20 COMMENT
Councillor David Renard, the LGA’s housing spokesperson said: “Councils are committed to working with Government and developers to build the housing the country needs.
“It is good the number of homes built each year is increasing. But by giving councils the right powers to incentivise developers to get building once planning permission has been granted, we can go further and faster. Councils are granting permission for hundreds of thousands of homes but families who desperately need housing cannot live in a planning permission.”
Councils are in many instances desperate to increase their own housing stock and reverse the trends of the past decade where as a result of Right to Buy sales and transfers to housing associations, their total stock of housing has fallen by 11 per cent to 1.58 million properties in 2019/20. In contrast, housing associations have increased their stock numbers by 18 per cent during the same period to 2.58 million in 2019/20. In total, since 2008 the social housing stock has been increasing each year and now stands at 4.17 million houses and flats.
But because people are staying in their council or HA home for longer periods (they have more secure tenancies than
private rentals as well as lower rents), fewer of these low-cost homes are becoming available each year and this is putting greater stress on the waiting lists and extending the time it takes to provide homes to those in need.
NOT A NUMBERS GAME
There were only 306,000 new social housing lettings in 2019/20, a decrease of 2.5 per cent on the previous year and a whopping 23 per cent fall from the peak of 396,000 new social housing lettings in 2013/14. This is forcing councils to turn increasingly to the private rented sector for solutions to the chronic under-supply of affordable housing. However, it is usually a less popular option because the standard of accommodation available at lower, affordable prices is variable at best and unsafe at its worst.
It is estimated that up to 400,000 tenants have racked up huge rent arrears during the past year as a result of strained incomes during the various lockdowns and many thousands of tenants are at high risk of being evicted.
The ban on evictions was extended several times during the Coronavirus pandemic, but it ended on 31 May, and it is feared that tens of thousands of tenants (maybe even hundreds of thousands) will
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be evicted. Many of them will then apply to join the council waiting list, pushing the combined lists well above the 1.15 million figure.
Giving approval to councils to build thousands more low-cost homes now will not create an overnight solution to the impending evictions crisis. But the Government could make help available through discretionary payments for those tenants in arrears, deferring the need for landlords to repossess their properties. Proactive help to ward off huge
numbers of evictions would save the Treasury a small fortune in paying for bed & breakfast, and it could also be seen as a better investment than the more than a billion pounds spent on the stamp duty holiday extended to home buyers in recent months.
This is actually a much more important social and economic issue than the ongoing tit-for-tat between the LGA and the HBF. Let's hope that Ministers make the right calls, but looking forward it would not harm to respond positively to some of the LGA’s requests and give councils the tools to build 90,000 new homes a year, so they can bridge the gap between current targets and levels of supply. Surely that would be a win-win and satisfy both the LGA and the HBF.
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