Tag: Social housing

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Funding the social housing revolution – what the sector needs

Today there are 4.2 million people in need of social housing in England including people living in overcrowded, unsuitable and unaffordable homes or homeless. We are in a housing emergency, caused by years of cuts and short term piecemeal policy decisions. What the social housing sector urgently needs to be able to tackle the housing crisis is long term certainty – both in policy and funding.

Only a few months into power, the new government has already been promisingly vocal on housing. Secretary of State, Angela Rayner, has announced an overhaul of the planning system, reintroduced more ambitious mandatory housing targets and recognised the role of social and affordable housing in achieving the government’s ambition of building 1.5m homes over this parliament.

Housing associations are ready to play their part in making this happen, but they’re starting from a fragile financial position. For starters, successive rent freezes and caps mean that rental income is 15% lower in real terms than it was in 2015; this equated to £3bn in lost rental income for housing associations last year. Alongside this, the sector is also facing significant financial pressure from building safety costs. Since social housing doesn’t have access to government building safety funding, housing associations estimate they’ll need to spend in excess of £6bn making all their buildings safe over the next decade. Last year, housing associations increased investment in their existing homes by nearly 20%, spending a record £7.7bn on repairs and maintenance.

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All of these competing pressures, on top of direct cuts to funding for new homes, has inevitably led to a reduction in plans for building new affordable and social housing at a time when they are needed more than ever.

Earlier this year, the Levelling Up, Housing and Committee’s report into the finances and sustainability recognised these financial barriers. For housing associations to have the confidence to plan for the future and help the government meet its ambition of building 1.5m homes, certainty of rental income and urgent funding is needed at this year’s Autumn Budget and Spending Review.

A new Affordable Homes Programme would be pivotal in supporting the social housing sector to build the number of homes the country needs. Ideally this would shift focus towards social rent, with greater flexibilities around grant rates and funding for regeneration. To deliver the step change needed in the delivery of social housing, a new Affordable Homes Programme would need to provide £4.6bn of funding per year on average for the first Parliament, on a minimum five-year rolling basis.  

The Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund (formerly the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund) is also playing a crucial role in helping the country to meet its net zero targets. However the sector will need to invest up to £50,000 per home by 2050 to ensure they are safe, high quality, decarbonised, and meet new regulatory requirements. The introduction of a new long-term Social Housing Investment Fund of £2bn per year would allow housing associations to continue their vital work in ensuring their homes are sustainable and fit for the future, while unlocking capacity for the supply of new homes.

There is also a crisis in supported housing which provides homes with support, supervision and care. NHF research shows that one in three supported housing providers have been forced to close services such as women’s refuges, homeless hostels, and older people’s housing over the past twelve months, due to the worsening impacts of funding cuts and rising costs. Without supported housing, an additional 71,000 people would be homeless or at risk of homelessness, we would need 14,000 more inpatient psychiatric places, 2,500 additional places in residential care and 2,000 more prison places. That’s why the government must reinstate ring-fenced funding for housing related support, with at least £1.6bn per year of funding, to ensure the continued viability of this vital provision.

Uncertainty around rents has also stopped housing associations from effectively planning for the future. A commitment from the government to a 10-year rent settlement would give social landlords the certainty they need to plan investment over the long-term while ensuring social rents remain affordable for residents. Alongside this, widening access to the Building Safety Fund to cover social housing, would help relieve the some of the financial pressures so many housing associations are facing.

The beginning of a new parliamentary term is the best time for bold action and long-term thinking, and that’s exactly what is needed for the government to be able to meet its housebuilding ambitions. Housing associations are ready to work with the new government to build the affordable homes the country needs and end the housing crisis for good.

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Delivering a Fairer Housing in Westminster

Langdale House, part of the legendary Churchill Gardens Estate in Westminster, image by Images George Rex licensed under (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

For many of us in local government, a pro-social housing and house building national government isn’t just a welcome relief, but a necessity to give our tenants, leaseholders and residents the compassion, dignity and security they deserve.

Labour’s manifesto promises to support councils to build their capacity and make a greater contribution to affordable housing supply. This is of course welcome, but must be accompanied by an appreciation of the challenges local authorities already face in delivering fairer housing for their residents. While some components of our story are unique only to Westminster, we think this reflection of our journey gives some insight into some of the challenges faced by all local authorities.

Locally here we won control of the Council in 2022 after nearly 60 years of Conservative control. The previous administration’s treatment of social housing was literally scandalous – in one historic instance using housing as a tool for gerrymandering, the so-called ‘Homes for Votes’ scandal – with a litany of management failures including the collapse of City West Homes. As well as the headline-grabbing issues, there had been a long-standing degradation of the housing service after decades of neglect.

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In contrast, our winning 2022 manifesto promised to build a Fairer Westminster. That meant for us putting housing at the heart of our agenda for change. We promised to take a resident-centric approach to improve housing management, deliver genuine engagement with tenants and leaseholders, and make building new council and lower rent homes the Council’s top policy priority. This was reinforced by the work of the Future of Westminster Commission and turbocharged by a Cabinet Member who has grown up in Westminster’s social housing stock and fully understands the resident experience (and challenges).

Even with our renewed focus, the Westminster housing context has remained extremely challenging. The average house price in Westminster was £954,000 in June 2024, the second highest in London. This has meant that 43% of people in the borough lived in households with an income of less than 60% the UK median after housing costs have been subtracted (i.e. in poverty) – which is the highest proportion of any London borough.

There are of course limited land opportunities for building and development as an inner-city borough. Moreover, supply pressures are compounded by the high numbers of short-term lets and second homes. The Census empty home rate in Westminster was recorded as being 25.4%, which effectively means that one in four properties in Westminster were marked as being empty at the time of the Census, suggesting 30,000 properties in Westminster have no full-time residents.

Westminster also has the highest proportion of private rented properties in the country – making up 44% of the housing stock. The high cost of private rents, supply shortages and ability for landlords to evict tenants easily has resulted in skyrocketing presentations of homelessness. 5,000 households approached the Council for support last year due to homelessness. This has resulted in extreme pressures on Temporary Accommodation. 

