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Leeds housing crisis: ‘We are just not getting the funding’
DECADES OF STANDSTILL: Housing supremo Coun Peter Gruen says Leeds council has not been able to build new homes for the last 20 years.
As part of a YEP investigation into the Leeds housing crisis, Vicki Robinson reports on the shortage of social housing and what is being done to create more affordable homes.
It’s a figure that graphically exposes the scale of Leeds’s social housing crisis – 88.
That’s the number of new homes built by Leeds City Council in the past TWENTY years.
The authority says it has not been in a position to create new housing directly for at least two decades – both through a lack of funding, but also, for many years, the opposition of successive Governments to new council house building.
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Gordon Brown did a u-turn on the policy in 2007 but the 88 new homes were still only made possible by a one-off grant from the Homes and Communities Agency.
And while new houses have been developed by not-for-profit housing associations, there are currently 27,328 households on the waiting list for council or social housing in Leeds.
Leeds City Council says the average waiting time for a property is 59 weeks, though the National Housing Federation estimates that the average wait Yorkshire-wide is as much as 4.7 years.
Unfortunately, the level of council housing stock available is decreasing, too. Five years ago, the council had 60,480 properties. Today, it has 57,733 – some of it being lost through the controversial Tory-led Right to Buy scheme which allows tenants to purchase their council homes.
As reported by the YEP this week, housing associations in the Yorkshire region built around 3,500 new homes last year.
But the National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations, admits this is still nowhere near enough to meet demand.
While the council concedes that it might never again be in a position to build large numbers of homes, it is working to provide more affordable housing.
And it has spent huge sums bringing the stock it does have up to scratch.
Coun Peter Gruen, Leeds City Council executive board member with responsibility for neighbourhoods and housing, said: “For about the last five years, we have concentrated on improving the stock we do have. Under the Decency programme we have spent £850m in Leeds getting around 97 per cent of our stock up to the decency standard.
“It’s been a huge amount of work.”
Government ministers last week announced plans for a £400m Get Britain Building fund designed to restart housing development schemes that have stalled through a lack of finance.
It is hoped the fund will “unlock” the construction of up to 16,000 homes, with 3,200 of those being affordable properties.
More details of the scheme are due before the end of the year – but in the meantime the council is pursuing its own affordable housing agenda against a background of what it says are Coalition government funding cuts.
Coun Gruen (Lab, Cross Gates and Whinmoor) added: “In the last three years of the Labour Government, we received £100m for affordable housing.
“This allowed us to create many affordable homes in partnership with private developers.
“We have built some fantastic new properties in Bramley, Pudsey and Morley, to name a few. That has been great.
“What we are doing now is finishing those that are in the pipeline but in terms of the grant we are now getting [for this], it’s insignificant. We are just not getting the funding from central government.”
On the massive demand for social housing, he said there was no easy solution without increased investment.
He added: “The situation is going to be markedly worse if the Government reinvigorates the Right to Buy scheme.
“People end up buying the best stock and we can’t replace it. Our stock keeps declining all the time.”
Coun Gruen warned that the current government’s policies meant existing tenants would suffer, too – through rent rises. He said: “The Government is doing the opposite [of helping].
“They are forcing us to increase rents above inflation. Last year when inflation was 3 per cent we had to increase rents by over 6 per cent. Now inflation is at 5 per cent, we will have to think about the level of increase. It is gloomy to think that, when people are being thrown out of their jobs, losing their housing benefits and their fuel bills are rocketing, we are going to come along and increase their rent.
“It is not a happy situation.
“We understand the problems. We are working with the private sector to find some solutions for Leeds and we want to do everything possible.”
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