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Dispatches from Housing 2024: day one
A daily round-up of the most important headlines from day one of the Housing 2024 conference. Photography by Guzelian
It’s that time of year again, folks. The housing sector has descended on Manchester for the Housing 2024 conference, and back to guide you through the highlights is your friendly neighbourhood dispatches.
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With the election at the forefront of many attendees’ minds this year, on the first day of the conference, Sir Keir Starmer set out the Labour Party’s plans for housing in Britain, in an Inside Housing exclusive.
Elsewhere, a number of regional mayors set out some ambitious plans for the sector. There was also talk of capping service charges within the planning system, and lively debates on health, mergers and football.
Here is our round-up of what was discussed on Tuesday.
Regional mayors talk of devolution and retrofit
Master of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham was a fitting figure to kick off the conference on Tuesday morning. His speech was concerned with ways a potential Labour government could speed up housebuilding without spending lots more money.
The metro mayor suggested that the next government could transfer train stations to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) so housing can be built around them.
“Devolve train stations to us,” he stated. “Train stations have got land around them where you can build around them, build on top of them. They’re great places to build, because you’re building for public transport, not for cars.”
Mr Burnham, who was re-elected as mayor of Greater Manchester in May, said he supported planning reform to boost housing supply, but cautioned that it “doesn’t necessarily deliver massive wins very quickly”.
“One policy that I think could do that,” he continued, is if the Treasury agreed to release public land without “always getting full market value for it”.
He added that there is “loads of land” in Greater Manchester owned by the NHS, Network Rail and the Department for Work and Pensions, yet “the departments don’t sell it” or if they do, they demand too high a price that affects viability.
“If you really want to get going on housing, it means changing some of that thinking,” Mr Burnham stated.
Later in the day, West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin pledged to retrofit all 650,000 homes in the county by 2038.
The Labour mayor, who was re-elected in May, said: “It is going to be difficult, but we are going to help.
“We’ve run a number of pilots, we’ve had 3,500 homes retrofitted across West Yorkshire. And the cost of not doing it is greater than the cost of doing it.”
“I really am grateful for the changes Homes England have made in the fact that we can now look at the housing stock that we have already,” she added.
Ms Brabin also reiterated her pledge to deliver 5,000 new affordable homes over the next four years in a mix of tenures.
The metro mayor was scathing about the nation’s homelessness crisis. “The billions wasted on temporary accommodation, thousands of families stuck in low quality bed and breakfasts or hotels, we all accept is absolutely a waste of money,” she said.
Ms Brabin added: “In West Yorkshire we have 12,000 homeless households, 85,000 people on the waiting list for housing and over 1,000 in temporary accommodation, 500 of those have children.
“That should shame us all.”
Service charges and Section 106
During the ‘Exit 106: but what next?’ panel session, experts debated why some housing associations were stepping back from Section 106 agreements.
Amy Shaw, partner at Trowers & Hamlins law firm, said that social landlords were increasingly concerned about taking on Section 106 homes with high service charges that they would struggle to pass on to residents.
Often with Section 106, she said, “the mixed communities can produce very high service charges, which the registered providers can’t pass on to their residents”.
This was creating a “huge affordability and viability challenge”.
Ms Shaw added: “So I’ve heard requests from the affordable sector to look at service charge capping within the planning system, so that the affordable [homes] are subject to some kind of service charge cap.
“You can’t do that within the landlord and tenant legislation – it’s not allowed – but we could look at it through planning.”
Fellow panellist Helen Town, group director of property and partnerships at Watford Community Housing, said: “We’ve had a few schemes over the last year where we’ve had housing associations that have pulled out very late in the day on a Section 106 deal, and we’ve come in.
“Actually, that’s been a bit of an opportunity for us, because we’ve come in right at the end so we haven’t had the cost of carrying all that money over that time. We’ve got a scheme that’s good to go.”
To merge or not to merge
During a session on learning from mistakes of the past, Charmaine Simei, chief executive of small housing association Tuntum, reiterated what she told Inside Housing previously about mergers: they are not the solution to the sector’s woes.
“When I say it’s the solution, I mean it’s not routinely the answer to the dilemma. If we had a room full of customers here who had gone through literally the experience of merged organisations, I’d be interested in what they have to say.
“But I’m not convinced their satisfaction levels would have gone up,” she said.