Despite this we have made significant progress in delivering on our housing ambitions. Recognising the scale of the challenge we set up our Housing Improvement Programme. New people have been brought in with different skill sets, experience and perspective from across the council to drive change. We’ve taken a structured approach, focusing on key problem areas first, and maintaining a constant dialogue with residents to help shape solutions and priorities. Some of examples of our early successes include:

  • Resident Panels: We have created a borough-wide Resident Panel which is open to all Westminster tenants and leaseholders to support resident input in our policy making. We have set up Task and Finish Groups to focus on specific issues. Our first Task and Finish Group focused on repairs. The Group undertook research and proposed recommendations which have been central to improving our Repairs Service.
  • Housing Repairs: The Panel’s recommendations, and our desire to improve repairs and make it localised and more responsive, is reflected in our new Repairs Policy which provides a clear understanding of the service residents should receive and how the council will continuously improve. To put this policy into action, one step we have taken is to pilot a Direct Labour Organisation (DLO). This is a small team of in-house operatives tasked with carrying out communal repairs across our estates and jointly signing off work completion with residents.
  • Estate Offices: Estate Offices were closed by the previous administration and had created a disconnect between residents and the council. By re-opening offices in communities, we are able to provide more personalised and localised advice and support service for residents. Feedback from residents has been positive and have welcomed the shift in placing housing officers back into the communities they serve. 
  • Understanding resident vulnerability: We identified that some residents’ housing casework is inherently more complex due to their vulnerabilities. A proactive new process for identifying and recording vulnerability for residents was implemented at the first point of contact and to date the team has identified vulnerability for thousands of residents so as to agree on reasonable adjustments. Moreover, we have set up a multi-disciplinary team, the Customer Advocacy Team (CAT), who can be called upon to offer advice for complex cases and visit the most vulnerable to ensure the residents’ needs are assessed.

We in Westminster are of course beyond excited to play our role in delivering on the ambitions set by the new Labour Government and have already made strides in improving our existing services, but this must be matched by an appreciation of the challenges and pressures many local authorities already face.

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The first consumer inspection reports: what they tell us

social-housing-inspection-reports
Apartments block in London by Pedro Ramos is licensed by Unsplash

On 24 July the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) published its first regulatory judgements (RJs) on the performance of two registered providers of social housing (RPs) following inspections under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023. Watford Community Housing Trust (WCHT with 5,200 homes) and Nottingham Community Housing Association (NCHA with 10,500 homes) both secured a C1 grading, meaning they were judged as meeting the outcomes of the Regulator’s consumer standards.

The C1 judgement states:

“that overall the landlord is delivering the outcomes of the consumer standards. The landlord has demonstrated that it identifies when issues occur and puts plans in place to remedy and minimise recurrence”.

Consumer ratings today are very different from the verdicts of the Audit Commission in the 2000s. We are not talking about the delivery of ‘excellent’/’three star’ services identified by the Commission under its inspection regime. While organisations will have the accolade that they are meeting the standards, they will not have the kudos of being able to call themselves ‘excellent’.

The reports offer scant detail about the quality of services and do not provide the evidence the Regulator holds that the standards are being met. As we were advised during the development of the new framework, inspection reports are intended to mirror those produced following in-depth assessments (IDAs) in the housing association sector covering the economic standards. Consequently, the reports are extremely short and are simply a summary of the inspection findings. The NCHA report runs to just 522 words and the WCHT report is even shorter at 365 words.

Looking at inspection methods from other sectors gives us alternative reporting models which RSH could learn from. Both Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) produce much longer reports following inspections.  More importantly both regulators use templates that summarise the inspection findings and promote consistency in reporting. The RSH may face pressure to revisit its narrative approach as tenants (and other stakeholders) struggle to draw comparisons between the performance of different landlords.

Will the inspection reports for large providers be longer than those generated for smaller landlords? The first such reports have examined the performance of relatively small providers. Blanket positive conclusions about the performance of large providers with significant geographical spread may be challenged by groups of tenants who may feel that they do not reflect the level of service they receive from their landlord in their area.

The NCHA and WCHT reports set out how the providers have assured inspectors that the consumer standards have been met. However, there are no links to key public documents such as tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs). To improve transparency and accountability, the RSH should consider publishing up-to-date TSMs as part of its inspection reports.

Focusing specifically on TSMs, and taking WCHT’s satisfaction scores as an example, some commentators might be surprised to see the Watford-based provider secure a C1 rating while all its 12 satisfaction scores (bar one) were less than the median score achieved by 196 housing associations in the LOCARLA dataset. This effectively confirms that there will be no clear read across between TSM scores and the ratings that providers will secure following an inspection.

WCHT and NCHA were both due a scheduled inspection, having each had IDAs in 2020. In both reports, all four of the consumer standards were subject to assessment by inspectors. Will this approach be repeated for future inspections? The RSH affirms its risk-based approach to regulation. It might be expected that inspections would be more focused where a document review and the TSMs (for instance) have shown that the inspectors should concentrate on, say, the poorly performing services.

The judgements for NCHA and WCHT, based on consumer inspections, can be compared with the RJs delivered earlier in the month for four providers deemed as failing the standards. The four RPs were each given a non-compliant C3 consumer rating, which means there are “serious failings in the landlord delivering the outcomes of the consumer standards and significant improvement is needed”.

We are now seeing the outputs of the new regime for consumer regulation over seven years since the Grenfell Tower disaster precipitated the wholesale change in state oversight of social housing. A key question arises as the various reports emerge from the RSH about the performance of individual providers against the consumer standards. Will the reports give tenants and other stakeholders the insight they need into the performance of providers? Will the reports make providers more accountable for the services they deliver to their tenants? It is noteworthy that the RSH reports score on the cusp of ‘very difficult to read’ for readability[i]. That suggests they are intended more for professionals than the general public. 

The RSH is starting to roll out the new regulatory framework for social housing providers just as a new government takes over. Ultimately what will ministers make of the nascent regulatory framework? Will they deem it ‘fit for purpose’? We already know that in the health and care sectors the role of the Regulator has been criticised by the new Secretary of State.

But given the in-tray that the new housing ministers face, an immediate review of the regulation of social housing providers is unlikely.

An earlier version of this blog was published by Housing Quality Network

[i] Flesch reading ease scores of around 30-33, listed as ‘difficult to read’ with scores below 30 ‘very difficult to read’

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What’s holding back estate regeneration? Personal reflections and hopes for joined-up policy

Sylvia Court, Hoxton, Simon, is licensed under CC-BY-2.0

I don’t know exactly when it started to set in, this pessimism about housing I’ve had lately.

