22 COMMENT


THE NEW HOUSING SECRETARY’S CATCH 22


Patrick Mooney


Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance magazine, discusses the Government’s ‘transitioning’ housing policies.


T


he Government has sensibly accepted that its long-standing commitment to build 300,000 new homes each year by the mid 2020s is not going to be met – Michael Gove (before being replaced by Greg Clark) tried to refocus attention away from numbers and targets.


But of course the need for more housing still exists, with over one million people on local authority waiting lists, hundreds of thousands of people living in wholly inadequate temporary accommodation and the private rented sector now houses a record number of families.


Indeed the scale of the problem is refl ected in recent polling by Ipsos which found that seven in 10 people agree there is a housing crisis in Britain, with the percentage who think there is also a crisis in their local area having risen from 39% to 49% in the past two years. This change is also refl ected in the fact that only 22% now oppose more local housebuilding, down from 27% two years ago. Support for more housebuilding increases if the new homes are to be affordable and designed to look right in their surroundings.


PEOPLE ARE PREPARED TO SEE MORE HOUSING BUILT IN THEIR BACK YARD, IF NEW HOUSING IS GENUINELY AFFORDABLE


WWW.HBDONLINE.CO.UK


PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS The above fi nding suggests that the cult of NIMBYism may be rapidly receding, even if it is not entirely dead. People are prepared to see more housing built in their back yard, particularly if measures are taken to ensure the new housing is genuinely affordable. But it also has to look good and be in keeping with the locality to get their support. Over half of the adults who responded to the Ipsos survey (taken in May for the New Statesman) agreed that unless more homes are built in Britain, then the country’s housing problems will never be solved. They also agreed that building more homes was preferable to encouraging older people to move out of their larger homes, in favour of bigger families with a greater housing need.


The pressures for more affordable housing were acknowledged by Michael Gove before he was fi red by the  when he said eve reached a situation where the availability of social housing is simply inadequate for any notion of social ustice or economic effi ciency. hich is why the overnments proposal to extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants appears to be odd, and counter- intuitive. Given the desperate need for more genuinely affordable rental housing, surely the priority should be on reversing the long-term net loss of social housing, not in adding to it. But that would be ignoring the political machinations at work whereby increasing levels of home ownership are usually associated with long term support for the Conservative Party. Messrs Johnson and Gove were pursuing a political agenda, rather than looing to resolve the housing crisis identifi ed in the Ipsos polling.


AN IMPRACTICAL REMEDY


Delivering an extension to the Right to Buy might be more diffi cult though as it appears


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