Industry News
Chancellor offers £3bn boost for new affordable homes
News in brief
struggles to meet its target of 300,000 new homes a year. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip
T
Hammond used his Spring Statement to announce the boost via the affordable homes guarantee scheme in the form of Treasury guarantees for HAs to allow them to build. He also announced a series of schemes to boost
housebuilding, including £717m to “unlock up to 37,000 homes” in the Oxford-Cambridge arc, in Cheshire and west London. Mr Hammond said: “The Government is
determined to fix the broken housing market. Building more homes in the right places is critical to unlocking productivity growth and makes housing
he Government is making £3bn available to housing associations to fund the building of an extra 30,000 affordable homes, as it
more affordable.” The news was welcomed by many housing bodies
including the campaigning group Shelter, but they also called for increased investment in social housing for rent. Campaigners, landlords and developers say that far more homes at low rents are needed, in place of the higher affordable rent homes and shared ownership properties. Polly Neate, Chief Executive of Shelter, said:
“While this is good news, it has to be noted that we can’t deliver social housing on the scale we need on borrowing alone – 3.1m social homes are needed in the next 20 years to tackle the housing crisis at its root and lift thousands of families out of homelessness. We need much more grant funding for social housing in this year’s spending review to get a grip on our ever-growing housing emergency.”
• Analysis released by the Office for National Statistics shows the number of single- person households in the UK is rising sharply and that nearly one in seven people in the UK could be living alone by 2039. The report also revealed that those living alone are more likely to be renting and feel less financially secure than couples without children. The number of people living on their own shot up by 16 per cent between 1997 and 2017, to 7.7 million, said the ONS. It predicted that this could rise to 10.7 million people living alone in 20 years’ time. The study also found people living on their own spend an average 92 per cent of their disposable income, compared with two-adult households who spend 83 per cent. The number of people aged 45 to 64 living alone has increased by 53 per cent in the past 20 years to 2.43 million. The increase was partly due to the large number of children born in the 1960s reaching older age, but is also down to a change in our relationships, with more people in this age group being divorced or single than there were 15 years ago.
Government confirms five-year rent settlement for social housing sector
The Government has confirmed that social housing rents charged by councils and housing associations can rise by inflation plus one per cent for five years from 2020. The announcement follows a formal consultation
on the new rent standard. It also marks the end of the annual one per cent rent reductions, which have been in place since 2016. There was no provision for raising historically low social rents by higher rates. The Government has said it “acknowledges the
concerns” of tenants about future rent rises. The proposal to allow annual rent increases was rejected by 87 per cent of tenants and tenant groups, who responded to the consultation. However, Ministers were under huge pressure to
allow social landlords to raise more money for building much needed new low-cost homes, mainly for rent. On the opposite side of the equation, they also wanted to limit increases in the welfare budget. Housing Minister Kit Malthouse said: “This
Government is committed to ensuring social housing remains fit for the future, with homes that tenants can be proud of and shovels in the ground to build even more. “The new rent deal will ensure that housing
associations and councils have the certainty they need to manage, maintain and build more social housing – providing tenants with high-quality homes and helping to restore the dream of homeownership for a new generation.”
• According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the benefit freeze between 2016 and 2020 will have affected more than 27 million people and swept 400,000 into poverty. It says if the Government lifted the freeze in April 2019 this would have helped almost all UK families with children, with working families who have children gaining the most. After three years of the freeze, people in poverty are on average £340 a year worse off than they would have been - equivalent to the average cost of food shopping for a low- income family for around eight weeks. Of the 200,000 people who have already been pulled into poverty in the first three years of the benefits freeze, around half of them children. The JRF estimate the cost of lifting the freeze in 2019 would be £1.4 billion - substantially less than the £2.79 billion cost in 2019/20 of raising the income tax personal allowance and higher rate threshold. More than £5 in every £6 of the money spent on these tax cuts benefits people already in the richest half of the country.
www.housingmmonline.co.uk | HMM April/May 2019 | 21
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