Category: 10-year plan for housing

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

What does an NHS fit for the future need from the ten-year housing plan?

The Prime Minister and Chancellor visit Coventry Hospital by No.10 Downing Street is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Since 2006, the vision for the NHS has been to shift care closer to home. Development of the 10-year health plan goes further; patients should be able to say:

  • I can stay healthy and manage my health in a way that works for me
  • I can access the high-quality and effective care I need, when and where I need it
  • My care is integrated around my needs and I am listened to
  • I am treated in a fair and inclusive way, irrespective of who I am

For these to be true, what should we expect a ten-year housing plan to include? And how will it support the planned shifts in health care: from hospital to community; sickness to prevention; analogue to digital?

It’s worth restating what we mean by a healthy home. We mean homes in which the population can start life, live and work, and age well in. A healthy environment, free from all hazards (not just damp and mould), which will increasingly include overheating. A suitable environment, with space and design that is inclusive, accessible and adaptable to everyone’s needs. A stable environment, providing a sense of safety and security. Genuinely affordable; people can afford to live there and aren’t pushed into poverty. Homes located in a healthy and supportive neighbourhood.

It’s also important to understand that building new homes will not enable healthy homes for all. 80% of the homes we will be living in by 2050 have already been built. We have some of the oldest housing in the developed world, and the highest proportion of inadequate housing in Europe.

Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS drew attention to the housing crisis, highlighting the significant impact that homelessness and poverty have on health outcomes, the increase in homes with damp problems, and noting the link with poor mental health.

It’s estimated that almost one third of NHS patients live in circumstances that present a risk to their health and wellbeing, including people living in unsafe, overcrowded, unsuitable and poor-quality homes, people living in fear of losing their home, in temporary accommodation or on the streets.  These circumstances directly impact on patients’ access to, experience of, and outcomes from health care and, with the largest workforce in England, this will include many NHS staff.

National housing, homelessness and welfare policy is a considerable way off supporting ambitions for the NHS. There’s no evidence of a systematic consideration to where people live, their health and wellbeing, the impact of unhealthy homes on the NHS, other public services, productivity and the economy.

Labour has an opportunity to change this, taking the ‘health in all policies’ approach described in its manifesto and Devolution White Paper. Improvements in the population’s health and wellbeing and health equity should be the primary outcomes of the housing plan.

A ten-year housing plan that supports the ambitions for the NHS would:

Describe a vison for healthy homes, sharing outcomes with the ten-year NHS plan and the national care service.

An independent housing strategy committee, and cross-departmental Homes and Health Board would inform, oversee and deliver necessary systemic and operational changes, including measuring the impact national and local housing decisions have on health. Data would be gathered at a granular enough level so that housing, health and care systems at all geographies can act.

In the shorter term, it would require and resource localities to develop an integrated housing, health and care strategy for local populations who would benefit most from joined up homes and services, such as people with disabilities and those in inclusion health populations.

Recognise the role of the housing workforce in improving health and wellbeing and  commit to workforce development, integrated with that for the NHS and social care.

This would begin with investment in local housing and public health leadership capacity and capability, including planning, occupational therapy and environmental health professions.

This would enable localities to better integrate homes with health and care, targeting combined resources to patients who need it most, and would quickly see a return on investment.

The frontline housing workforce, particularly in homelessness and housing support roles, is filling gaps in the NHS and care workforce. Plans to end homelessness must consider the health and wellbeing of this workforce, and what the future holds for them.

Take a health-led approach to improving, adapting, renewing and regenerating existing homes.

Existing homes across all tenures, including temporary and supported housing, must benefit from health-led improvements, underpinned by the more granular local understanding of homes, health and wellbeing, and sustained and flexible funding so that localities may target resources effectively. This would include:

  • Retrofitting alongside other measures to improve warmth and reduce emissions
  • Tackling other hazards which result in avoidable ill-health, including falls and fire
  • Adaptations and assistive technology, enabling disabled people, people with long term health conditions, and people as they get older to live independently
  • Climate adaption, including building resilience to new extremes of flood and heat

Immediate action should be taken to improve local system’s knowledge of, and capacity to act on:

  • Unhealthy homes for patients whose health and wellbeing is a priority for the NHS, enabling safe, timely and effective transfers of care from NHS and care settings to the community, and ensuring that people experiencing homelessness are not lost to health services
  • Unmet housing, care and support needs, enabling people to live independently

New homes and regeneration must meet the TCPA’s healthy homes principles and include 90,000 social rented homes a year, specialist and supported housing, and technology enabled homes. A review is needed of the impact of social housing allocations and lettings policies and practice for their impact on the population’s health and wellbeing.

Raise awareness and enable access to national and local information, advice and guidance services, to empower people to understand how their home impacts on their health and wellbeing, and options available to improve matters.

Developments in technology in the home need to enable residents to have choice and control.

