthcare providers previously attempted to reach local communities to get them to engage with diabetes services through traditional means, such as putting leaflets through doors, but this had a minimal impact. So whg recruited a number of “Community  Champions’ from among their residents with relevant cultural experience and language skills to engage with their neighbours and spread awareness and connect residents with diabetes healthcare services.  .

As Connie pointed out, “The system expects those with the least to jump through the most hoops to get to the services most of us take for granted”. Landlords like whg can help residents to jump through such hoops, such as providing more elderly residents with digital inclusion courses so that they can be in touch with their relatives over Zoom.

Key to whg’s success in this area, in Connie’s mind, is the housing association’s place-based nature, with a large number of  whg properties being in the Walsall area. This has allowed them to build up a relationship with the integrated care partnership and to sit on the local NHS Partnership Board. Rather than investing in multiple contacts across multiple councils, whg is able to focus most of its attention in this single local area.

One issue in many local authorities is a lack of joined-up working between departments within councils, and between local authorities and housing associations, GPs, or schools in their area. This leaves residents having to deal with a range of contacts in the public sector, or in another case one service finding it hard to reach a resident who may be in regular contact with another part of the state. whg aims to reduce this complexity, for instance all of their Wellbeing Schemes for people aged 55+ have  a dedicated Wellbeing Officer on site to support residents. I asked Connie how whg were able to dedicate funding towards this when that many housing associations are facing tighter budgets due to increased costs from building safety or decarbonisation work. Connie attributed this in part due to whg’s long-term organisational culture which prioritises customer wellbeing in the same way they prioritise building safety and carbon reduction, with ring-fenced funding in the organisation’s 2030 plan to carry on this work.

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Thinking about more than just an organisation’s bottom line also has more beneficial long-term financial consequences. Interventions to improve a resident’s mental health could generate a social value of £36,000. And Connie pointed to the work of whg’s employment and training team, which has helped 180 residents to work in local NHS hospitals and healthcare teams, addressing a local skills shortage while providing stable work for the residents. In 2023/4, whg generated a social value of £46.4m through a range of actions such as building new homes, helping residents into employment, and providing money advice to households, in turn helping customers to successfully sustain their tenancies and remain in their home .

I asked Connie what the new Labour Government could do to support the work of individuals like her. She pointed to the Supporting People Programme, ring-fenced funding provided to local authorities to help individuals with additional needs to live independently. Subsequent value-for-money analysis commissioned by the then Department for Communities and Local Government showed that the programme had produced benefits totalling £3.41bn per annum against an overall investment of £1.61bn. Looking ahead to the Autumn Budget, Connie noted, “we’ve got to be able to demonstrate the worth of a social housing tenancy. It shouldn’t be a safety net, it should be a trampoline.”

For all of us in the housing sector, it is crucial not just to champion the value of new homes, but that of secure tenancies with responsible landlords who can help to empower residents to take advantage of new opportunities.

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This World Homelessness Day let’s raise our ambitions

The scale of homelessness across in England is unacceptable and is getting worse. Last week, the annual official figures showed that more than 320,000 households accessed help from their council last year – the highest figure ever recorded. It is vital that our response, as a sector, and in the corridors of political power, rises to the scale of the challenge. Let’s use this World Homelessness Day as a platform for bold, positive ambition.

In Westminster, we are in a rare moment of possibility, where fundamental change feels possible. Post-election I was delighted to see the Deputy Prime Minister commit to a new strategy – one that will tackle all forms of homelessness, not just rough sleeping – and the establishment of an inter-ministerial group to unlock the solutions across government. The commitment to work alongside Councils and Mayors also signals a fresh and empowering approach.

New energy and answers to homelessness are on the way. But what are the ingredients for success? What does bold and positive reform involve? Here are five key elements for success:

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A housing-led plan

The pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the next 5 years offers the foundation for a breakthrough on homelessness. It is critical that a substantial proportion of these homes are delivered at social rent (the research suggests at least 90,000 a year) with local housing targets based on levels of homelessness in each area.

But it is not only about more supply. A housing-led approach to addressing homelessness is also about moving people quickly into a home of their own with the right support so they can build a foundation for everything else. This means actively decreasing the use of temporary accommodation.

A housing led approach is now the norm in many European countries, as recommended by the OECD, and is even the suggested approach for tackling homelessness in Ukraine. It is a long overdue paradigm shift in England.

Prevention

All too often, opportunities to prevent homelessness are known, but missed. Any strategy to address homelessness must have prevention as its cornerstone. There is a lot to learn from proposals in Scotland and Wales, where there are respective plans to introduce legislation that prevents homelessness at least 6 months before it occurs and to extend legal duties to wider public services.

The Homelessness Reduction Act was a vital step in the right direction in England, but it is time to go further so that the full public sector is working to prevent homelessness.

Addressing immediate need

Successful strategies must of course have long-term goals, and there are excellent examples in Denmark, Finland and elsewhere to draw on. However, in the here and now, homelessness is a humanitarian issue on our streets, hostels, B&Bs, and elsewhere. It is ruining lives and driving council finances to bankruptcy (the bill for temporary accommodation is £2bn and rising). We need to stop things getting worse whilst simultaneously working on the long-term reforms.

There is an opportunity in the upcoming budget to give councils the tools to address short term need, asking them to help more people out of homelessness by removing the cap for the temporary accommodation subsidy and by investing in Local Housing Allowance. We can also shift funding right now through the Affordable Homes Programme to deliver more social homes.

Focus on outcomes

Over the last 10 years in England, the political focus has been on tackling rough sleeping, neglecting the wider forms of homelessness. This has incentivised a focus on limited action and solutions. Of course, many good things happened because of this, and we should not lose sight of that. But we must also be honest in pointing to the range of other ways in which policies drove homelessness in the wrong direction; from the treatment of prison leavers; punitive welfare changes; the ‘hostile environment’ for people with no recourse to public funds, and of course the failure to build social housing.

