Feature
Social housing, the( broken) British way
Every new government promises to build tens or hundreds of thousands of social homes, yet every government leaves office with what can only be described as a pathetic record.
Campaigners will tell you the problem is market builders, and this excuse continues to be leapt on by politicians looking to avoid accountability. Few people are brave enough to say that the affordable housing model is the problem.
Housing First if you follow the discourse on social housing and homelessness it is likely you will come across the term‘ Housing First’, concept started in Finland which has trended worldwide. In the UK is it described as a way to tackle rough sleeping and homelessness, which sees funding used to deliver homes and schemes targeting those most in need of a roof. The reality of the Finnish scheme is very different.
When the HBA visited Finland, it had an opportunity to speak to a civil servant looking after this model. We discovered that most of the funding supports market housing with low interest rate mortgages. The Finnish government also pays for the delivery of affordable housing schemes but stimulates institutional investment in these homes by providing low interest lending to anyone building them.
However, as an extra carrot, after 25 years it permits them to be turned into market properties and should a property not be taken up after a period of six months, the investor can also apply for market home status.
Where many of these homes have been delivered in the last decade there has been an increase in applications to revert them to market properties. This has been confined to smaller cities and towns, rather than major urban conurbations where population growth continues.
We took an opportunity to ask whether Finland forces the market to deliver affordable homes on market sites and were told that this would gut the house building industry and so not a route that it would pursue.
The market delivery model is not one other nations pursue, unless there is joint investment. For example, in Austria where market and affordable houses are delivered together, the state( local) either provides funding or discounted / free land.
It’ s about supply!
At the heart of every successful affordable housing programme is the understanding if you want affordable homes, your first port of call is to ensure there are enough homes.‘ Housing first’ is underpinned by the understanding that to solve housing problems, enough homes are first required. In the UK,‘ housing first’ means providing enough housing for targeted groups and ignores the broader supply challenge.
The UK has evidence of this failed understanding as a‘ housing first’ pilot was undertaken in 2022, with a post pilot report concluding that a lack of housing supply was a reason for underperformance.
Sadly, the report was not brave enough to identify that affordable housing by market mechanism embeds affordable housing supply failure, permits national government to blame local governments for underdelivery and local governments to blame house builders for profiteering and using every trick in the book to avoid delivering affordable housing.
There is of course a discussion which
could be had about how these affordable homes come forward when promised by land owners and not housebuilders but this would be best left to a different piece.
Ironically the UK has experience of affordable housing success, as the 1919 Housing Act required LPAs to deliver social homes and should they fail, county councils or other bodies would deliver for them.
Build, baby build!
The solution to delivering more social and affordable homes is simple. It is to build them. And those building them should be government, registered providers, charities, specialist accommodation providers and institutional investors.
This fundamental reality to solve part of our housing crisis would not sit well with campaigners who know that bashing house builders attracts donations. Affordable housing providers which access government funding and discounted homes on developments. And politicians, who follow the‘ Turkeys not voting for Christmas’ survival technique.
The British affordable housing experiment must end, not just so that we deliver enough affordable homes but that we stop gutting the house building industry. It is time that those claiming to care about affordable housing put policy before performance. Rico Wojtulewicz, NFB Director of Policy and Market Insight
60 www. britbuild-magazine. co. uk