Stafford has a small but enthusiastic housing co-operative. I’m a member and supportive but not as active as I should be. Others, like Lisa and Tony Pearce, are doing the heavy lifting. And it’s getting us somewhere. Staffordshire County Council owns blighted properties in Castletown. They are blighted because of a highway protected route once published by the same County Council. The properties, potentially good homes, are long-term empty as a result. Our co-op has a plan to buy them, make them habitable once more, and rent them out. Finance for the purchase has been negotiated. We just need the Council to abandon the protected route (for a road that is never going to be built on that line) and sell the homes to the co-op.
This is a great example of a small number of committed people making a difference by taking the initative. There is a role for this kind of work, especially when it comes to bringing empty homes back into use.
We do, however, need national policies to support the provision of sufficient affordable homes. There are young, first-time buyers who cannot afford today’s asking prices, family members living in over-crowded homes because they cannot get a home at a rent they can afford and increasing numbers of residents who need homes that offer additionally an element of personal social care.
It’s legitimate for the new Con Dem coalition government to pursue a different approach, but will its policies result in more affordable homes? Step one surely has to be to get supply and demand closer to balance. Currently too many would-be buyers chase too few homes for sale and for rent. The result is rising prices. Existing homeowners like rising prices and they often don’t like new house-building near their homes. So for them, abandoning Labour’s pressure on councils to provide more land for new house-building is often quite welcome. But at the same time, they probably share the concern for young people who cannot afford to buy their first home. Their own sons and daughters may be caught in just this trap. They may be concerned about people who are homeless, living in cramped conditions or occupying unregulated, unsafe rented properties.
The Con Dem coalition government is offering councils incentives to provide land for homes, they can keep the council tax receipts from the new homes for a while. Labour ran a similar scheme to promote new business start-ups under which councils could keep the new business rates for a period. It was called LABGI. It was reasonably successful. But crucially, will this incentive be generous enough to tempt councils to take on the NIMBYs? Will there be any special incentive for new developments to include high proportions of affordable homes (after all, higher council tax receipts will come from more expensive homes)?
These are tests and challenges for policy-makers and the councils who implement the policies. The outcome measure that will tell us whether we successfully increase the supply of homes, especially affordable homes, will be the number of new homes appearing. The people who will feel the effects of this success or failure are the first-time buyers and the would-be tenants who need help if they are to find their own homes of the future. Typically, they are hard-working and hard-pressed. We should want to help them succeed and we can help them – in small, constructive ways – through community efforts like housing co-ops and through pressing central and local government to do the right thing by them.