If I had to put a date on it I’d say 2021, probably the summer, when I was working as a Housing Operations Manager, responsible for thousands of residents’ homes across different estates and schemes across London. I knew our plans for the renovation of 1940s walk-up blocks were held back again by failure demand, due to the mounting backlog of routine and emergency repairs to our homes and estates which stripped away our allocated maintenance routine and planned budgets. Inflation, to my eye mysteriously low until now at a headline level, could also go up at any time.

The Office for National Statistics Housing Construction output prices indices shows that between June 2018 and June 2020 the cost of housing repairs and maintenance rose from 104.8% of 2015 prices to 106.9%. Between June 2020 and June 2021,  it rose to 109.3%. Thereafter, the index spiked sharply, peaking at 120%) where it has stayed since. Our economic circumstances in housing and homelessness are now vastly different, just like those early Covid-predictions.

From my viewpoint, financial instability, deprivation and lack of clear national direction were already biting local communities, holding back housing reinvestment and regeneration and stressing our social housing workforce.

The national headlines about an exponential rise infood bank and emergency food relief usage were played out in the real world in front of our eyes as residents set up or expanded food banks and emergency food delivery schemes, which we supported financially and with our own system of well-being calls and free food deliveries for those who needed help.

While this was ongoing,  the pressure on our finances began to tighten with soaring maintenance and repair costs, cross-subsidy demands for new building, loan repayments, while our income was restricted by rent freezes, capped increases and constricting credit systems that usually serviced a 100,000 unit housing association smoothly but were starting to tighten as interest rates began to rise.

This meant residents and some frontline housing workers – many living in social housing themselves – were not only living through a pandemic but also an outbreak of delayed and broken promises of home and estate improvements.

Across the country, we knew from forums and Inside Housing, some of the most alert housing associations were scrambling to adapt to a new post-pandemic future – they didn’t expect much yet from the government given how little they were used to being guided on housing management since de-regulation after 2011 and 2015!


When Covid started looking serious in early 2020, we’d been so relieved both for our residents, and as a team,  that the first phase of the renovation plans were completed, not knowing how long or severe the disruption to housing services would be. Never had the phrase “fix the roof while the sun is shining” had so much relevance when storm clouds were gathering around again. 


This was work for me, but it was personal as well. As we discussed in the neighbourhood office every day, long-term plans for individual homes and whole neighbourhoods underpinned thousands of people’s lives. People who I quickly learned from doorstep conversations, in meetings and by email frankly didn’t care much about what their social landlord thought. As long as they could get on in life with their lives, education, work, personal challenges, life plans – they were happy to leave their social landlord to competently operate in the local economy and manage their home and neighbourhood in partnership with the council, social services, police, faith and charity groups.

Trust was fragile, and there’d been very little of it in the area when in autumn 2018 I was first set a very stretching target of implementing plans rapidly developed with residents to rebuilding trust with the residents’ associations and residents of several estates, all told it would amount to around 3,000 homes.

I was determined to rebuild that trust with my team and colleagues, by driving rapid improvements to estate reinvestment and regeneration locally, improving routine maintenance and delivering neighbourhood communication for the age of social media, enabling people to live in their homes without the need to chase their landlord or complain.

Trust needed constant work with a section of residents, many with lived experience of homelessness, with bad experience with private landlords or insecure housing in the past, as we understood from speaking with them.

From the many personal conversations I had with residents on the doorstep and in meetings, emails, Twitter and newsletter feedback received to our dedicated inboxes between 2017 and 2022, I also knew that some also felt that delay and disappointment from their social landlord meant they were reliving their own journeys of the insecure private housing, being asked to leave or being evicted and then approaching hard-pressed local authority housing departments, only to be advised of long queues to be offered the chance to bid on precious social housing flats. 


As a trainee, in constant dialogue with the residents’ associations and local Labour councillors, I’d drawn estate reinvestment plans for each of the big estates with an assembled taskforce of senior colleagues. 


These had focused on the basics, first cleaning and antisocial behaviour, then security and safety for the day-to-day challenges people faced: including stronger communal doors, new lifts, better lighting, roof repairs, water pumps. These plans were formed only in late 2018 in answer to and with residents’ associations and the local councillors, and were delivered just in time for the end of 2019/20. The next phase would focus on warmth, decency and efficiency: new heating and energy systems including heat pumps, more efficient boilers, solar panels (several residents’ associations had declared climate emergencies and were discussing community energy schemes), and communal cleaning. 

Now I felt sick speaking to my colleagues in the Repairs, Reinvestment, Neighbourhoods Department, as we looked at the plans for 2021/22 and realised how difficult it would be to deliver them. Inflation, already bad after 2016, was going south on ‘specialist’ parts for lifts, door entry systems and for window frames, certain heating system parts. Wages were increasing too. The cost of some maintenance projects had doubled, due to contractors being unwilling or unable to deliver work – they had plenty of quotes themselves. Even with an in-house contractor the same issues with materials and wages arose rapidly, and even our in-house team and trusted suppliers were unable to keep up by summer 2021.

The quotes we’d shared for full transparency with the residents’ associations would now be just promises we’d made standing up in front of a room of residents, that we’d written down and sent to our local councillors. 

Should I have felt so ashamed and angry about the prospect of my organisation, which I was proud to be the local face of for many residents, being unable to deliver everything we’d promised? 

Well, reflecting on it, the picture was more complicated. After all, successive Conservative Governments had caused a great degree of this instability, successive rent freezes and rent caps and with price shocks, material shortages, distortions in the skills and labour market, meaning that Maintenance and Planned Reinvestment and Regeneration budgets, often possible to squish together in the process of cutting them to meet straitened income was increasingly stretched or disappeared to build new homes, service debts or deal with other more pressing issues, especially fire safety checks and works.

Looking back, I can see from a policy perspective what I knew from a personal conversation with a resident talking to their housing teamthat each disappointment of a delayed repair, each broken promise to fix up their estates communal parts and gardens could seem to compound their history of bad experiences in their homes and with local public services.

But it felt like a betrayal, and we would do all we could to put it right. In the end we delivered almost everything in those neighbourhoods, a little late, to everyone’s relief by the Summer of 2022. But only after some very difficult financial decisions, including rearranging funding allocated to other high need, high priority neighbourhoods, and some brave communication with residents and their associations.

