It’s five years since the 2017 Housing White Paper, Fixing our Broken Housing Market, which set out a package of reforms firmly focused on increasing the supply of new homes. Five years on, the Levelling Up White Paper, with its declaration that ‘Nowhere is the need for making opportunity more equal more urgent than in housing’ sets out a very different prescription on housing – it’s a sign that focus is shifting in Westminster, says NHC Executive Director (Policy and Public Affairs) Brian Robson.

Housing strategies don’t come along quite as often as new housing ministers, but they do emerge with a fair degree of regularity. 2007’s Homes for the Future: more affordable, more sustainable was followed by 2011’s Laying the Foundations; and then by 2017’s Fixing our Broken Housing Market. On that basis, we’re due a housing policy shake-up around now – and the Levelling Up White Paper appears to have delivered it.

Fixing our Broken Housing Market placed heavy emphasis on boosting the supply of new homes in the right places. Existing homes were covered in three short paragraphs within a 106-page document. By contrast, the Levelling Up White Paper makes housing quality a priority, with Michael Gove’s foreword calling for a ‘transformation in the quality of housing’.

The White Paper sets out a mission on housing that is broader than just new supply: ‘By 2030, renters will have a secure path to ownership with the number of first-time buyers increasing in all areas; and the government’s ambition is for the number of non-decent rented homes to have fallen by 50%, with the biggest improvements in the lowest performing areas.’

This focus on quality fits with what the Consortium is hearing from our contacts in Westminster and Whitehall: there’s a real shift in thinking on housing, with the Secretary of State taking a keen interest in the quality of existing accommodation. Some have said as much on-the-record: the Director of the Levelling Up Task Force (and former Homes England Deputy CEO) Tom Walker told the Convention of the North earlier this month that the Levelling Up White Paper represents a “very bold change in emphasis on housing policy” with “an emphasis on quality that hasn’t been there for several years… it’s a very significant change.”

So, what does this mean for housing in the North?

The mission on decency has significant implications for our region. If Government wants to see the biggest improvements in the lowest performing areas, we’re going to see particular focus on housing quality in the North West and Yorkshire. Across tenures, Northern Housing Monitor analysis shows non-decency running above the national average in both regions; with Yorkshire recording a rate of failure on the minimum standard criterion that is 50% above the England average. Non-decent homes tend to be older: 46% of the North’s non-decent homes were built pre-1919 and a further 22% between 1919 and 1944. These homes are particularly likely to be found in the North’s villages and isolated rural areas, and in the most deprived decile of neighbourhoods.

It should be noted that the mission excludes a large proportion of the North’s non-decent homes : those that are owner-occupied. 56% of vulnerable residents living in a non-decent home in the North are doing so in a home they own. This is a hard truth that Government will need to confront before long.

In terms of next steps, Government has made clear that further detail will be set out upon conclusion of the Decent Homes Review. We’re also expecting a Private Renting White Paper later this year. The first phase of the Decent Homes Standard Review – looking at the existing standard – has now concluded. The DLUHC Sounding Board, which the NHC is part of, is awaiting ministerial go-ahead for phase two – which will develop the new standard. It’s worth noting that the figures cited above are based on the existing (fairly basic) standard – a higher standard, especially on energy efficiency, will likely bring more homes into the mission’s scope.

Where does this leave supply?

The mission retains a focus on increasing rates of homeownership. Housing associations and councils in the North have a role to play here. The Northern Housing Monitor finds that delivery of shared ownership housing across the North has averaged around 2,600 homes per year in recent years. Independent assessments suggest the market for low-cost home ownership products in the North is in excess of 5,000 homes per year. There’s a lot of scope to increase delivery of low-cost home ownership products in the North, whilst being careful to protect the delivery of low-cost rented homes, where there’s a huge shortfall of social rented homes.

