Inside Housing – Home – The Week in Housing: Starmer sparkles but can he take on the nimbys?

Dealing with this homelessness crisis is contributing to a £500m shortfall in London councils’ budgets.
A new analysis by the cross-party group London Councils found that boroughs in the capital will need to make over £0.5bn of savings next year to balance their budgets.
And in what would prove to be a worrying trend, one London council revealed that it had defunded a supported housing contract so it can adequately fund the rest of its providers.
Lewisham Council agreed to remove the £250,036 annual funding for Phoenix Futures, which supports homeless people to address substance misuse, and use it to fund other supported housing providers. 
In an attempt to find its own solution this week, one large landlord has partnered with Shelter to help prevent affordable evictions.
The homelessness charity and the newly formed Sovereign Network Group have partnered for an initiative that aims to prevent avoidable evictions and support tenants to re-engage with their landlords.
On the regulatory front, the Housing Ombudsman published details of its enhanced new powers, including the ability to order landlords to re-evaluate policy.
The ombudsman is now able to order a landlord to evaluate a particular policy or practice to prevent service failure being repeated.
Meanwhile, the Regulator of Social Housing’s annual whistleblowing report recorded a fall in allegations made about social housing providers in the past year.
Housing secretary Michael Gove stirred from his post-conference slumber to announce that there will be no government funding to go towards the removal of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in social housing.
Where found, social landlords must pay for the potentially dangerous concrete to be removed using rental income. This news came after leading ratings agency Standard & Poor’s warned that many of the UK’s social landlords will find it “challenging” to maintain interest cover if inflation and interest rates remain high.
Sticking with inflation, there will be some respite for new shared owners. Annual rent rises for new shared owners are being brought in line with social housing.
The current rule allows shared ownership landlords to increase rents once a year in line with the Retail Price Index (RPI) plus 0.5%.
The RPI figure from the previous September is used, which was 12.6% in 2022, meaning shared owners faced a rise of 13.1% in April if the landlord did not voluntarily cap it at a lower rate.
But the government has announced a move from the “outdated” RPI to a new system based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) plus 1%.
There was no consultation, and it appears to have taken the sector by surprise. One housing professional has already been in touch to ask: “What is this going to do to capacity and development plans?”
That is a good question.
Have a great weekend.
Stephen Delahunty, deputy news editor, Inside HousingSay hello: stephen.delahunty@insidehousing.co.uk
@StephenD_
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