Cllr Richard Clewer
Leader Wiltshire CouncilConservative Councillor Richard Clewer discusses Wiltshire Council’s housing strategy.
Whilst the main focus of local government finance is on adults and childrens services, cost pressures on temporary accommodation are also hitting our District and Unitary Councils hard. The private rental sector is broken across most of the UK, rents far outstrip local housing allowance levels and demand exceeds supply. We all see increases in people losing their homes placing huge demand on temporary accommodation whilst housing waiting lists are growing.
So what can local authorities do? At Wiltshire Council we have been focusing a long term flexible approach to housing and homelessness support to anticipate and reduce future demand.
We look after 5,400 council houses and the need to manage and improve those has helped us shape our approach over the last 10 years. In housing everything we do is focused not on the short term but on the long term. The rigor of putting together plans and budgets covering 50 years whilst also being flexible to deal with change is challenging. Once you develop that mindset the rewards are great, housing stock is consistently maintained well and savings derived from long term plans.
Using this approach we developed a retrofit program for our Council Housing stock that will bring it all up to an EPC B rating not only reducing carbon emissions but more importantly saving significant money for residents on their heating bills. The sector as a whole is only delivering EPC C retrofit but by investing over the long term we have been able to go further.
The safety net of affordable housing is critical for our residents. Much of the provision of affordable housing is now tasked to Registered Providers, our Housing Associations. They buy houses from the volumetric developers that tend to be small and due to the insanity of current building regulations will need extensive retrofit inside the next couple of decades to achieve anything close to a zero carbon state. There is absolutely no excuse for Government not to have mandated all new houses being built to a zero carbon standard already, the increased costs are 2 to 4% whilst the costs of retrofitting new build properties can run beyond £20,000. Increasingly some Housing Associations are focusing on new builds and not on maintaining their existing stock and their role as a social landlord As a result they are increasingly selling rural stock which is more expensive to maintain yet critical to community cohesion in villages. To tackle this we decided to build council housing, ideally at social rent (50% of market rent) rather than affordable rent (80% of market rent). We have prioritised this in our villages providing housing to keeps families together in places where renting or buying is beyond the reach of most. We built almost 200 houses in the first 2 phases and are now expanding that to provide 1,000 more over the next 10 years with about 350 already identified or under way. All new housing is built to a zero carbon standard.
We have looked beyond council housing and set up a housing company, Stone Circle, which has now purchased over 120 properties (only inside the council’s boundaries) which are let to people nominated by the council at a level just above affordable rent. This is designed to tackle areas of market failure in housing, for example housing for council care leavers.
We chose not to use our Homes for Ukraine funding to pay extortionate private rental prices, instead using it as a ‘deposit’ which we are leveraging with borrowing to enable us to purchase housing which is affordable and available to support Ukrainians over the next few years and then other residents beyond that. Government have since copied and adapted this scheme nationwide. We are in the process of purchasing 125 properties with dozens of completed purchases already housing Ukrainians and Afghans.
Lastly we don’t use expensive bed and breakfast places for temporary accommodation by maintaining our own stock of dedicated housing. We just released £10 million from our reserves leveraged upto £50 million which we are using to purchase properties that will meet future demand whilst reducing council costs. We also focus on preventing people needing temporary accommodation in the first place, the most cost effective way of dealing with the problem and this reduction of demand, sustaining tenancies or re-housing people before they lose their current accommodation is critical to our success.
Housing is an immensely powerful tool for local councils, not just to make sure that our most vulnerable residents are supported but also to control and reduce costs over all budgets, in adults and childrens services as well as tackling homelessness. It is one we all, especially the Unitary authorities among us need to make good use of.’