The White Paper also brings good news on policy changes likely to boost supply in the North: the end of the arbitrary ‘80/20’ geographical funding mechanism will be welcomed; and there’s also news on two key NHC priorities: the Brownfield Housing Fund and Homes England’s role.  £120m of brownfield funding has been announced for Mayoral Combined Authorities, and 77% of this is heading North – an increase on the 69% that was allocated to Northern MCAs in the last round. We’re also pleased to see Homes England’s role being refocused to drive forward regeneration – this was a key plank of our Spending Review submission and something we’ve been discussing with the Agency’s new leadership since last Spring.

And the 2017 White Paper isn’t dead – we understand work is beginning at DLUHC to ‘refresh’ the commitments made in that White Paper.

Will this shift last?

Even with a majority administration, UK politics is remarkably volatile. As the history of housing white papers shows, things change fast – and these are long-term missions. Even so, I think there’s reason for some cautious optimism.

I’d offer three early tests of the Government’s commitment to the housing mission:

1. The Levelling Up White Paper tells us to expect a Private Rented Sector White Paper in ‘the Spring’. Does this emerge on time, and how ambitious is it on quality?
2. How quickly does the Decent Homes Review progress, and is the same enhanced standard intended to be applied to the social and private rented sectors?
3. We’ve been waiting for Government’s response to a consultation on raising Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards in the private rented sector to EPC C for over 12 months. There have been some suggestions this might set a lower investment cap in ‘low rent areas’. This would be inconsistent with the housing quality mission – there must be a funding mechanism that avoids leaving parts of the North behind.

In the longer-term, the mission needs to marry higher standards with increased investment. The Northern Housing Monitor shows that bringing all the North’s existing rented homes up to the current relatively basic decent homes standard would cost £2.6bn (£2bn of that in the private rented sector alone). We need to see integration of energy efficiency investment with investment in wider decency – an exercise in cross-government coordination that will need all the wiles of a Whitehall operator like Michael Gove. Of course, devolving the funding – as the NHC has suggested in the past – would remove this integration headache for Government.

I’m definitely glass-half-full on the White Paper. The missions provide a long-term framework, and the fact some of them are carried over from the previous Industrial Strategy is positive – it suggests that long-term missions can outlive policy fads. The job for housing in the North is to ensure the newfound focus on quality achieves longevity. Mission accepted.

You can discuss the White Paper, and the role housing in the North can play on delivering on a range of levelling-up missions at our Homes at the Heart of a Rebalanced Country conference in Leeds on July 14th. Places are free for NHC members, and the event is arranged with the support of Karbon Homes and Bolton at Home.  Book your free place now, using MyNHC.

As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, what options does the social housing sector have at its disposal to hold back the tide in the form of practical and effective help? What support can they offer tenants facing the apparent inevitability of debt, and how can they bolster their own defences against an ever-increasing risk of rent arrears?

For fear of stating the obvious, there really are just two options available – supporting households to increase their income and reduce their costs. Easily said …

Society Matters cic is a national social welfare training operation set up by northern charity Citizens Advice Gateshead as a trading subsidiary in pursuit of its vision of ‘a fair society for all, with lives well lived’. The charity recognised a few years ago that just continuing to respond to the crises presented to them daily because people had – for whatever reason – got out of control of their finances, could only ever be a response, not a resolution, and the further into crisis these people are the more difficult it becomes to turn the tide. The distress experienced by someone in a state of crisis is so great, but often we think it’s also unavoidable. So the charity set out on a mission to ‘mobilise knowledge so the system works, and it works for everyone’ and by achieving this so, in turn, would we start to enable equality.

In practice that means making sure that the people and organisations ‘in the system’ (and we’ve intentionally not defined what that is – because it can involve so many aspects of people’s lives, from the utility company to the employer to the landlord), are empowered to help people to avoid getting into financial difficulties, and when there are signs that things are going wrong they can catch them before they fall.