Community capacity to improve homes should be invested in, whether this is through a local handyperson scheme, or community-led housing.

For one-third of NHS patients, home is not just a social determinant, a building block, of their health; it determines how effective the NHS is in preventing, treating and managing ill-health. An NHS fit for the future demands a ten-year strategy for homes that is honest about how old and unhealthy our homes are, and commits to action now. Care closer to home cannot be achieved through new build alone.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

What does the housing sector need from Government to deliver on their long-term ambitions for housing?

As Director of Policy and Public Affairs at The Housing Forum I work with organisations from across the whole of the housing sector – from construction companies and architects, to housebuilders, housing associations and local authorities. I also keep abreast of housing policy – helping our members understand new developments and ensuring the government understands the needs of the sector.

The last year has been a fascinating time to have one foot in industry and one in policy circles. On the policy side, it’s the most positive I’ve ever seen. The new government has come in with huge enthusiasm to tackle the housing problems in the country, a willingness to burn political capital in doing so and – above all – a willingness to listen. It’s been greeted with pretty much unanimous enthusiasm from across the sector too. Yet at the same time, in the sector itself, the financial challenges are huge. After 15 years of high house price growth, the market sector is struggling with the slow-down alongside a sharp rise in construction costs, whilst the social housing sector struggles also with increased costs of building safety and maintaining existing homes, rising costs of borrowing and grant rates that just aren’t stacking up to support the building of much-needed new social housing.

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So what does it need to do to turn this tough situation around and build the new homes, including social housing, that we need?

The first and biggest answer has to be funding. Keen to establish themselves as fiscally responsible, Labour came to power making few promises that involved any spending – and there have been no major funding announcements for housing as yet, though the sector awaits the Spring Spending Review with trepidation. The next Affordable Homes Programme will be the main source of funding for developing new social housing. Grant rates need to be high enough to bridge the gap between construction and land costs, and the amount that landlords can borrow against future rental income. If the government also wants to sector to prioritise social rented housing over other options (Affordable Rent, or shared ownership) then this requires additional funding, as the subsidy required per dwelling is significantly higher.

The other way to support the sector is to support the finances of social landlords, so they’re better able to raise capital. The Building Safety Fund ensures that leaseholders do not have to pay for remediating fire safety issues, but social landlords have not been protected and are having to pay from reserves. If landlords are having to spend their own reserves on remediation, they cannot commit this same money to developing new housing, and nor can they borrow if their capital position is not strong enough. Fully funding building safety work for the social housing sector would be the first step to getting some of the biggest social housebuilders, who have the expertise – and in many cases already own the vacant sites – to build again.

Supporting the social housing sector in this way will not only help build the new social housing we need, but will also help the whole of the housing sector moving towards the 1.5 million new homes target – especially while the market for sales remains stagnant.

But Government doesn’t have unlimited funds, and housing is by no means the only call on them. So what else could government do that doesn’t involve funding?

Planning is a big part of the answer, and the new Government has hit the ground running with planning reform. The changes are welcome, and will now need time to bed in, alongside maintaining the strong rhetoric to ensure all areas play their part in delivering against the new targets.

Government could look to reduce the subsidy needed for social housing by looking at social rents. The previous government reduced rents for four years, meaning that they are currently significantly lower in real terms than they were in 2010. The G15 (group of the largest housing associations in the London area) has calculated that 29% of’ homes are currently below target rent, losing them £67.7m each year in rental income. They could also consider allowing higher rents for more energy-efficient homes, something that we’ve called for at The Housing Forum, to help leverage in some private finance for retrofitting. Increasing rents could see a backlash from tenants (as well as increased costs born by the DWP via higher benefit claims). A key concern would be the impact on those affected by the benefit cap – abolishing the cap would ensure that the welfare safety net works effectively for all types of families to help them afford their rent.

And finally, looking to the longer term and to a higher rate of housebuilding across many years, the government needs to ensure that the sector has the skilled workers it needs:

  • Increased investment is needed in training and developing the workforce. FE Colleges must create training facilities and training that meets with the skills requirements of employers and the sector.
  • Staff in FE colleges and universities need to undertake continued professional development to ensure that they are up to speed with the current practice and regulations around construction.
  • Government should make dramatic improvements to careers guidance in schools to help teenagers make informed decisions about the later stages of their education, and much better knowledge of the types of job opportunities that are out there. Work experience, part-time jobs, internships and visits to local employers can all help.
  • There needs to be clear pathways for young people from school into the many different careers in construction, which includes both building new homes and maintaining and upgrading the existing stock. The London Homes Coalition has done some good work on this area.
  • The Government should not overlook the need of mid-career switchers – who have potential to expand their skillset into growing areas, such as green technology. This requires more flexible approaches to retraining and funding.

