In this section:

Making the case for council housing: ARCH and NFA meet HM Treasury officials 18/02/2021 Labelled as Consultation, Scrutiny, Finance, Legislation

Following publication of our joint report "Building Post-Pandemic Prosperity", ARCH and the National Federation of ALMOs (NFA) met with senior officials at HM Treasury to make the case for council housing as part of the post-pandemic recovery.

 

ARCH Chief Executive John Bibby and Policy Adviser Matthew Warburton, together with colleagues from the NFA met with the Head of Social Housing and Head of Housing Economics at the Treasury on 12 February to discuss the findings of our report and the economic, fiscal, social and health benefits that investment in council housing would bring to Britain's post-pandemic recovery.

 

We highlighted the ambition of local authorities to build much needed social housing and the impact that the lifting of the Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap has had, as illustrated by our previous report " Local Authority new build programmes and the lifting of the HRA borrowing caps - what is the potential and what are the constraints?" , which demonstrated that local authorities were likely to exceed the Treasury estimate that the lifting of the HRA borrowing cap would enable local authorities to build 10,000 houses a year and we highlighted the remaining barriers to enabling councils to build more new homes.

 

In particular we drew attention to the need to introduce more flexibilities in the use of Right to Buy (RTB) Receipts and the contribution that this could make to council house building programmes. We pressed officials to expedite the long awaited response to the consultation on the use of RTB receipts first published in August 2018 and discussed the contribution that the introduction of greater flexibilities could make to increasing the supply of new council housing to help meet the Government target of building 300,000 new homes of all tenures per year. In addition, we highlighted the case for change made in our previous budget submissions and our submission to the Government's Comprehensive Spending Review.

 

We stressed that local authorities were facing increased financial pressures on the Housing Revenue Account for investment in the existing stock to tackle fire and building safety issues, the Government's decarbonisation agenda, a potentially higher Decent Homes Standard and the installation of mandatory fire and carbon monoxide alarms and that without increased flexibilities in the use of RTB receipts new build programmes would inevitably have to be curtailed to meet these growing commitments. 

 

As expected, in the run up to the Chancellor's Budget on 3 March we received no assurances from Treasury officials and wait to see whether the Government will make any relevant policy announcements in or alongside the Budget statement.

 

Like emailLink
ARCH Member Comments 1 people like this

Housemark