It is well recognised, for example, that health and poverty are intrinsically linked, so if we’re recognising a health problem, by looking at the whole person we can anticipate that this is highly likely to also manifest itself as problems with money fairly immediately, and vice versa. Problems with mental health are both a cause and an effect of debt. Not being able to heat a home will often lead to or exacerbate a health problem, which in turn can impact on household income. Equally, if a tenant is struggling to pay their rent, in most cases that’s an indicator of a significantly deeper problem. As a charity we often find that a single crisis issue presented to us by a client, say the threat of eviction, is the tip of an iceberg that can unravel into up to a dozen or more issues, many of which have been left to fester below the surface to ultimately lead to up to that day the notice arrived. And when we say crisis, that has often come about as a direct result of someone trying to find their own solution to a money issue with only limited options available to them. Gambling, high interest door-step lending and prostitution are rarely life choices, but what might appear to be a way out for someone desperate in the absence of other alternatives.

So, if we return to that simplistic formula of enabling tenants to spend less money and gain more, what practical support can Society Matters cic offer to the social housing sector in an attempt to start melting the iceberg? Mobilising knowledge really is the key. For a start, you don’t know what you don’t know. If you’ve never dug into options for income maximisation through in-work benefits, charitable grants, accessible support for carers or disabled tenants, then how can you be expected to be able to point people in the right direction? If you don’t know what support is available for someone facing debt, to avoid the situation spiralling further out of control, you would be understandably fearful of providing reassurance or guidance for fear of making the situation worse.

As housing is such a fundamental foundation stone of people’s lives, we need to put this right.  If the housing provider has the knowledge and confidence to paint a picture of what might be possible to a tenant, to help them to slow the downward spiral and put them on the right track to balance their household books, and an accessible and impartial buffer can be put in place to take over as early as possible, then the system starts to work.

Society Matters cic has dug deep into the knowledge and acute, front-end expertise of its advisory team to find a way to mobilise knowledge to make the system work, and the result is a programme of quality, affordable learning and development for professionals working across the housing, employability, justice, utilities and community and voluntary sectors, and for employers who are committed to supporting the welfare of their staff.  Workshops and courses are delivered exclusively online in a highly interactive virtual classroom environment for between 2 and 6 hours, and many bring with them CPD accreditation providing both a reassurance of quality and the opportunity for your staff teams to gain evidence of their own commitment to their professional development.

You can find out more about the training on offer at https://societymatterscic.com/social-welfare-training/ and to explore options for direct access to social welfare advice and information services for tenants and housing teams who need accessible, impartial and quality assured solutions, please get in touch.

 

Jayne Graham MBE FIEP

Director of Society Matters cic/Commercial Director of Citizens Advice Gateshead

Introduction

The Future Homes and Buildings Standard is a set of standards that will complement the Building Regulations to ensure new homes built from 2025 will produce 75-80% less carbon emissions than homes delivered under current regulations.

Certain home improvements in existing homes will also be subject to higher standards.

The Future Homes Standard was first announced in the government’s spring statement in 2019. There have been two consultations into the Future Homes Standard, which proposed a variety of measures for new and existing homes.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) announced Building Regulations changes will come in from June 2022.

A technical specification was confirmed in the government’s response to the Future Buildings Standard consultation, which will be consulted on in 2023, with the necessary legislation introduced in 2024, ahead of implementation in 2025.

Local authorities will continue to be allowed to set higher energy efficiency standards for new homes in their area once the Standard is published.

 

Summary

• As of the 4^th of January 2022, Plans for New Building regulation amendments that are to be implemented on the 15^th of June 2022 have been released in several different documents, these cover the following topics:
• Ventilation (Document F)
• Conservation of Fuel and Power (Document L)
• Infrastructure for the Charging of Electric Vehicles (Document S)
• Overheating (Document O)

 

• The most significant news regarding this development is that new homes following all these measures will produce 30% less CO2 than current homes according to a government press release on the documents

 

What do the Documents Say?

Document F- Ventilation

As stated previously document F focuses on the issue of adequate ventilation in homes and this particular priority revolves around the ideas of improving indoor air quality for the health of occupants, ensuring fewer cold draughts in homes and preventing damp/mould.

