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Dear Mr Sunak, what about the Community Housing Fund?
The Budget lacked a major announcement which is critical to the future of housing supply. Sue Bird asks: where is the Community Housing Fund?
At the Lowfield Green Housing Co-operative, we watched last week’s Budget with bated breath. Like many community housing groups up and down the country, the big question we were all asking was: would the chancellor announce an extension to the Community Housing Fund (CHF).
The CHF has been hugely important for stimulating new community-led housing schemes over the past four years. With over 16,600 new community-led homes in the pipeline, for us, and many schemes like us, the CHF will be vital to take our project forward.
“Failing to renew the scheme at this point would be a huge waste of the money that the government has already spent”
We were very hopeful about an announcement as the Conservatives made it’s renewal a manifesto pledge. You can then imagine our disappointment when the chancellor remained silent on the future of the fund.
Our development at Lowfield Green in York, a former school site and now mixed development, is going to deliver 19 forever affordable homes for local people. We need capital funding from this grant programme in order to achieve our affordability targets.
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This funding will mean that every member of our community, some who have volunteered for several years to develop the plans, can access affordable homes – demonstrating that living in supportive and sustainable communities can be accessible to people on all incomes.
Failing to renew the scheme at this point would be a huge waste of the money that the government has already spent. The CHF has already given us a much smaller grant to help us develop our plans and get planning permission. All that money will have been wasted if we do not go on to build the houses as we’ve planned.
The National Community Land Trust (CLT) Network estimates that there are 900 groups across England aiming to bring forward a pipeline of 23,000 community-led, desperately needed affordable homes. Failing to support these groups would risk this supply of affordable housing and fail to unlock the additional investment they would create.
Take our project for example: YorSpace is the CLT that will own the land at Lowfield Green. The residents’ co-op will lease the land for the long term from YorSpace and build the houses on it. The CLT keeps the land as a community asset in perpetuity and the co-op ensures that the homes are kept out of the open market and affordable forever.
We’ve recently been successful in generating over £422,000 of investment through our community share offer, in order to finalise our plans and buy the land. We have land, planning permission, investment and lots of local support. We are, you could say, oven ready. However without an extension to the fund, this investment and the homes it would bring forward look like they could be lost.
Our group is far from alone. The government has already committed a significant amount in funding to pay out for dozens of groups across the country to develop plans and achieve planning permission, only for the capital funding to not be in place to actually build the affordable homes our country desperately needs. Failing to renew the fund at this point risks wasting these groups’ time, labour and ambitions, alongside the government funding committed to get them to this point.
We have been waiting for more than 12 months for the announcement of the extension that we have been consistently reassured ‘is coming’. We now urgently need certainty and for the government to back the Community Housing Fund.
Sue Bird, potential resident and co-founder, Yorspace