18 THE SOCIAL NETWORK REALITY CHECK Patrick Mooney
Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing Management & Maintenance magazine, interrogates Labour’s plan for growing the supply of new housing, and asks ‘how realistic is it?’
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ince winning the general election Labour has embarked on an ambitious series of policy announcements designed to show how different they are from their predecessors. This eventually manifested itself in the King’s Speech which outlined the new Government’s legislation programme, packed full of Bills to deliver economic growth.
But on delivering new housing they appear to have a near identical target – so what are their chances of success? Remember the Conservatives had a target of delivering 300,000 new homes a year by the middle of this decade. Labour has set itself a target of achieving 1.5 million homes over the course of fi ve years, which even I can work out amounts to much the same overall fi gure. As a country we haven’t gotten close to achieving anything like 300,000 new homes a year recently (the last time we did was in 1977) and the list of reasons for that is quite lengthy.
The main problems were a disjointed planning framework, a fractured economy which drove mortgage rates out of the reach for many prospective buyers and drove a number of our biggest modular housebuilders out of business. In fact it is a wonder that we still managed to build 234,000 homes last year, albeit that fi gure includes conversions.
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NOT ENOUGH HOUSING
Homelessness, evictions, disrepair and overcrowding have all risen sharply in recent years, the private rental market is showing signs of stress while affordability for all tenure types has gotten steadily worse. Perhaps most worrying of all though has been the sharp decline in the building of new homes for social rent, with rents set at roughly 50 to 60% of market rent.
In each of the last 10 years fewer than 10,000 social rent homes have been constructed. Of the 522,335 affordable homes built in the past decade, some 260,000 (49%) were for affordable rent and 127,214 were for shared ownership, while only 76,925 (14%) were for social rent.
The situation which Labour has inherited could hardly be any worse. But Labour has spent a long time in opposition in which to develop its plans and there is a huge appetite for change across the housing sector and it seems the whole country.
The speed of delivering these new homes will be hugely important, as we don’t want the programme back loaded to the end
of a fi ve year period. Reintroducing mandatory local targets and recruiting hundreds more planning offi cers (but from where?) will undoubtedly help, but much
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