She added: “I’m just concerned that the unintended consequences of some of the financial constraints that we have at the moment – the regulatory cost pressures brought forward by some regulation – could result in further and further mergers, and I think that’s going to take us further away from that customer satisfaction point and that consumer experience.”
Ms Simei likened the idea of all landlords, despite their size, being community-based to greenwashing or “community-washing”. “I just don’t believe it,” she stated.
Katie Davies, managing director of Buena and former chief executive of Notting Hill Genesis, disagreed. She said the cost of managing and governance for each association is “really quite comparable”.
She added: “There’s a large cost of having all that management and all of that governance there. There is also having all different IT systems, all different HR departments, or all different finance departments. It’s actually very, very inefficient.
“It’s one reason why we have really big supermarkets like Asda and Tesco. And, of course, we still have corner shops because each community does need some sort of out-of-hours stock available, but it isn’t always the cheapest or freshest, and if you can you go to a bigger supermarket.
“And I think it’s because we don’t have genuine competition in the sector. And companies, housing associations in particular, can carry on existing even when they’re not really very good. They wait until the regulator closes them down. They’re not likely to run out of money or become bankrupt as if they were a private business.
“It doesn’t feel like a very healthy marketplace. I don’t think it particularly benefits tenants that there were loads and loads of housing associations. It’s not like loads and loads of choice, because there isn’t really choice in that system.
“So I personally think it would be better if we could really have some very large housing associations that could run a purely commercial model.”
Ms Davies said those organisations could have “really good technology, really excellent managers, really good quality homes”.
She added: “Unfortunately one of the reasons some small housing associations have been merged forcibly recently is because they haven’t had enough money to invest in their homes.
“And that is the way that some of these mergers are beginning to happen because the assets and liabilities just don’t add up. Generally I would support mergers, but I think the way it’s done leaves a lot to the desired.”
Nervousness on MMC
The run of big failures in modern methods of construction (MMC) continued to prompt debate at a session on practical updates on the sector for housing associations.
Katie Gilmartin, head of business development and innovation at Platform Housing Group, said boards “hear MMC and nervousness creeps in”.
She referenced the Future Homes Standard as a “green light for MMC”, but said the mood in the sector had experienced a “slight deflation” overall.
Paul Mullane, director of development and Sales at Halton Housing, said house builders have already adapted to supply chain issues and skills shortages.
He added: “As social housing providers, we’ve been sitting on the beach looking at the fish flapping on the sand. The private house builders have been moving to the hills.”
As clients, housing providers “need to get better at understanding the risk” after the sector had been “lazy” for years, Mr Mullane said.
Looking to the pledges made in election manifestos for delivering new homes, Tony Woods, technical manager, construction and sustainability at Procurement for Housing, pointed out that building 300,000 houses would “be the equivalent of four Barratts” entering the sector.
“Where are they coming from?” he asked.
No more political football
How planners, developers and landlords can work to create sustainable communities was the subject of the opening plenary on the Future of Living stage.
Panel chair Sarah Walker-Smith, chief executive of Shakespeare Martineau, began by describing how lucky she had been to live in “brilliant” social housing growing up.
“We moved into a brand new house when I was about six, and I stayed in that house right the way through my childhood. It meant my health improved and I went to the same school. It meant I stayed part of the same community,” she explained.
Yẹmí Aládérun, head of development at Meridian Water, called for homes that catered to diverse needs as well as governance structures that give residents a voice.
Graham Sibley, operations and marketing director at the Association for Rental Living, urged the government to stop “using housing as a political football” and have “a cross-party political consensus approach that transcends the parliamentary cycles”.
“Devolution is key,” stated Tracy Harrison, chief executive of the Northern Housing Consortium. “What we often see is that funding streams are really difficult to access, particularly for large areas of the North.”
“It goes back into this point about local people wanting to have a say, rather than having everything dictated,” she said.
Giving a planner’s perspective, Helen Fadipe, vice-president of Royal Town Planning Institute, said: “Planning is always blamed for the non-provision of housing. We’re the scapegoat, but it’s not necessarily the case because there are so many other players.”
And Nicholas Boys Smith, interim chair of Office for Place, issued a plea for the sector to “stop talking about units” as opposed to homes. “Can we please get back to talking about homes in beautiful places,” he stated.
