……..Support Almshouses – Community-led, Truly Affordable Housing For Your Community……
Is Boris’s new white paper, “Planning for the Future”, good news for those needing affordable homes?
In sentiment, it looks good. Who could argue with a paper that starts off aligning its spirit with the great housing philanthropist George Cadbury? But, like a proverbial curates cream egg, it may be good in parts but there is more than one layer to this and the devil may lurk in the sugar coated detail.
The Government’s mission is presented as the solution to the country’s housing crisis. But this terminology has always been, in my view, a misnomer. The real crisis is one of affordability, not just availability. There seems to be no lack of 4 bedroom executive homes being built, however, for young families and single people living in substandard housing at ever increasing rents, there is a crisis. Roughly, 90% of those on lower incomes find that housing benefit does not cover their rent. While an estimated 8.4 million people in England are living in an unaffordable, insecure or unsuitable home, according to the National Housing Federation *. This is unsustainable.
So the good first. There
is an ambition that most developers will pay something towards the affordable
housing provision locally. This paper asks for a national, clear and
unambiguous policy. It points to an uncertain and inconsistent implementation
of section 106, a levy on developers to provide a percentage of housing onsite
or negotiate a fee to the council for the provision of affordable homes.
Certainly the current Section 106 agreement process needs reviewing, for example, it could work more effectively if properly applied and standardised and not negotiated and haggled down by the best lawyers. Also, it does not properly prioritise community housing and truly affordable housing, with the current wording suggesting the best beneficiaries are housing associations, not locally led and accountable community housing charities such as almshouses.
The new paper wants a
standard levy across the country, but with the potential for regional
variations. Does that sound familiar? I wonder what the difference would be in
practice.
What we need is a simple
levy set for affordable housing on new development by commercial developers. If
its 20% then let it be 20% from Ipswich to Islington. Let’s make sure that
almshouses, as the truly affordable form of community-led housing, are recognised
as a priority beneficiary, if not we would like to see almshouse charities
being offered the opportunity on all sites where the levy is applied. Let’s make
sure that no almshouse charity is charged the affordable housing levy (I know
how mad that sounds but some local authorities have tried!)
There are definitely some good
elements of the paper around protecting Greenbelt, AONB and focusing
development on brown field sites and I don’t want to detract from that. Overall,
the White Paper has some good intentions but in places is contradictory or, at
least, appears so.
We would like to see:
– All almshouse charities exempt from the new Infrastructure Levy just as they are from the current Community Infrastructure Levy.
– All almshouse charities to be able to apply for affordable homes benefits or partnerships on a level playing field with other affordable housing providers.
– Community led housing supported on small scale sites as a preferred option to large corporate style housing associations.
* Affordable housing stats from – Statistica and ONS
Posted 19 August 2020