Housing and planning minister Gavin Barwell has signalled a small but perceptible change in government policy towards social housing, with an admission that affordable, sub-market renting is vital to help solve the country’s housing crisis.
At the annual conference of the National Housing Federation, which represents social housing providers, Barwell, appointed housing minister by Theresa May in July, admitted that having fewer homes for sub-market rent has increased the amount of housing benefit being paid to those renting privately.
He said the housing crisis was not just a problem for those who want to own their own home, but had consequences for everyone. “If more and more people can’t get on the housing ladder, competition for tenancies in the private and social rented sectors will become more and more intense,” he said. “Rents will continue to increase and more working people will need help from housing benefit to pay their bills.”
Barwell said the government remained committed to helping people on to the housing ladder, but also wanted to “maximise” the number of affordable homes. “We need more homes for sale, we need more homes for private rent, and we need more sub-market homes for rent.”
Last week, the government announced changes to its proposals on housing benefit, including deferring a cap on housing benefits for social housing tenants and exemptions for people living in hostels and refuges, and a new funding formula for supported housing to be introduced by 2019/20.
The implications are still unclear for many providers of sheltered and supported housing, as Jane Ashcroft, chief executive of Anchor, one of the country’s biggest providers of sheltered housing for older people, pointed out earlier this week, and many senior leaders in the sector at the conference also expressed concern about slow decision-making at the heart of government. Little detail is now expected until the new chancellor’s autumn statement in November.
Addressing the divisions within the social housing sector over the controversial deal with the government last year to extend right-to-buy to social housing tenants, Barwell said he wanted to reject “the false choices” that he said had mired the housing debate for years. He said the proposals, put to last year’s conference by Greg Clark, secretary of state for communities and local government, had shown that the government and social housing providers had been able to find “common cause” quickly and he rejected the idea that the housing market should be about conflict between public and private housing, or pit renters v buyers. “You’ve shown this doesn’t need to be the case,” he said.
Barwell told housing associations that he wanted them to build more than one-to-one replacements for homes sold off under the right-to-buy deal that now includes social housing. But his speech came on the same day as the latest figures revealed that the number of new homes created under the revived right-to-buy scheme is nowhere near the amount needed to cover the existing one for one pledge.
The National Audit Office said five times as many new homes need to be built just to keep pace with homes sold in 2014/15 and data from the Department for Communities and Local Government show that the number of new homes started or acquired by councils in England between April and June this year fell by 41% on the previous quarter. Just 422 new homes were either begun or acquired, down from 715 in the previous quarter. In the same quarter, there were 3,362 right-to-buy sales – a slight increase on 3,276.
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