We kicked so many things down the road that residents told us would be needed which we could confirm from our stock data, and which I know will still be needed now.  Not least the local employment scheme, the solar panels, the heat pumps and the fundamental renovation of the fabric of estates and, where the residents and data pointed us, regeneration, things that my predecessors and colleagues had felt forced to push into the far future due to funding pressures and constantly changing political priorities. This showed the Conservative illiteracy of the basics of how social housing ‘worked’ on the ground.

We were far from perfect as a social housing provider, and we welcomed the new Social Housing Regulatory Regime that the Conservatives finally realised was needed, after scrapping consumer standards as a neo-liberal, austerity experiment, and yet we did try to keep up with everything and deliver new homes to boot.

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From promises to delivery – making Labour’s housing goals a reality

One of Labour’s most significant pledges ahead of the next general election is a promise to build 1.5 million homes over the next parliament. Doing so would go a significant way to tackling the housing crisis, particularly if such a level of construction were maintained in the long term.

However, this will be particularly difficult to do given the spending constraints which the party is also promising to maintain. At the recent Mais lecture, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised to only borrow to invest, and to maintain the Conservatives’ fiscal rule of ensuring that debt was on a track to fall after five years.

Speaking at Labour Housing Group’s 2024 Annual General Meeting, Toby Lloyd presented a roadmap for how this might be achieved. Toby is an independent housing consultant, formerly Head of Policy at Shelter, and advised the May government on housing issues, with previous experience as a policy advisor for local councils, housing associations, developers, and the Mayor of London.

Toby’s presentation covered a number of key themes on how Labour’s housing promises could be delivered while maintaining their fiscal rules:

Making the existing system work:

The 1.5 million home goal is ambitious – the last time that this was achieved in a five-year period was from 1968 – 1973. While tinkering with elements such as the planning system may be helpful, relying solely on this, or on any other tweak will get in the way of the need to deliver – a Labour Government will need to hit the ground running and work with the system as it is, at the same time as initiating more fundamental reform.

Ensuring committed money is spent:

Eye-catching sums of money committed for unlocking or building new housing have recently been returned to the Treasury. These include two thirds of the £4.2bn earmarked for the Housing Infrastructure Fund, and £255m allocated to building affordable homes.  

Part of the reason that these funds have not been spent is inflexibility on the Treasury’s part – rules set by them in how the money can be spent mean that inflation and viability changes can quickly scupper a project. Adding flexibility into how these funds are spent will not only unlock this money, but will be crucial to ensure that future pots does not face the same issues.

Encouraging diversity in housebuilding:

Part of accepting the reality of the existing situation is realising that private sector developers will continue to deliver the overwhelming majority of homes for the foreseeable future. However, with the market as weak as it currently is and land values likely to fall, there is less incentive for developers to build, rather than to withhold their land supply.

In the short run there will be opportunities to acquire stalled private schemes and convert them into affordable homes, while in the longer term decent funding social housebuilding will be a key to restoring diversity to the sector, so that councils, housing associations, small builders and community groups can all contribute. Not only will this be crucial for providing homes for those facing the most acute housing need and driving up quality, it also will help make the whole development system less vulnerable to market cycles and so raise overall housing supply.

Strategic planning:

While tinkering with the planning system will do limited good in the short term, reasserting the proactive state role in shaping the development system will be crucial to achieving the 1.5 million homes goal.

Key to this will be reinvigorating spatial planning, which the state has taken largely abandoned over the last 14 years. Implementing a national spatial plan which clearly identifies the locations for strategic growth, and delivering this in partnership with regional and local stakeholders, would give a greater degree of purpose to the planning system.

This will be particularly important for the delivery of New Towns, best devised as extensions to existing settlements such as the new Cambridge Urban Quarter. In order to deliver these, Development Corporations with Compulsory Purchase powers will be needed to ensure that land is acquired for a fair price.

Improving existing stock:

While building new homes is key, the number of existing dwellings which fail to meet quality and safety standards is a crisis in itself.

Funding is needed for a ‘Decent Homes Programme 2’, to upgrade existing stock to current energy efficiency and safety standards. This will have significant savings down the line from lower energy bills, improved health outcomes for residents, and a decrease in major safety risks.

However, the UK’s definition of fiscal debt is unusual in including the debt of public corporations, including councils borrowing to invest in housing stock. Changing the measure of public debt used for fiscal rules to exclude this ‘public corporation’ borrowing would remove incentives for the Treasury and local authorities to ignore this pressing need.

Q&A:

After his presentation, Toby answered several questions from Labour Housing Group members on a variety of topics including siloed thinking in government, ending homelessness, ensuring that homes with planning permission are built, and empty homes.

We are grateful to Toby for speaking at the AGM, and look forward to working with him further.

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A Tenants’ Manifesto

Avondale Square Estate, Old Kent Road. Image by Simon for Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0 DEED

Our leader, Keir Starmer, has vowed to enable communities to take control. This got me thinking about how we make this a reality for social housing tenants.

The Grenfell Tower tragedy and the death of Awaab Ishak have highlighted why it is critical that tenants have an effective voice. The responsible organisations, Kensington and Chelsea ALMO[1] and Rochdale Boroughwide Housing Association had tenants’ representatives on their boards. The problem was that they could not affect the culture and practices of these organisations.

The challenge is captured in the introductory paragraph of the London Tenants Federation (LTF) 2021 Tenants’ Manifesto.

As social housing tenants, we and our homes are often written about by government ministers, journalists, think-tanks, charity policy teams, architects and academics. Some portrayals are sympathetic to us, but many are not.

The vast majority of these ‘experts’ have no experience of living in social housing. It is essential for us that a strong and articulate social housing tenants’ voice is heard in respect of the decisions made about our homes and communities.

In 2016 the Conservative Government drove the Housing and Planning Act through Parliament with next to no engagement with tenants. I cannot imagine a government passing legislation affecting the private sector without consulting with lobbying organisations. The outcome was that the Act was passed, but was not enacted, because the in-coming Prime Minister, Theresa May, realised that it would cause too much hardship.

The reason that social housing tenants are disempowered is due to class. Most social housing tenants are working class, however there is also the sadly familiar intersection with other forms of discrimination.

