COMMENT 13
are put in breach of loan covenants. One bright thing to emerge from all this
gloom in recent weeks was the Labour Party’s Green Paper on social housing. Called ‘Housing for the Many’ it sets out the opposition’s plans to revive affordable housing, and specifically new council housing. The focus on affordability has been particularly warmly received, along with other measures such as suspending the right to buy and ending policies like forcing housing associations to convert social rents to so-called ‘affordable rents’, which in reality everyone regards as unaffordable rents. Rents for both private and social
housing are increasingly becoming unaffordable to many as welfare reforms and local housing allowance freezes continue to bite into the budgets of those on the lowest incomes in society. With the new and additional responsibilities to the homeless, it’s becoming harder for councils to find suitable housing for those on waiting lists.
FRESH COMMITMENT The headline-grabbing Labour policy was the commitment to build one million new affordable homes for rent over a 10-year period. This looks like a very ambitious figure initially, but many older
professionals in the sector will remember times when this level of construction was commonplace. Reports from bodies like the Trussell
Trust (on the increased use of foodbanks), the Resolution Foundation (on the plight of young adults struggling to find decent and affordable housing) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (reporting on the death of 78 homeless people on the streets of Britain over the winter) has reminded us all of the huge need for new and affordable houses, accompanied by the necessary caring services. There was a time when we took such
concepts for granted. But in the post- Grenfell age we probably need to be a lot noisier and more demanding about such things. The cost cutting culture that led to a botched refurbishment scheme and turned safe homes into a tinderbox needs to be consigned to history. This is the challenging agenda inherited by the new Housing Secretary. As the public inquiry into the Grenfell
fire resumes, the next few weeks and months could be quite harrowing as we hear evidence from the survivors and various fire safety experts. But we badly need to learn the lessons from it and to ensure that such a tragedy does not happen again. We thought lessons would
be learned after the Lakanal House fire in 2009, we now need to ensure they are after the Grenfell Tower fire.
Image courtesy of Natalie Oxford
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