The document also introduces minimum ventilation rates in buildings (page 18/table 1.3) which monitors the effectiveness of household appliances in extracting a certain number of water litres per second. Finally, the document also covers mechanical ventilation’s extensive role in heat recovery where it is present (page 24/25) which implies that it likely links itself tangentially to the documents concerning energy efficiency and CO2 reduction below.

 

Document L- Conservation of Fuel and Power

The most important document regarding emissions and efficiency as this sets out a “target emission rate” for all dwellings in regulation 26 as well as stating all new builds must be near zero energy in regulation 25B (both on page 16)

Furthermore, Regulation 25A (1A-D) (page 28) also outlines the government’s recommended alternatives for high energy efficiency these include: cogeneration, use of renewables, heat pumps and district/block heating and cooling. It will also be a required measure to limit heat gains and losses through building fabric and any other part of the structure as per Requirement L1(a) (page 31).

 

Document S- Infrastructure for the Charging of Electric Vehicles

Intention is to provide greater accessibility for electric vehicles and requirements are being ushered in to supplement this. For example, Requirement S1 on page 11 has made it so that all new housing developments must have electric charging points and cable routes in their parking spaces. The number of these charge points varies but must be one of the two following:

 

Option A

The total number of parking spaces around the development, where there are fewer parking spaces than there are dwellings contained in the residential building

 

Option B

The number of parking spaces that is equal to the total number of dwellings contained in the residential building, where there are the same number of parking spaces as, or more parking spaces than, there are dwellings.

 

Document O- Overheating

Finally, this document covers the issue of overheating, the main requirements of which surround heat mitigation in the event of unwanted solar gains in the Summer with potentially even mechanical assistance (page 12).

This requirement according to the document can either be achieved by categorising building risk based on the solar gains it experiences as well as its cross-ventilation performance (page 13) or through a less simplistic method known as “dynamic thermal modelling” (page 16) which is method of building modelling that predicts/analyses the internal conditions and energy demands of a building using weather data and building characteristics.

Although this method is more complex the government states that if utilised it can provide more flexibility for designers than simply measuring cross ventilation particularly in buildings that have high levels of insulation or airtightness (page 16).

However, in new builds using this second method there must be a demonstration on the part of the housebuilder that the house meets the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) methodology for overheating known as TM59 in order for the development to be fully compliant (page 16).

 

Wider Implications

Although not yet fully in place the impacts of all of the requirements found in these documents could see a reduction of CO2 in new builds by up to 30% which would clearly be a massive boost towards the success of the government pledge for net zero and with these regulations coming as soon as June 2022 this could be to help gauge the sector response to carbon cutting measures which will also certainly be part of the Future Building Standard that will be implemented in 2025.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion these changes seek to drop carbon emissions in new homes by a third by focusing on energy usage and building composition which may become further nuanced by the time the Future Building Standard is introduced in 2025. Needless to say the recent changes are definitely linked to the government’s efforts of working towards net zero and will likely be part of an incremental process in adapting building design to suit the 2050 target.

Furthermore, for context, Respondents to the original consultation raised concerns regarding the energy performance of buildings which were beyond the scope of the consultation or existing Building Regulations, including questions about embodied carbon and tackling the performance gap. In response, DLUHC and BEIS are developing a Statement of Intent that will consider what needs to be done by government and industry to deliver net zero buildings by 2050. This will be published shortly and will be part of the considerations while developing the full technical consultations for both the Future Buildings and Future Homes Standards.

Finally, if members are interested in compliance and the wider aspects of adapting to building regulation changes Consortium Procurement offer a number of solutions to assist Members in remaining compliant with a wide array of building regulations and legislation, including our Asbestos, Legionella and Mould framework, HVAC+R, Drainage and Plumbing DPS, and Property Safety and Security framework.

 

 NHC contact

For any policy enquiries about the new building regulations and the means to address them please contact:

Joseph Breen – Policy Specialist in MMC

Joseph.Breen@northern-consortium.org.uk