The starting point of tenant empowerment and even more importantly improving the living conditions and safety of tenants, must be adequate funding for social housing. Councils and housing associations have been systematically underfunded for decades. Most councils are now reporting that they do not have sufficient funding to make their ageing stock liveable and safe. Social housing tenants have experience of making ‘tough decisions’ about priorities in their personal lives and this is an expertise that they bring to decision-making. However, it is unfair to expect tenants to serve on boards and take on legal and moral responsibility for housing that is insufficiently funded to be safe.

A tenants’ voice

Tenants either know best or a very least can bring a helpful insight. They need a voice at a local, regional and national level. Active tenants make a difference. I can walk onto a housing estate and tell from the standard of cleaning and communal repairs whether it is benefitting from an active tenants’ association. I marvel at the varied mutual aid initiatives that happen on many estates.

Effective empowerment requires training and support for both the unpaid, tenants, and paid, officers. Those being paid may need training to help leave behind negative stereotypes and to support them to deliver the outcome that tenants desire. Tenants also need support to engage effectively. We need to acknowledge that open democracy can bring to the fore difficult people, whose bad behaviour, if not effectively challenged, will alienate others. Tenant engagement is risky, the biggest risk is that there is no outcome from the consultation and that those who got involved are never seen again and their experience of powerlessness is reinforced.

The 2023 Regulation of Social Housing Act gives individual tenants new rights as customers but is weak on collective rights. When the Social Housing Regulator finds its stride, it should require housing providers to demonstrate that tenant engagement has made a tangible difference to the way services are delivered. The same criteria should be applied to funding applications to build new homes. Why should we be funding organisations who are not managing their existing homes well to build more homes?

A tenants’ levy

Councils, ALMOs and housing associations fund landlord lobbying organisations, but there are no parallel, equally well-funded, bodies for tenants. Landlord organisations may encourage collaboration with tenants’ groups on issues of mutual interest, such as increasing the supply of social housing, but there is little evidence of engagement on issues where tenants may have a dissenting voice, such as the CEO’s salary. Landlords should look again at the fairness of this arrangement. Also, a tenants’ levy of say a penny on the rent each week by every housing provider could help fund independent tenant activism.

Neighbourhood management

Tenant empowerment presents the greatest challenge for the largest and most geographically dispersed housing associations. Many areas have several social housing providers operating within them. I live on the eastern side of the Old Kent Road in Bermondsey, South London. We have a concentration of ageing, under-invested in social housing. Landlords include Southwark Council, City of London Corporation, Peabody and Hexagon. Problems on one estate spill over on to others. What we desperately need is a coordinated approach to investment, management and support for our community. My proposal is that diverse social housing providers devolve responsibility and funding for housing management to a new local and democratically controlled neighbourhood management organisation, whilst retaining ownership. This would allow councils and housing associations to use their assets to build new affordable homes, whilst management would become local and better.

These neighbourhood management organisations, would have a board of elected tenants, operate in urban areas where there is a high density of social housing and cover around 2,000 homes. Funding would be provided by existing housing providers contributing what they currently spend on housing management and maintenance into the neighbourhood pot.

Tenants Empowerment Grant

Up until 2010 there was a Tenants Empowerment Grant (TEG) of around £1m per year in England. It was slashed by the Government in 2010 and then abolished in 2015.

TEG paid for the support and training that council tenants needed to exercise their Right to Manage. 140,000 council residents on 130 estates have taken on the direct management of their homes. Tenant Management Organisations (TMO) consistently achieve higher levels of tenant satisfaction than the rest of the council stock. Tenants’ groups that gain confidence managing their estates often undertake wider activities to support their community. TMOs must hold a formal continuation ballot every 5 years to test with their residents whether they are staying true to their principles and they retain tenants’ support. If a TMO fails to gain the support of its tenants the TMO folds and staff lose their jobs, this level of jeopardy has a profound and positive effect on the culture of the staff team.

Whilst the Right to Manage still exists, without funding for training few tenants’ groups have been able to exercise this right since 2010. As well as restoring the Right to Manage as a funded option for council tenants, the right should be extended to housing association tenants. As with a neighbourhood management organisation, housing associations would still retain the asset and the rental stream, minus a management and maintenance allowance, therefore their ability to build new homes will be unaffected.

TEG also paid for tenants to explore options short of full management control, For instance a group of tenants may be particularly aggrieved about estate cleaning standards and want to take it over.

National and Regional Tenants’ Lobbying Organisations

Just before the TEG was cut in 2010 moves were underway to create a body known as the National Tenant Voice to represent the interests of social housing tenants and be a sounding board for the government.

In 2022 the Government set up a rebranded Resident Opportunities and Empowerment Grant of £500,000 for partner organisations to bid to provide training, capacity building and independent advice. This is exactly one of the roles that a national, mass-membership, representative tenants-led organisation should be performing. Hopefully, when the current contract comes up for renewal there will be such an organisation in place.

The LTF argue for a tenant-led think tank to generate policy ideas, rather than just respond to the agenda of the government of the day.

With Labour committed to greater devolution to regional authorities, tenants’ representation at this level will become important. A model is provided by Sadiq Khan’s Housing Panel, in which representatives of Londoners at the sharp end of the housing crisis advise on housing policy.

Combined approach

There are different approaches that people can take to collectively improve their housing situation, tenant associations, tenants’ panels, TMOs, housing cooperatives and community land trusts. If funding exists, the funding streams are separate. There is an argument more joint working, lobbying and sharing of ideas will give tenant empowerment a higher profile.

Community Land Trusts and other community organisations are playing a vital role in encouraging support for new housing developments when local opposition may be an issue. Hopefully, the Labour Party will not lose the idea of transferring unsafe homes from the private sector into public and community ownership. During the 1970s, 80s and 90s tenant cooperatives demonstrated that they could restore rundown street properties in a cost-effective way.

Low cost-high impact

We all know that Labour will inherit the consequences of the Tories’ financial mismanagement. In the context of overall government expenditure the cost of the proposals outlined is small, however their adoption will demonstrate Labour’s commitment to empower some of the most voiceless citizens of this country.

For too long tenants’ voices have not been heard with devastating consequences, if we can win the next election, we have the chance to change this.