Overall, it’s been great to see such as strong focus on housing from the new Government, particularly around planning reform. But it’s now time for them to put their money where their mouth is in terms of the affordable housing sector.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

Labour’s housing strategy needs to inspire confidence in a daunting context

Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives Plan for Change Speech by No.10 Downing Street is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives Plan for Change Speech by No.10 Downing Street is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The forthcoming long-term housing strategy is a huge opportunity for the government to set the agenda for the next five years or more.

The Starmer government is not the first to have bold plans on housing and, as our recent report examined, successive governments have missed their housebuilding targets. Setting a robust strategy will be key to avoiding the same fate.

The new housing strategy should define success and set a clear direction

Beyond general notions of building more homes and improving affordability, few governments over the past two decades have specified what outcomes they want from their housebuilding programmes and why – including their position on critical policy questions such as where they want new homes to go nationally, and roughly what tenure mix they want to end up with.

Without this clarity, reform programmes have lacked drive, direction, clear success metrics (beyond housing targets) and – as a result – credibility. This has often left the housebuilding industry with no clear or long-term trajectory to confidently invest in, instead being buffeted by constant policy churn, made worse by inconsistent leadership. In recent decades housing policy has rarely featured in prime ministers’ top priorities, while housing ministershave been notoriously short-tenured: the last 10 spent fewer than nine months in post.

The government’s upcoming strategy is, then, an opportunity to go beyond this summer’s broad manifesto promises and nail down what success looks like for its housebuilding programme. To inspire confidence, the strategy should set clear objectives, including a 10-year vision for what housing outcomes the government wants to deliver.

These objectives need to be realistic. We recommend that the government publishes analysis setting out – all things being equal – how it expects its policy programme to affect key outcomes such as housing availability and affordability, compared with a counterfactual where housebuilding rates are lower and the tenure mix stays the same.

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The strategy should offer a roadmap for reconciling policy objectives

Successive governments, of all stripes, have failed to reconcile their housebuilding objectives with other important policy objectives that affect development, like building standards and environmental regulations. These have often undermined each other where, for example, regulations conflict or remain unclear, increase building costs at short notice or create bottlenecks in overstretched planning authorities.

The government must engage honestly with these trade-offs and set out how it plans to take forward its commitments to housebuilding, the environment and building standards in a coherent way. To help, it could commission an environmental regulatory body (such as the Office for Environmental Protection or the Environment Agency) and housing delivery experts (such as Homes England, industry stakeholders and/or regulation experts like the Future Homes Hub) to conduct a joint urgent review into how to combine higher building rates with better environmental outcomes.

The strategy should set out a credible path to delivery

The government has committed to delivering 1.5 million new homes in the next five years, requiring a rate of building not seen since the 1960s. It has been bold elsewhere too, stating that it wants new homes to come with the infrastructure that local areas need, and promising the “biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation”. Both will require increased investment, whether from government, the private sector or from capturing land values.

The government has taken important first steps to setting a better housebuilding record than its predecessors. It has implemented a new National Planning Policy Framework designed to get enough homes through Britain’s planning system, published proposals to reform planning committees to speed up decision making, and increased planning fees to improve planning departments’ capacity and performance. It has also upped investment in the Affordable Homes Programme and committed to reforming Right to Buy – signals that the government is serious about expanding social housing.

But delivery remains daunting. The housing market is in a downturn. Developers are facing a toxic combination of high interest rates (preventing first-time buyers entering the market), materials and labour shortages, and new regulations – from post-Grenfell fire safety regulations to Biodiversity Net Gain and the 2025 Future Homes Standard. All this adds to building costs.

Likewise, social housing providers are struggling with uncertain rent settlements, difficulties getting private finance in a high interest-rate environment, burgeoning maintenance bills and the costs of new regulations. All eyes are on the government’s long-term rent settlement consultation and the June 2025 multi-year spending review, where the government will set out its long-term investment plans in a tight fiscal context.  

The government needs to navigate these challenges to avoid them becoming major blockers. We recommend that its long-term strategy should include a five-year delivery plan, setting out what it expects to deliver in this parliament and how.

The government must prepare to course-correct when needed

No matter how good the government’s ‘Plan A’ is, several factors could throw its housebuilding programme off course, or indeed offer opportunities to progress it faster or more cheaply. Housebuilders – and housing ministers and their teams – will be watching the UK’s future growth projections and interest rates closely.

Recognising this volatility, we recommend that the government’s long-term housing strategy includes plans to monitor and evaluate progress against its objectives. It could, for example, commit to producing regular stocktakes that assess progress, identify current and emerging delivery risks and opportunities, and prompt the government to course-correct where needed.

The strategy is a chance for Labour to put its bold plans into action

Starmer’s government is not the first to enter office promising bold action on housebuilding. For it to become the first, for some decades, to get it right and deliver a programme that works will require a clear, robust and credible strategy. This is what it should be working to produce.

Read From the ground up: How the government can build more homes for the Institute for Government’s full analysis on how the government can meet its housebuilding targets.

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10-year plan for housing Blog Post

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.