The autumn 2024 budget contains a whole raft of housing commitments. While it is unclear how many of these commitments are actually new funds or simply a repackaging of existing programmes, this budget gives us a sense of the new government’s early ambitions for the sector. This includes commitments on tackling homelessness, increasing social housing and new housing investment such as addressing stalled developments, and on investing in the energy efficiency of existing and future homes.
Genuinely affordable homes
Support for the provision of more genuinely affordable homes is starting to come through in the budget plans – as Secretary of State Angela Raynor acknowledged in the Guardian newspaper, ‘Pressures have been felt acutely in our housing market. Millions of people face soaring rents, poor housing conditions… For too long a safe, secure home has been the luxury for the few’.
The National Housing Federation has broadly welcomed the budget commitments to invest £500m in the Affordable Homes Programme but noted there was no additional funding for supported housing for vulnerable and disabled people – ‘which is currently in crisis with 1 in 3 providers forced to close schemes in the last year’. An additional £233m has been announced to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping but Homelessness charities were also critical that the chancellor Rachel Reeves did not use her first Budget to raise Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates.
The government has selected locations for three new large housing developments in Cambridgeshire, West Sussex and Durham, in addition to £56 million to unlock up to 2,000 new homes at Liverpool Central Docks. Focusing on improving inclusion and adaptation in homes, they propose a modest £86 million increase to the Disabled Facilities Grant.
Energy efficiency
Some of the largest housing commitments in the budget relate to improving the energy performance of new and existing buildings.
The Warm Homes Plan includes an initial £3.4 billion towards heat decarbonisation and promoting household energy efficiency for the next three years, of which £1.8 billion is for fuel poverty schemes. There is also a commitment to deliver 3,000 energy efficient new homes across the country, with a £25 million joint venture with Muse Places Limited and Pension Insurance Corporation, and an aim that 100% of these homes will be ‘affordable’.
More generally, the government proposes to support ‘hundreds of local energy schemes to help decarbonise the public estate through the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, with over £1 billion over three years. It was pointed out by Jim Pickard in the FT however, there has been a significant drop in investment for Labour’s Green Prosperity Plan (GPP). The original pre-election announcement on the GPP referred to £28bn a year for the next five years, this has now fallen to £24bn overall for the same period.
Dangerous cladding
In terms of remediation of households and buildings subject to unsafe cladding in the aftermath of Grenfell Town Fire, they commit to new investment of over £1 billion for 2025-26.
However, the National Audit Office has said that up to 60% of buildings with dangerous cladding still have not been identified, and has raised concerns that the current rate of progress will mean the government may miss the estimated completion date of 2035. Clearly more will be needed to make buildings including homes safe from cladding fire risk.
Filling the gaps
So, the 2024 budget appears to contain much that is positive on housing, including on energy efficiency and affordable homes. Looking across the 12 Healthy Homes Principles (see below), further support will be needed to raise housing standards. This will include addressing the many poor quality homes produced through Permitted Development conversion, as well as on key principles, including fire safety, accessibility, adaptability and inclusion, climate resilience, air quality (indoor and outdoor). And ensuring future housing schemes create sufficient genuinely affordable homes and contribute towards creating communities, with accessible health care services, public transport and schools, and local economic and employment opportunities.
Fundamentally much greater resources and capacity will be needed to support the effective delivery of housing standards across all tenures, including temporary homes. In the Campaign for Healthy Homes we will continue to press for further financial and legal commitments to enable a more comprehensive approach towards housing quality in the year ahead, to ensure that new and existing homes not only meet minimum standards, but actively promote the long-term health and sustainability of all residents.