I want to apologise to participants in the 2019 London Tenants’ Federation and 2023 London LHG conferences, whose ideas I have stolen without crediting them. My theft would be too egregious if I do not mention Sharon Hayward, Pat Turnbull, Lee Page and Cllr. Mick O’Sullivan.

Andy Bates is a member of the LHG Executive. He has recently retired from full-time work after 40 years working in council housing. For 27 years he was manager of Leathermarket JMB, a TMO in Bermondsey, South London. He is now an associate for Community-Led Housing London and TPAS, a CIH tutor and board member of Wenlock Barn TMO.

[1] You may be more used to references to Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO). This is a name that the organisation gave itself. However it is an important principle that it is correctly referred to as an Arms-Length Management Organisation (ALMO). Kensington and Chelsea own over 9,000 council homes. Every other TMO is much smaller, managing between 50 and 1,500 properties, with more direct resident involvement and scrutiny than was the case in Kensington and Chelsea. For a fuller explanation read Pete Apps’ excellent book Show Me The Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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Tackling Temporary Accommodation: Labour Housing Group’s Recommendations

When we talk about homelessness, our thoughts often turn to people in doorways and tents, living on the streets of our towns and cities. Rough sleeping is the most extreme and dangerous form of homelessness and the increasing numbers experiencing it is easy to see. Shocking as this is, it is just the visible tip of the now vast homelessness crisis.

Earlier this month Hannah Keilloh set out both the human and financial cost of this hidden crisis. 123,000 homeless families are living in temporary accommodation (TA) including 140,000 children. More than £1.7 billion spent in 2022-23 to “temporarily” house people, often in appalling conditions.  Two thirds of the families have been in TA for more than a year, some for more than a decade – their lives on hold as they wait for the settled and secure home that everyone deserves.

There is an urgent need for action to tackle this and last summer I was pleased to join Labour Housing Group’s policy working group to help develop proposals we would like to see Labour’s manifesto.

The Group’s aims were to bring forward proposals to reduce the cost of temporary accommodation and to improve the quality of accommodation being used. But also to work towards a greater mission – to prevent people from becoming homelessness and, when that isn’t possible, to ensure that temporary accommodation is truly temporary and their homelessness ended as quickly as possible.

Strategy and leadership to enable change

Tackling homelessness requires consistent, coordinated action and commitment across multiple areas government – national, regional and local. It requires a true team effort with government and public agencies working hand in hand with housing and third sector support providers and communities.

Adopting an overarching homelessness strategy might not sound like the biggest ask, and yet the UK is one of the few nations in Europe that does not have one. The next government should swiftly correct this. It should be coproduced and delivered in partnership with people with lived experience of homelessness, and the local authorities and voluntary & community organisations working on the frontline. It won’t be easy to break the silos. Strong leadership will be needed to develop and deliver this across government – the report recommends the appointment of a homelessness Tsar, who will need political support at the very highest level.

At its heart, Labour’s approach should have an understanding that the causes and impacts of homelessness are diverse and unequal. Women make up 60% of adults in temporary accommodation with violent relationship breakdown as a leading cause.  Black people are three and a half times more likely to experience homelessness as White British people and a quarter of young people at risk of homelessness identify as LGBTQ+. Labour’s strategy must recognise disadvantage and discrimination. It must enable person centred and trauma informed approaches to meet diverse needs.

Low cost, high impact changes

Preventing homelessness and the need for temporary accommodation is our ultimate aim, but to alleviate the immediate TA crisis Labour must act swiftly to lower the barriers people face to moving on from TA, refuges and other homelessness accommodation. Too often people are stuck on social housing waiting lists and blocked from private rental tenancies. It is in many ways akin to bed blocking – people unable to move to somewhere more suitable and the “beds” in good quality, local accommodation unavailable for newly homeless people.

The report recommends that social housing allocation policies should give greater priority to people experiencing homelessness and that more housing association lettings should be reserved for people experiencing homelessness. The report particularly recommends that policies should far greater support to those who have spent more than a year in TA.

Action should also be taken to remove barriers from securing private rented accommodation. This should include increasing the budget and eligibility for Discretionary Housing Payments and enabling local authorities to expand of funding of deposits and rent in advance. Reforms should also require landlords and agents to accept offers of written guarantees (for instance from local authorities) instead of cash deposits.

Investing in the future

The working group recognises the financial and economic challenges a Labour government would face. However, there is strong evidence that investing to end homelessness is money well spent with PWC finding every £1 invested could save up to £2.80 of spending across the public sector.

We recommend a comprehensive, cross government review of current spending on supporting the homelessness crisis – both direct spend on TA and homelessness support and the hidden costs of homelessness including within health, social care and criminal justice budgets. Our proposals for investment include additional ring fenced funding for homelessness prevention, a local authority TA acquisitions programme and funding of a robust inspection and enforcement regime to ensure existing legal standards for TA are met.

Ultimately Labour must make it their mission to end poverty and destitution. That means investing to tackle the housing crisis by building at least 90,000 new social homes per year and, alongside the new deal for working people, fixing the gaping holes in the social welfare safety net.

With real determination and ambition we believe a Labour government could end the homelessness crisis and we urge Labour to take up this challenge.

Find out more

There will be an online launch for Labour Housing Group’s policy paper on temporary accommodation on Tuesday the 27th of February at 10am. Register for that here.

Click here to read the full report.

Fiona Colley is Director of Social Change at Homeless Link, the national membership body for organisations working directly with people who become homeless in England.

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Invest to save: essential for solving the temporary accommodation crisis, Labour Housing Group says

Why Labour Housing Group’s invest to save  approach is needed to resolve the temporary accommodation crisis

A safe, stable, and decent home is a foundational building block for life. Home is our space away from the rest of the world where we can relax and feel secure.  However, in England, 140,000 children head into 2024 living not in a ‘home’ at all, but instead living in temporary accommodation (TA). 

To put it in context that’s the equivalent of over 4,600 classes of children, or 220 entire primary schools. Or the entire population of Watford! The numbers are huge, and they are only going up (this figure was a 14 per cent increase on the previous year). Behind every number is a child and a family.  Some will stay there a few days but more often stays in TA last months and even years. Almost certainly their TA will be overcrowded and all too often it will be of poor quality.  

