You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
The Week in Housing: new Homes England boss, big ruling in Wales and pushback against care watchdog
The Week in Housing is our weekly newsletter, rounding up the most important headlines for housing professionals. Sign up below to get it direct to your inbox every Friday
Good afternoon.
The ‘two Peters’ at Homes England, chief executive Peter Denton and chair Peter Freeman are to step down from their roles in the new year.
Eamonn Boylan will join the government’s housing delivery agency from 15 January as interim chief executive.
It was a week of big changes with the news that the Office for Place will be closed, less than 18 months after it was made an arm’s-length body.
In a landmark case in the High Court in Cardiff, a judge ruled that Welsh tenants who do not receive safety reports are entitled to withhold their rent.
Landlords fear their non-compliance could open the door to a bill of tens of millions of pounds if tenants are entitled to demand a refund for rent they have already paid. A further hearing in the new year will determine whether tenants are entitled to their money back.
READ MORE
In Scotland, Wheatley Group, Scotland’s largest housing association, raised its homeless allocation target by 1,000 properties in order to help local authorities and support agencies dealing with the housing emergency.
And in Northern Ireland, housing bodies welcomed an additional £24m in funding allocated by the Northern Ireland Executive to deliver 1,400 new social homes but said more investment was needed to make an impact on waiting lists.
Back in England, a city council has refused part of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s recommendation to compensate a woman after it broke the six-week legal cap on leaving homeless families in B&B accommodation.
The council argued that the national housing crisis meant going over the limit was “unavoidable”. It said making all of the payments recommended would be “disastrous for local councils, setting a precedent that could cost them around £130m”.
The other sector watchdog, the Housing Ombudsman, named 10 landlords that received more than one complaint-handling failure order in the last quarter.
And one landlord was left with a lot to consider after receiving a prevention of future deaths report from a coroner. The London council was told to act after a tenant died following a fall from her balcony while she was cleaning a blocked drainpipe.
A warning was issued by a building safety organisation concerned that smoke vents are at risk of being blocked during cladding remediation work. The UK branch of Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures, a confidential safety-reporting scheme for the building sector, issued a red alert after receiving several reports of vents being made “inoperable”.
The Regulator of Social Housing also published its first set of annual stability check results for this year, which revealed 11 landlords with unchanged viability grades.
Another symptom of the housing crisis that affects homelessness services and funding is out-of-borough placements. An MP has called for local and central government action on this issue, as she said the placements were putting significant pressure on services and taking housing from local people.
On Tuesday, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee began its inquiry on rough sleeping.
However, MPs may feel it did not go as planned, as Lord Bird, founder of The Big Issue magazine, walked out of the session after telling MPs he did not want to become part of “a farce”.
He said he had been having the same discussion on rising rough sleeping for years, and yet the government still spent most of its resources on emergency funding for homelessness services, rather than putting in the upfront cost to prevent it in the first place. This may include funding for local authorities, uprating Local Housing Allowance rates and grant funding for building new social homes.
Lord Bird raised a point backed up by the latest government figures, which revealed a 23% annual rise in no-fault evictions by bailiffs. The statistics prompted the Law Society of England and Wales to call for legal aid funding for the more than 25 million people who do not have access to a local legal aid provider for housing advice.
Another issue raised in the first inquiry session was the impact of the government’s National Insurance hikes on homelessness services. Charities have warned that the rises in employers’ contributions will cost the homelessness sector between £50m and £60m per year.
For a long time, the sector has been providing a host of services to residents who have felt the impact of 15 years of austerity: financial advice, food-security initiatives, homelessness prevention, employment training and help with cost of living pressures. These voluntary support services, worth £23m in social value last year, are under increasing pressure as budgets come under strain, the G15 group of London landlords warned.
The government has now signalled that leasehold reform may not happen until the end of this parliament. However, this week, one large retirement developer came out in favour of commonhold as an alternative to leasehold.
With thousands of people facing redundancy at Tata Steel, Inside Housing visited Port Talbot and spoke to Linda Whittaker, chief executive of Tai Tarian, about how the housing association is preparing to help.
Have a great weekend.
Stephen Delahunty, news editor, Inside Housing
Editor’s picks: five stories you may have missed
Local authority in Kent to defend opposition to 8,400-home scheme after Rayner calls in application
Northern Ireland housing bodies welcome new funding but warn significant gap remains
Westminster launches new partnership with 11 registered providers to improve housing in borough
Sign up for our Week in Housing newsletter
Already have an account? Click here to manage your newsletters