The alternative approach is to agree the outcomes that all government policy should be driving towards – outcomes such as more people living in safe, secure homes, less expenditure on temporary accommodation and reductions in repeat homelessness. The Government need look no further than Wales, where such a framework was recently agreed and published.  

Localism

The increase of English devolution and Mayoral power has massive opportunities to show local leadership, progress elements of a homelessness strategy and test solutions at a local level that can be replicated elsewhere. We have seen examples of this already such as in Greater Manchester with an adoption of a ‘housing first’ philosophy for all residents of the city region to have a safe and secure home.

Right now, tens of thousands are trapped in poor quality temporary accommodation, hostels, night shelters, or forced to sleep on the streets, in cars, sheds, and public transport. We have a huge opportunity to ensure no-one experiences the trauma of homelessness again or when it does it is rare, brief and unrepeated. Let’s work together to make this happen.

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Labour has a proud record of halving homelessness – three steps which will enable us to do it again

We were genuinely heartened when it was revealed in June that Angela Rayner planned to create a new Ending Homelessness Unit if Labour won the General Election.

Labour has a proud record on this issue with previous administrations more than halving the number of households living in temporary accommodation between 2005 and 2010.

This achievement was even sustained during and after the 2008 global financial crisis, with Labour reducing the number of homeless households living in temporary accommodation by almost a quarter (24%) during the recession.

Similarly, between 1999 and 2001, rough sleeping was reduced by two-thirds, reaching an all-time low in 2010.

Over the past couple of years, the soaring numbers of homeless children and households living in temporary accommodation represents a humanitarian crisis unfolding behind closed doors.

Creating a new Ending Homelessness Unit and placing it inside the Deputy Prime Minister’s office means there will be a real focus on tacking this humanitarian crisis at the heart of government. It also provides the new Homelessness Minister, Rushanara Ali with support from the very top of government.

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However, reducing the number of households in temporary accommodation will be an even tougher challenge this time around for the following reasons:

Firstly, in Q1 of 2024 the number of homeless children reached more than 151,000. This is already 16% higher than the number of homeless children during the previous peak in 2006, and continues to rise at record rates.

Secondly, the shortage of social housing has grown much more acute over the past 30 years.

In 1979, local authorities and housing associations managed 5.5 million homes at a time when the population of England was less than 47 million people.

As of March 2023 House of Commons researchers estimated there were around 3.8 million social homes in England at a time when the population of the country has grown by around 14m people to almost 61m people.

This means we have less social housing for people to move into leaving them stuck in temporary accommodation and hostels even when they are ready to move on.

Thirdly, the public finances have worsened and the resources currently available to the sector to tackle homelessness have been depleted.

However, we know what needs to be done to end rough sleeping and homelessness for people.

We can dramatically cut the number of people sleeping rough if targets are set and organisations are given the resources to achieve them.

These are three of the key steps the new government should take to halve homelessness again:

Ring-fenced funding

While public finances are tight, the new government must take an ‘invest to save’ approach if we are to reduce homelessness.

In the last financial year, government figures revealed that councils spent an eye-watering £2.3bn on temporary accommodation.

Over the past year, we have seen cash-strapped councils reduce funding for homelessness services at a time when homelessness is rising at record levels.

These specialist services are essential in ending the cycle of homelessness for thousands of people every year – and moving them on into general needs housing.

We understand why individual councils feel a need to cut homelessness services, as they weigh up the closure of one service against the closure of another.

However, it is important for government to understand that under-resourced councils closing homelessness services to balance their annual budget is a false economy.

Closing homelessness services means councils and ultimately taxpayers are forced to spend even greater sums of money on temporary accommodation, and it also means people affected by homelessness have worse outcomes and are trapped in homelessness for longer.

To end this vicious cycle, the government must provide ring-fenced funding for homelessness services to prevent cash-strapped councils from ending funding at a time when these services are needed the most.

We are calling on the new Government to ring-fence and increase long-term revenue funding for supported housing to ensure spending at least matches the £1.6bn per year allocated to local authorities under the last Labour government Supporting People programme in 2010.

Social housing targets

As well as the target for building 1.5m homes over the course of this Parliament we believe an annual target should be set for the delivery of new social homes.

By announcing a target publicly, the government creates pressure on the system to deliver the goal and a target it needs to reach consistently each year.

However, building new homes takes time.

Better use of existing housing stock

Riverside manage more than 75,000 homes as well as homelessness services across more than 160 local authority areas in England.

Insight from this experience leads us to think there is also an opportunity for central government and councils to unlock savings by making better use of existing housing stock.

Since 2019 Riverside has been running Sefton Families Service on behalf of Sefton Council, a service which helps break the cycle of homelessness for families placed in temporary accommodation.

The service sees residents live in a fully-furnished home on a 12-month trial period with intensive support provided by a Riverside support worker rather than in temporary accommodation.

The scheme currently has a 97% success rate with every participant transferring to a long-term social housing tenancy with Riverside. Indeed, the only exception was a family who wanted to move to a permanent home outside of Sefton.

Sefton Families Service has enabled 60families to break the cycle of homelessness, including one family who had previously had to move home 37 times.

As well as making a huge difference to the lives of the families it has supported, the service is estimated to have saved the council £1.6m over four yearscompared to the cost of temporary accommodation, which is over six times as expensive as Riverside’s service.

While there is a mountain to climb, by taking an ‘invest to save’ approach, we believe that this new Labour government can halve homelessness again.

And we know the whole homelessness sector wants to work with government to help them achieve this.