The reality of this situation is often children having to share beds with siblings or parents and babies with no safe sleeping space at all. Young children with no safe place to play, and older children with nowhere to do their homework. Children are getting to school tired and late having travelled long distances to their schools (having often been placed out of area). Parents losing their jobs because the length of commute to work is now impossible.  Stressed-out parents struggling to feed their children decent meals without any suitable cooking facilities. Families are living in limbo and moving frequently, with constant uncertainty and insecurity.

TA is a broad term and can include B&Bs, hostels, hotels, private rented houses or flats, and council or housing association properties. TA has an important role to play in emergencies: providing short-term housing until settled accommodation can be secured. However, this is where things have come seriously unstuck.  A chronic shortage of new social housing under successive governments, rapidly rising private rents, a local housing allowance that has failed to consistently keep pace with inflation, all coupled with a cost of living crisis, means more and more households are finding themselves forced into homelessness and ending up in TA.  

The reasons for ending up in TA are the same reasons that people find themselves stuck there for increasingly long periods – there is nowhere affordable or suitable to move people onto. Data from Shelter in 2022 revealed two-thirds of families living in TA have been there for more than 12 months, and this rises to more than four-fifths in London. Some families have been living in TA for more than 10 years. Ten years – this means some children have only ever lived in temporary accommodation never knowing or having the security of a fixed home.

This is no longer a temporary housing solution; it is becoming an unofficial tenure in itself.

Whilst very difficult for the families affected, TA is also very challenging for local authorities.  As we see more and more councils teetering on the brink of Section 114 notices, recent figures released by DLUHC show that from April 2022-March 2023 £1.74 billion was spent by councils on temporary accommodation.  In some cases, councils are using between one fifth and one half of their total available financial resources on it.  This is unsustainable but it doesn’t have to be this way. 

In summer 2023 Labour Housing Group set up a working group to look at the issue of families in TA.  After consulting with the wider housing and homelessness sector, the group has now produced a working paper with a framework of essential actions for the next Labour government. With the situation growing worse by the day, the premise of the framework is to ensure that TA is a priority for the first 100 days of a new administration. 

Solving this crisis and releasing people from the grips of TA will require a long-term ‘invest to save’ approach.

There will be an online launch for Labour Housing Group’s policy paper on temporary accommodation on Tuesday the 27th of February at 10am. Register for that here.

Read a summary of the report here, and click here for the full report.

Hannah Keilloh is an experienced Policy and Practice Officer at the Chartered Institute of Housing, specialising in homelessness, domestic abuse, and planning.

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Furniture Poverty and the role of furnished tenancies in social housing

Furniture poverty is too often hidden behind front doors. There are at least 6 million people in the UK living without essential furniture items and this could be a cooker, a fridge, or a child’s bed.

As the Cost of Living crisis continues to devastate lives, this figure is rising every day. If people cannot afford food, how can we expect them to be able to afford to replace a broken cooker?

Living in furniture poverty has a terrible impact on your life, affecting people’s physical and mental health, and their social and financial wellbeing. It can mean people turn to unaffordable credit to buy the items that they need, leaving them unable to pay rent or buy food; it can lead to social isolation as the stigma means family, friends or support workers are no longer invited into homes without a sofa to sit on; and it can lead to unhealthy diets and poor health without a cooker to prepare food or a fridge to store it in.

Of course, furniture poverty is about poverty, it is about people not having enough money to live on. It is about a broken welfare system, unaffordable housing, and insecure low-paid employment. But there are steps that can be taken now to lift people out of furniture poverty and provide them with a decent furnished home – and the social housing sector has a vital role to play.

At End Furniture Poverty, our research has shown that only 2% of social housing is let as furnished or part furnished, compared to 29% of private rental properties. We also know that 26% of social housing tenants are living in furniture poverty, living without one or more essential furniture item.

Those fleeing domestic violence, or moving from homelessness, often have no furniture at all, so are moving into an empty box. Even simply moving from a furnished property in the private rental sector to the social housing sector can leave tenants with no furniture, appliances, flooring or window coverings. Other sources of support for furniture and white goods are much harder to access as 37 local authorities in England have closed their local welfare provision schemes as they face enormous budgetary burdens, and charities are overwhelmed with the demand for help.

A furnished tenancy scheme can provide the answer

Furnished tenancies mean a landlord can provide all of the furniture items a tenant needs, including floor and window coverings, and then recoup the costs through the service charge element of Universal Credit. It provides a sustainable, long-term solution for tenants who are on benefits and likely to remain on benefits. This relieves the burden on local welfare schemes and the third sector, and frees up support for others in furniture poverty.

Some landlords offer furniture gifting schemes or small furniture reuse programmes and while these are vital tools, they cannot provide a comprehensive, sustainable solution given the scale of the issue. We need a blended approach, with a furnished tenancy scheme supplemented by reuse and gifting.

We believe that at least 10% of social housing stock should be let as furnished, a figure calculated using the current FT rates in social housing and number of social housing tenants in deep furniture poverty, lacking three or more essential items. Existing furnished tenancy schemes have also naturally balanced at around 10% of their housing stock so it is a robust figure.

We are already working with Liverpool City Council to encourage the local housing associations to commit to this target and we believe every social landlord in the UK should join them. Local authorities own 55% of social housing too, and with ambitious plans for more council housing on the horizon, now is the time for a sector-wide, firm commitment to furniture provision.

A guide for social landlords

To support social landlords, End Furniture Poverty has published a Blueprint for Furniture Provision in Social Housing, a step-by-step guide for landlords to understand how to develop their scheme, looking at everything from finance, staffing, asset management and much more. It also outlines the broader benefits to landlords with case studies from existing schemes including data around the impact of furniture provision with reduced rental arrears and tenancy churn, improved tenancy sustainability and reduced void costs.

Furniture Flex- one example of a delivery model

We have also been working with our colleagues in our wider group of charities, FRC Group, to develop an even better delivery model with Furniture Flex. We have brought together our knowledge from conversations with landlords across the country over several years, considering all of the barriers and challenges they face to get a scheme off the ground, and believe we have offered solutions to all.

FRC has been supplying furniture to landlords for many years, and as a registered charity and social enterprise, 100% of the surplus is reinvested back into the group to help us to achieve our charitable mission to end furniture poverty.

Furniture Flex offers landlords the option of purchasing the furniture with a more traditional furnished tenancy route when the landlord owns and controls the asset, or a rental model, where Furniture Flex retains ownership and the landlord pays the rental cost through the service charge. The rental model overcomes that barrier for tenants who may find employment and move off benefits as they can simply return the furniture and reduce or remove the service charge.

