Less than ideal homes

Crisis and scandal are two of the most overused words in the reporter’s lexicon, but it’s hard to avoid both when looking at the current state of the country’s social and affordable housing. The bare facts of the matter are that we are desperately short of such homes, that many of the existing ones are in poor condition, that we are not building anything like enough new properties to meet demand, and even those we are building are far too often of sub-standard quality.

There are now around 1.8m households on council house waiting lists across England and Wales. The curve on the graph indicates that this figure will rise to more than two million households, representing five million people, by the end of 2011. This is already looking like a conservative estimate as the recession creates higher demand while further reducing supply.

In 1997 the incoming Labour Government set this year as the target date for the completion of its Decent Homes programme, a commitment to refurbish all the country’s social housing stock to make them ‘warm, weatherproof and to have reasonably modern facilities’. By ‘reasonably modern’ it meant bathrooms that were no more than 30 years old and kitchens no more than 20 years old, a fairly modest aim.

Substantial progress has been made but the target remains some way from being met. According to the National Audit Office (NAO) there were 1.6m poor quality social homes in 2001, 39% of the the total stock. By the end of 2009 that had fallen to 14% and the NAO estimates that only eight percent will be short of the standard by the end of this year. However, that still means that just over 300,000 families are continuing to live in properties that the NAO describes as being ‘not warm, weathertight or in a reasonable state of repair’. The programme has also cost roughly twice as much as originally anticipated. The government earmarked £19bn for the scheme back in 1997 but it’s forecast to hit £37bn by the end of next year.

Coping with cuts?

The NAO warns that the whole programme is now in danger of stalling. Unlike health, education and policing, housing has not been ringfenced from the public spending cuts that will be a stark fact of life over the next decade or so. ‘There are risks to both the programme’s completion and what has been achieved so far if a reliable funding mechanism is not put in place,’ says NAO head, Amyas Morse.

If we’re not hitting refurbishment targets, we appear to be even wider of the mark when it comes to the quality of new building. Last year, the government launched the Kickstart housing delivery programme, providing £1bn of public money to the Housing and Communities Agency (HCA) quango to resurrect developments that had been delayed or abandoned by the impact of the recession on the building industry.

To qualify for social housing grants, HCA developments have to score more than 12 from a 20-point design criteria established by another quango, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). But CABE was less than impressed by HCA’s developments. Of the 136 HCA housing schemes that CABE investigated, less than a third (32%) met the required standard while more than half (54%) scored under 10, which means that CABE classifies them as ‘poorly designed’. Incredibly, 27 of the projects (20%) scored five or less, and two managed only 1.5 points.

CABE’s 20 criteria are listed on its website. Read through them and you won’t find anything too onerous or pie-in-the-sky. They range from the development’s access to public transport, schools and shops to the building’s adaptabilty to conversion or extension. The fact that planning permission has been granted – and public funds made available – to schemes that satisfy only a quarter of these criteria simply takes the breath away, while the inadequacy of a development that scores only 1.5 injects new life into the not-fit-for-purpose cliché.

Despair at these figures is not helped by learning that they only became available last December when Building magazine obtained them through Freedom of Information legislation. Neither HCA nor CABE had any intention of placing them in the public domain. Transparency, it seems, is a buzzword, not a policy, when it comes to social housing.

Local authorities, which have to deal with the many problems caused by poor and insufficient social housing, have been stripped of most of their powers to do much about fixing it. They can’t exploit the security of their own bank balances to borrow money on the open markets to invest in high-quality house-building programmes, even with interest rates at record lows. They can’t even redirect what they take in rents to meet their own needs. The finance and decision-making capacity has been shifted upwards to central government, and outwards to the private sector. The results have been mixed, to say the least.