COMMENT 13 THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Patrick Mooney, news editor of Housing Management & Maintenance
CAN COUNCILS DELIVER ON THE QUALITY AS WELL AS THE NUMBERS?
Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing Management & Maintenance, discusses the barriers to councils upping their game in terms of housing quality as well as output.
he importance of getting local authorities building tens of thousands of new council homes has been amply demonstrated by the large-scale cuts made to housing association development programmes in recent weeks.
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It is also revealed in the growing figures of those in temporary accommodation (an estimated 84,740 households) and on housing waiting lists (up to two million) across the country. The numbers in temporary accommodation, such as bed and breakfast hotels, includes 126,020 children – a rise of 28 per cent in the last four years.
A HUGE TEST WILL BE WHETHER MMC CAN DELIVER THE SORT OF QUALITIES THAT SAW GOLDSMITH STREET WIN THE STIRLING PRIZE
Councils in England built just 2,550 homes last year – their highest total since 1992/93 – but clearly an inadequate number, when compared to the demands on their resources and housing services.
Now councils are hoping to up their game massively, with plans for building up to 80,000 new homes over the next five years being assembled. The drag or disincentive of only being able to replace a quarter of homes sold under Right to Buy continues to undermine these ambitious plans.
And in the dash to house thousands more people in need, councils are desperate to not repeat the mistakes of earlier decades when some of the housing built en masse, quickly became unpopular and is often derided as ‘sink estates’, littered with ‘difficult to let’ empty properties.
AWARD-WINNING DESIGN
Instead they are hoping to replicate the shining example set by Goldsmith Street in Norwich, a new council housing estate that is winning a host of design awards and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece.
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Other councils with house building plans, such as York, have already been to East Anglia to see the award-winning development and no doubt they will be trying to reproduce similar designs in their own environments. But not everybody will be able to do this and given the ambitions to build tens of thousands of homes, it is highly likely that Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) will need to contribute a significant number of the new council homes.
Interestingly the new Housing Minister Esther McVey has said she would like Britain to become a world leader in MMC. We are currently a good few years behind Germany in this respect, but it’s helpful to have an aspira- tional target to aim for. The test of the ambition will be whether the Government backs this up with the resources necessary to become a world leader.
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