A merger too far
Posted: October 22, 2025 Filed under: Cornwall, Housing associations Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It may not be quite merger mania but the steady flow of housing association amalgamations continues.
So too do the questions. Where will this end? When does big become too big? Should business logic always trump local connection?
The mooted merger between Bromford Flagship and LiveWest made me think again about all those questions precisely because of that local factor.
When I first moved to west Cornwall in the 1990s, the council housing stock had just gone through a stock transfer, one of many carried out by small district councils following approval by tenants in a ballot.
In 2007 Penwith Housing Association became part of Devon and Cornwall Housing. DCH in turn merged with Knightstone to form LiveWest in 2018.
The tenants’ landlord became larger and larger and also more remote – with headquarters more than 100 miles away in Devon – and there was no further ballot but at least those organisations made some kind of regional sense.
Now, 30 years on from that original stock transfer, we potentially have merger number three, with LiveWest in talks to become part of Bromford Flagship (itself the product of a merger that only happened in February).
The merged landlord will become one of the largest in the country, owning or managing more than 120,000 homes stretching from Land’s End to Norfolk via the Midlands, with a headquarters 230 miles away in Tewkesbury.
Read the rest of this entry »Cracking the code on Section 106
Posted: October 17, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Section 106 Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For something so important, the Section 106 system of providing affordable homes seems to exist inside a black box.
We know what goes in (developments all over the country, local councils trying to get the contributions they can) and we know what comes out (almost half of affordable homes delivered for year).
We also know that this is just part of a wider system for capturing land value not just for affordable homes but also community infrastructure and facilities.
But the inner workings of the system seem hidden.
This is most obviously true when it comes to the dark arts of viability assessments that allow experienced developers to run rings around under-resourced local authority planning departments.
But it can also be true in reverse, with the complexity of the system holding development back and sparking calls for reform.
Read the rest of this entry »Missing the target and missing the point
Posted: September 22, 2025 Filed under: Housebuilding Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A year into the government’s five-year target to build 1.5 million additional homes and signs of progress are thin on the ground.
Indicators of new supply published on Friday estimate that 231,300 net additional homes were delivered in the just over 14 months between the start of the parliament on 9 July 2024 and 14 September 2025.
At this rate, the government will struggle to hit one million additional homes in this parliamentary term, let alone 1.5 million.
Worse still, the supply indicators are currently moving in the wrong direction. In the first quarter of 2025/26 (April to June), building control reported completions were down 5 per cent on a year earlier while the number of energy performance certificates (EPCs) issued for new dwellings was down 14 per cent.
Further back in the pipeline, the number of homes granted planning permission fell 7 per cent in the year to the end of June to 221,000, the fourth annual decline in succession.
The estimates published by the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government provide a more accurate picture of new housebuilding than the familiar starts and completions figures and a more timely one than the net additional dwellings statistics that form the basis of the target.
The official figures on net additional dwellings for 2024/25 will not be published until November but MHCLG estimates (based on EPCs for new dwellings but allowing for demolitions) that the annual total will be 199,300. That’s just over 100,000 below the annual rate required to hit the target.
Read the rest of this entry »The right’s way to more council housing
Posted: August 14, 2025 Filed under: Council housing Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
England should be building 100,000 new council houses a year, says a new report out this week.
It’s a call that would be routine if it was being made by one of the usual suspects, but this time it comes from, of all places, Policy Exchange.
The right-wing think tank was the incubator for the ideas that dominated the Conservative agenda in the 2010s and its alumni played a key role under successive Tory-led governments.
Among its greatest hits in the glory days of the coalition were calls for all social homes to be nationalised, with most sold off to tenants and only a rump left for the most vulnerable.
That was followed by proposals to sell off all ‘high-value’ social housing and fully commercialise housing associations.
True, the ideas were usually justified as ways to generate more affordable homes overall but the underlying agenda seemed to be that, far from tackling social exclusion and poverty, social housing was a cause of them
In the wake of the 2024 election, Policy Exchange is playing a less partisan tune and this report comes with endorsements from Labour as well as Conservative politicians.
Read the rest of this entry »Starmer reassures and worries on homelessness
Posted: July 28, 2025 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If you’re looking for a chink of light ahead of the promised government strategy on homelessness, the number of homeless households living in bed and breakfasts (B&Bs) is down for the third quarter in succession.
But it’s only a chink since government figures for the end of March saw the total number of homeless households (131,140) and children (169,050) in temporary accommodation rise to new records.
At the most expensive and temporary end of the spectrum, there were 3,870 families with children in B&Bs, down 28 per cent since Labour took power in July 2024. Of those, 2,300 had been there for longer than the six-week legal limit, a decline of 39 per cent.
However, those falls were more than matched by an increase in the use of nightly paid, privately managed accommodation. This is also expensive and temporary but self-contained so that families do not have to share a bathroom and kitchen.
This sub-sector took off after 2013 when the coalition government tried in vain to cut use of B&Bs and private landlords and management companies realised they could charge more on a nightly basis than for longer-term leases.
Over the next seven years, the number of homeless households in nightly paid accommodation doubled and since 2020 it has almost doubled again to 46,710. Since Labour came to power the number of families with children in non-B&B nightly paid accommodation has increased by 27 per cent to 32,160.
Of those, more than half (17,810) had been there for more than a year and 14 per cent (4,640) for more than five years.
By contrast, there were just under 25,990 households in private sector leased accommodation, roughly the same as in 2013 despite a doubling in the total numbers in temporary accommodation overall.
Trends like these highlight what’s at stake in the homelessness strategy both for homeless families stuck in temporary accommodation and for local authorities creaking under the strain of paying for it .
Read the rest of this entry »What’s at stake in the spending review?
Posted: June 3, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents | Tags: spending review Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
With a week to go until the most consequential spending review for ten years, the Treasury is facing desperate last-ditch lobbying from departments that have yet to agree their settlement.
Last week’s public intervention by chief constables warning that the government will fail to meet its pledges on crime unless they get more cash is sign enough of that.
So too the leaked memo from deputy prime minister Angela Rayner setting out options for higher taxes that was inevitably followed by more leaks about her spending priorities.
As of this week, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) was said to be one of the departments yet to agree a settlement, alongside the Home Office, with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero just finalising one..
By contrast with previous spending reviews, housing starts with the advantage of having a politically powerful secretary of state in charge – and Angela Rayner has repeatedly promised ‘the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’.
But the ‘biggest boost’ can mean many different things, some of them genuine, some of them not remotely up to the challenge of the moment.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 