ROOF Blog

Details of Gordon Brown’s plan to boost social housing were revealed in the House of Commons yesterday. He announced he would pump £2.1 billion into building affordable housing, including an extra 20,000 homes to be built in the next two years on top of the 90,000 already in the pipeline. He said he would triple the £600 million announced in the Budget to cover new council and housing association homes – with half the extra £1.5 billion coming from the Communities and Local Government budget and the other half redirected from other government departments including transport, health and schools.

The needs of vulnerable people will be protected in the Tenant Services Authority (TSA) regulatory framework. Speaking at the national sheltered and supported housing congress, head of the TSA Peter March said that coordination between tenant, landlords and their stakeholders is key to ensuring vulnerable tenants get the best service possible. The TSA consulted with more than 27,000 tenants to develop the standards which will apply to all social landlords from April 2010.

A report looking at how asbestos is managed and removed from people’s homes has revealed major differences in how local authorities and registered social landlords notify tenants of the likely risks. The report, from construction union UCATT, recommends that all social landlords maintain an asbestos register of properties, and conduct up-to-date house surveys.

Latest figures show that the housing market continues to struggle, with the number of new homes built falling to just 18,349 in the first three months of the year and mortgage lending slumping to £10.4 billion. Communities and Local Government said the number of housing starts was up 13 per cent on the previous quarter, but was 44 per cent lower than the March quarter 2008. Starts by registered social landlords rose by 5 per cent compared with the same period last year. 

Meanwhile mortgage lending was 9 per cent down on the previous month, and 60 per cent lower in year on year figures. The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) director general Michael Coogan said that it was still too early to spot a clear pattern of recovery in the housing market. Buy to let lending also fell for the sixth consecutive quarter in the first quarter of the year, accounting for just 6 per cent of gross mortgage lending. This is down 50 per cent from the same time a year earlier. CML said the number of loans in arrears of three of more months was up from 2.30 per cent to 3.09 per cent.

Tenants First has outlined proposals for a public housing strategy to meet the housing crisis. It calls for the establishment of a £3 billion fund to be used for a ten-year regeneration programme that will include the setting up a board of representatives from government, tenants and those marginalised or excluded from housing. Tenants First said this type of approach guarantees that a proportion of the state resources being handed over to the banking sector will be directed back to social purposes.

The law has been changed so that no more tolerated trespassers can be created and all existing tolerated trespassers will be given a new tenancy. Before the amendments to the Housing and Regeneration Act and the successor landlord order came into force yesterday thousands of council tenants had lost their housing rights, even if they complied with any conditions imposed by the courts. Though they continued living in their property they could not require their landlord to carry out repairs, exercise their right to buy, or ensure a spouse or family member could succeed to the tenancy if they died.

The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) has published guidance on how social landlords can bid for part of the additional £84 million funding package to cover cavity wall insulation. The scheme aims to cover the properties which would not normally have been filled under the decent homes programme because they were hard to treat, and expects to deliver on 130,000 homes across the country during the next two years.

Communities secretary Hazel Blears launched a strategy to improve design standards in new public buildings. She said that badly designed estates and low quality neighbourhoods ‘encourage crime, undermine communities, deter investment, spoil the environment and cost a fortune in the long term’. She added that good design was not a luxury that can be dropped during economic difficulties, and the government urged councils, social housing providers and developers to put good planning, local character and high quality design at the heart of development.

Housing association tenants are furious with rent increases far above the current rate of inflation, with many considering rent strikes, and others lobbying their MPs. Since the beginning of April, hundreds of thousands of tenants faced increased rents of at least 5 per cent, based on a formula of the retail prices index, plus 0.5 per cent. There are about 2.3 million housing association tenants in the UK, a figure that has risen sharply in recent years as many traditional council tenants have voted to change their tenure. The government has promised that by 2012 all social housing rents and service charges will be roughly similar for council and housing association tenants in similar areas.

More than 40 per cent of social tenants or their families have been hit by antisocial behaviour during the past two years, according to a YouGov poll. Council and housing association tenants are much more likely than private homeowners to suffer from antisocial behaviour, and more social tenants than owner occupiers believe that the level of behaviour has become worse in their area over the same period. Just 17 per cent of those questioned had confidence in their council or social landlord to tackle the problem, and almost two-thirds expect the problem to increase as a result of the downturn.