28 COMMENT
sold properties on a like-for-like basis have never been delivered and many of the sold properties have ended up in the hands of private landlords, who are now letting them out at considerably higher rents in the private rented sector. It is estimated that as few as one in seven RTB sales has resulted in a new property being provided by a social landlord and many of these new homes are let at the higher ‘affordable rents’, rather than on social rents. Looking forward to the end of the decade, it is being forecast that nearly another , social homes will be sold and not replaced, as councils continue to be starved of the resources needed to build replacement housing. A report from Savills for the Local Government Association, Association of etained ouncil ousing A and National Federation of ALMOs, estimates that , homes are likely to be sold through the scheme by , with ust , of them being replaced. The analysis warns that there will be no region of the country or local authority with the capability to provide one-for-one replacements of homes sold under RTB over this period.
he sie of the discounts available to tenants purchasing their homes were increased in April , and as a result the average discount has increased by to nearly , in . At the same time, this has led to a quadrupling in the number of RTB sales. With RTB discounts set to increase by a further . from April this year, in line with last September’s rate of infl ation, the A says it will become even harder for councils to deliver replacement properties.
CLEARING THE SOCIAL HOUSING SHORTAGE
confl icting views on it. ut since when council tenants were fi rst given a legal right to buy their home with the benefi t of a large cash discount at least . million council homes have been sold. ack in , social landlords managed to build , new social homes, which makes the new build fi gure of , look so paltry. In fact since construction rates of social homes have progressively tumbled.
The number of properties sold through the RTB is not itself a problem. The current crisis lies in the fact that political commitments to replace the
The current problem has been neatly summarised by Polly Neate, chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, who said e are fi rmly in the red when it comes to social housing. We lose far more homes than we build every year and the losses are mounting up.” She continued: “The social housing
defi cit is at the heart of the housing emergency. The fundamental lack of genuinely affordable homes has pushed millions of people into insecure, expensive and often discriminatory private renting. It is why we have over a million households waiting for a decent social home, and thousands of homeless
children are growing up in temporary accommodation.”
“The solution is simple: build more social housing. The Government can’t afford to allow this decline to stretch into another decade if it has any hopes of meaningfully levelling up. Instead, it must invest in a new generation of the homes we really need – secure, genuinely social housing.”
The need for action is underlined by the revelation that more than half of nglands housing associations have recently reduced their house building plans, due to a combination of economic uncertainty and the soaring cost of building new housing. he fi gure was revealed in the
Regulator of Social Housing’s latest uarterly fi nancial review of the sector. This showed the sector is forecasting .bn in development spend over the next months, down from its previous forecast of .bn.
It means forecast development expenditure is at its lowest level for two years, which the regulator said refl ects the ongoing challenges in the sector and economic uncertainty going forward”. The cost of retrofi tting energy effi ciency and fi re safety into existing properties, as well as higher costs in both day to day and planned maintenance is putting a huge strain on social landlords’ budgets. One possible solution might be for the Government to allow councils and housing associations to convert tens of thousands of existing affordable rents to social rents, but that would require an enormous amount of investment into subsidising rents which politicians would probably prefer to see going into building new homes.
Another possibility would be to follow the example of the Scottish and Welsh Governments in ending the Right to Buy in their countries, but that does not appear to appeal to political leaders in Westminster.
In the absence of other solutions the most obvious action would therefore appear to be pushing ahead with investment in building homes for social rent and at a scale big enough to make a real difference.
This has been achieved in the past, but
signifi cantly it reuired house building to be a national priority and for councils to be heavily involved in their delivery and construction. Will today’s politicians be as brave as their predecessors in tackling this issue head on?
ONE POSSIBLE SOLUTION MIGHT BE FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO ALLOW COUNCILS AND HOUSING ASSOCIATIONS TO CONVERT TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EXISTING AFFORDABLE RENTS TO SOCIAL RENTS
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