ROOF Blog

The National Audit Office (NAO) has expressed concerns over the strength of the information collected on Decent Homes progress. It is estimated that over a million social homes have been improved by CLG’s Decent Homes Programme. The original target was that all social sector homes would be decent by 2010, but by November 2009, CLG was estimating that approximately 92 per cent of social housing would meet the standard by 2010, leaving 305,000 properties ‘non-decent’. 100 per cent decency would not be achieved until 2018-19.

The government risks repeating the mistakes of the postwar housing boom by wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on funding ‘grotty’ new homes, say MPs. The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), which has an annual investment budget of more than £5bn, has admitted that 27 of the private-sector projects it has bailed out scored five or less out of 20 on the industry’s Building for Life benchmark, with two scoring just 1.5. Homes failed on a range of basic measures, including poor space standards and over-reliance on single-aspect dwellings; inflexibility; low sustainability standards; and poor compatibility with neighbouring properties.