Furniture Flex also provides increased administration support for those smaller landlords who find the perceived admin burden a stumbling block. It also allows landlords to support tenants with one or two items, again relieving the burden on local authority crisis schemes.

Whichever route a landlord chooses to acquire their furniture, whether it is Furniture Flex or another provider, End Furniture Poverty is here to support them at every step of the way, from building business cases to assessing the impact of pilots.

The current system of moving our most vulnerable citizens into empty boxes has to change and furnished tenancies provide an ideal solution. Together we can End Furniture Poverty.

LHG will be ‘In Conversation’ with Claire Donovan at 6pm on the 22nd of February 2024, to further discuss furniture poverty and possible solutions. Find more details of that here.

Claire Donovan, a former journalist, is the Head of Policy, Research and Campaigns at End Furniture Poverty, which raises awareness of the issue of Furniture Poverty; carries out research to highlight
the consequences and reality of living in Furniture Poverty; and develops solutions. Claire is also a trustee of the Reuse Network.

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More Snakes than Ladders

Occasionally an article comes along that encapsulates what you’re thinking. In the January 11 Economist there was an article entitled ‘The Housing Ladder, 1950-2005’ (https://econ.st/48Svcls note paywall) which came close to summing up my gloom about housing policy over recent decades. Its key theme is that ‘a redundant metaphor (the housing ladder) is blinding policymakers’.

The ‘housing ladder’ has been with us as an idea for a long time, and I remember being subject to endless images of ladders when I was on the board of a major housing association, being used to justify turning away from the production of social rent homes. It was linked closely to the other deadly notion of aspiration, which was of course defined in a way that suited the new policy. 

I used to argue a) that the first step on the real housing ladder is a decent affordable home in any tenure, noting that the ladder might only have one rung, and that b) being brought up in an aspirational working-class family meant that my parents wanted their children to stay at school and have better chances in life, their own wishes to own a home were real but secondary. I always hoped that the housing ladder as a concept would wither away and stop being so damaging to the emergence of a comprehensive cross-tenure housing policy, but it looks once again that it will be the main housing topic when the general election comes.

Of course, calling out the housing ladder as a myth is likely to get you classified as a wild-eyed loon – it is so firmly in the centre of housing’s Overton window (ie the range of acceptable opinion) and is used by media and politicians of all shades all the time – so it’s great to see a serious mag taking the idea to task.  

‘The housing ladder’ is the notion that aspiring people will naturally progress (through thrift and hard work – and by avoiding smashed avocado on toast) from buying a modest flat (or even a share of one) at a young-ish age then trading up over the years as incomes grow and housing equity increases. 

Graphic: The Economist, based on ONS data.

The problem is the facts no longer fit the fable, as the article shows. Home ownership peaked 20 years ago at 70% and has since fallen despite vast policy interventions. The ratio of house prices to earnings was around four from 1950s-1990s and is now eight. Home ownership before 30 is now around a third when it used to be more than a half and is increasingly dependent on inherited wealth or family support. Those who make it onto the ladder are much less likely to trade up. The flood of easy mortgage finance across the world following financial deregulation is now a thing of the past, after the USA mortgage market triggered the global financial collapse, and homeowners’ vulnerability to higher interest rates is now plain to see. The Tories, at huge cost, have tried to reinvigorate home ownership through demand subsidies, but the 1990s paradigm isn’t returning any time soon.

The Economist, data from the Resolution Foundation.

The article places the right to buy of council homes in this context, noting that this ‘one time trick’ transferred a tenth of the housing stock from the state to private ownership in a little over a decade, costing billions but giving a major boost to the appearance of success of home ownership. It also comments that even the successful implementation of the target to build 300,000 homes a year for a decade would only reduce the house-price to earnings ratio to 7. It argues that the ageing population means that homes recycle back onto the market much more slowly than they did.

Normally if I make this kind of argument I get challenged with the sneer: ‘I bet you are a homeowner’. Indeed, I am, and I’m a classic housing ladder person although without much trading up – starting in a council house, fortunate to buy a share of a £15,000 London house in a poor area in the 1970s because it was cheaper than private renting, just when Westminster Council allowed joint mortgages between unrelated people for the first time. All I had to do was sit and watch the value rise. But the responsibility of the lucky generation – mine – is to think about what policies are suitable for the less lucky generations that have followed.

So, as the article states, the private rented sector is no longer ‘a waiting room’ prior to home ownership. It is a destination. Social housing has been shrunk massively and deliberately and can no longer meet more than a small share of need. Those who get into home ownership are taking on mortgages well into normal retirement age. The housing costs of older people – home owners and private renters alike – are escalating rapidly, pensioner poverty will rise, and the state will catch much of the burden.

“The housing ladder may have died two decades ago but its allure as a metaphor remains. That continues to blind Britain’s politicians and voters to the reality of the property market. Rather than harking back to a bygone age, Britain’s politicians need to accept that there is more to housing than home ownership.”

The Economist.

The case I’ve always made is for a comprehensive national housing strategy that covers all tenures, building on their strengths and tackling their weaknesses. It will take a generation to turn things around and to stop housing costs crippling most of our households. In case you doubt it, I support home ownership as the preference and the best solution for many households. It will rise again in a sustainable way when peoples’ incomes rise in relation to property prices, so we should build more, subsidising supply where it is sensible but not wasting cash on demand subsidies that push prices up. We must tackle land costs and developers’ profit-first models. We must build much more social housing for those that need decent homes at lower rents, a hugely successful model that requires investment but not ongoing subsidy. And we must professionalise the private rented sector, the last great unmodernised industry, defining its role more clearly as home ownership and social rented gradually climb back, as surely they will.

See ‘The Housing Ladder, 1950-2005’, The Economist Jan 11 2024. Online https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/01/11/the-housing-ladder-1950-2005 (note paywall). No byline.

Steve Hilditch was a founder member of LHG when it formed 42 years ago, and edited Red Brick blog for 10 years, publishing a compendium book of 100 posts in 2020. He has worked as a housing professional and consultant, advising the last Labour Government, various Select Committees and many Labour Councils on housing matters. He recently carried out a detailed housing review for the new Labour Westminster Council.