22 COMMENT Patrick Mooney


IS THERE A READY-MADE SOLUTION TO THE HOUSING CRISIS?


Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance magazine explains how the problem of how and where to build more aff ordable housing might have a ready-made solution.


H


ow on earth are housing associations and councils going to fi nd the money required to build the tens of thousands of affordable new homes desperately needed in local communities up and down the country at the moment. After all it’s not the sort of bill that can be sorted by making a lucky discovery of some long lost loose change down the back of the sofa, nor what might be found on the mythical money tree


THE LIST OF PRIORITIES FOR SPENDING ON OUR EXISTING RENTAL STOCK IS GETTING LONGER AND LONGER


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Indeed the demand for houses and  ats which can be let at social rents is growing exponentially at the moment, with more than 1.3 million households on council waiting lists across the country and 270,000 households spending the festive period in temporary accommodation, including bed  breakfast hotels. At the same time the list of priorities for spending money on the existing stock of rental housing is getting longer and longer. Decarbonisation works, the retrofi tting of energy effi ciency features, tackling the huge problem of mould and damp, improving the safety of buildings, as well as bringing all properties up to the decent homes standard all adds up to a multi-billion pounds shopping list. The annual bill will dwarf the record 6.5bn spent by housing associations on planned maintenance and capitalised repairs in 2021/22 alone.


The capping of the annual rent increase in April at a maximum of 7% creates a huge additional problem for would-be developers across the social housing sector. The rent rise will stretch the fi nances of many tenants (probably resulting in a sieable increase in rent arrears), but it is well below the current rate of in ation and will in all likelihood result in the increased use of reserves (where these exist) and extra borrowing (where this can


be arranged).


The credit rating agency SP is already issuing warnings that the rent cap will be harmful for the sector’s fi nancial standing and make new loans both more diffi cult to obtain and more expensive, in terms of the interest being charged.


And as if that was not bad enough the Housing Secretary has increased the pressure on social landlords by warning them that fi nancial support (such as development loans and grants) will be withdrawn where they have breached the Regulator of Housing’s consumer standards until they can prove they are a responsible landlord. Rochdale Boroughwide Housing was the fi rst social housing landlord to be sanctioned, losing 1m of funding for new homes.


NATIONAL TARGET AXED


The next big issue to be factored in (and it is a genuinely big problem) is the overnment’s decision to drop its mandatory target of building 300,000 new homes a year, which is seeing scores of local authorities revisit and revise their local housebuilding targets, invariably downwards. Finding suitable and affordable sites for new housing development will get more diffi cult. At the same Michael ove also announced that councils would no longer have to plan for 20% more houses than their locality needs (to compensate for delays with designated sites) and those authorities with up-to-date plans would no longer have to maintain enough land supply for the next fi ve years of housing need. Planning experts are forecasting that these changes are likely to result in at least 100,000 new homes not being built over the next three to fi ve years. The economic and social cost of this scale of reduction could be immense, with


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