The Week in Housing: Labour exempts certain groups from local connection test, and new AHP not expected until spring 2025

The Hillsborough Law will force public bodies to co-operate with investigations into major disasters, and will be in progress before April 2025. Officials or organisations that mislead or obstruct investigations could potentially face criminal sanctions.

Sir Keir said: “The families and survivors of the Grenfell Tower, whose dignity has held up over the last seven years, has held up a mirror to Britain.”

During the conference it was confirmed there will be a third and rebranded wave of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, as well as a new local authority retrofit scheme.

Inside Housing has also learned that there will be no new details on the government’s next five-year Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) until spring 2025. However, sources suggested that some money might be pumped into the last year of the current AHP by the chancellor next month ahead of the Spring Spending Review next year.

Away from the party rhetoric in the main room, the fringe events offered a chance for the sector to reiterate key asks and express concerns to the new government.

One Labour MP told attendees to “keep pushing” the government on the 90,000-home annual social rent target.

A Northern metro mayor called for a ‘Grenfell law’ to enshrine the right to housing and for the return of mandatory council representation on housing association boards.

The former chair of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee said grant could be switched from shared ownership to social rent and that he is “sceptical” about the future of the product as a part of the government’s affordable housing plans.

You can read our full run-down from the Labour Party Conference here.

In other news, the government has issued a call for evidence on ‘brownfield passports’, which aim to speed up planning approvals for urban sites such as car parks.

This was followed by research from three UK developers which found that the majority of urban communities back brownfield development.

The government’s plans to speed up development on brownfield land comes at a good time for the Greater London Authority, after new annual data from the capital’s AHP 2021-26 programme revealed how delays have pushed 90% of all starts into the next two years.

In an effort to help meet that target, the deputy London mayor for housing and residential development told Inside Housing that City Hall’s developer will initially focus on joint ventures and land assembly.

The pressure on City Hall to deliver those numbers comes as research by the G15 group of London’s biggest landlords found that building 120,000 social and affordable homes in the capital could cost £54bn.

The government is betting on planning reform to deliver an uptick in delivery and has pledged to fund 300 new planning officer roles, but it was suggested at the Labour conference that this figure needs to be closer to 3,000. More than half (55%) of planning and placemaking professionals have said their teams lack the capacity to meet strategic goals beyond their minimum statutory responsibilities.

The Regulator of Social Housing published its latest round of judgements under the consumer standards for eight more landlords. Seven housing associations were awarded compliant ratings of C1 or C2 for their first consumer gradings, while one council was given a non-compliant C3 rating for “serious failings”.

The National Housing Federation and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors aim to launch a new stock condition survey standard for social housing in 2025. It is hoped the standard will help social landlords “provide a consistent and accurate barometer” of stock conditions so they can identify quality issues more easily.

For shared owners, the Housing Ombudsman has set out nine key tests for improving fairness in complaints. The watchdog set out the learnings for how it will assess shared ownership complaints in future and highlighted where it can intervene for shared owners, including on issues such as defects and sales process.

At a conference on building safety, Dame Judith Hackitt questioned why the housing sector is “so reticent to put its house in order” when it comes to building safety and “continues to wait for other people to tell you what to do”.

In our longer reads this week, Inside Housing looked at how one housing association is looking to change the face of resident engagement. 

An Oxford professor sets out why affordable housing is less of a priority for the British elite.

Plus, our exclusive survey revealed how many social housing staff are battling housing insecurity and fearing homelessness themselves.

This insecurity among staff comes as demand has increased but the ability to help is going in the opposite direction, as pointed out by Duncan Shrubsole, chief executive of St Martin in the Fields.

Housing’s role in tackling inequality and delivering economic growth was front and centre of many conversations this week. Priya Nair, chief executive of The Housing Finance Corporation, has set out where the funding could come from.

Have a good weekend.

Stephen Delahunty, news editor, Inside Housing

Say hello: stephen.delahunty@oceanmedia.co.uk

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