Industry news Editor’s comment
What’s the future of council housing?
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When policies are directed towards local authorities it is usually in a negative way – restricting access to or the length of tenancies, controlling rents or forcing councils to sell assets at ever-increasing discounts. And then to rub salt into the wounds, the proceeds from the sales of their most valuable properties are to be given to housing associations to compensate them for selling homes to their tenants at greatly subsidised prices. Where’s the logic in that? In many ways we are very lucky that the people working for councils up and down the
country are such a resourceful and robust lot, otherwise we wouldn’t see places like Sheffield responding to the current crisis by building hundreds of new low-cost homes for first-time buyers and young families, as well as new homes to rent at affordable prices, with higher levels of protection than the private sector will ever manage. But the only way Sheffield City Council managed to do this was by setting up a housing company, which then
entered into a partnership with a housebuilder and a housing association. Essentially they had to find a way around the byzantine maze of local government laws and finance, to ensure the new homes are not officially classed as council housing and tenants do not enjoy a statutory right to buy.
Solution
Thankfully Sheffield is not alone and councils in places like Croydon and Bournemouth are also finding ways of returning to the housebuilding game. It’s a far cry from the peak of council housebuilding of the 1960s when more than 400,000 homes were built in a single year, but it’s certainly a lot better than the somewhat miserly 130 homes built in 2004. Why the Government forces local councils to act in this way is anybody’s guess, but this is surely one of the more
stupid cases of ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.’ Councils are far from perfect and they do not always get it right, but if the Government is serious about fixing the housing market and delivering on its ambition to build a million new homes by 2020, while at the same time helping the ‘just about managing’, then surely it makes sense to give a key role to the likes of Sheffield.
Patrick Mooney, News Editor
Despite the recent raft of new legislation and policy papers on ‘housing issues’ it is still proving impossible to identify a clear Government vision for the future of council housing in Britain, or England anyway. While it was reassuring to see our political leaders accept that simply building more homes for outright sale was
not the way to fix our broken housing market, they have yet to come up with a blueprint for one of the major building blocks in our society. Councils already provide affordable homes for millions of people in this country but when politicians bring
themselves to talk about rented housing, they are invariably talking about the contributions being made by private landlords or housing associations.
Crisis
HOUSING&
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The May issue of Housing Management & Maintenance features Tribe Apartments, Manchester’s first Build to Rent scheme, which transformed three derelict tower blocks after an award-winning refurbishment.
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