Council houses – where are they now?
Our local authorities have ambitious targets to provide social housing. Why do they keep missing them. Is there a fundamental problem here? Somerset Confidential® investigates.
Dear readers
Today’s piece is for our paid readers. If you’d like to read more of these analytical and investigative articles, (and we provide at least 48 each year) please consider signing up as a paying subscriber. You can do that here for just 58p a week.
As you’ll see, you can also take a free subscription out to see if you enjoy our material or at least find it interesting. There’s no requirement to leave a credit card and you’ll be sent our weekly news summary automatically.
If you’d like to support us subscription you can sign up below:
We really appreciate (and need) your support!
Thank you!
Andrew Lee - editor
Council houses – where are they now?
When local planning bodies approve “affordable” homes it does not necessarily mean affordable in the sense that you or I might understand it. Whenever a new housing development is approved with a requirement for say 30% affordable housing, it always sounds impressive, hopeful even.
But that percentage can include different tenure types:
Social Rent – typically around 50-60% of market rent
Affordable Rent – set at up to 80% of market rent
Shared Ownership – a part buy, part rent scheme that helps people onto the property ladder.
Social rent or social housing is the new shiny phrase for what many of us used to know as council housing. Social housing provides security of tenure and rents that most people can afford.
Today demand for social housing in Somerset far outweighs supply.
“demand for social housing in Somerset far outweighs supply”
That’s not our opinion. It is a direct quote from the Homefinder page of Somerset Council’s website. Things are not much better in B&NES and North Somerset either.
The Somerset Council Homefinder web page goes on to explain: “On 1 April 2023, there were nearly 12,000 applicants on the Homefinder Somerset scheme. From April 2022 to March 2023 there were just over 2,000 homes advertised.
This means many people are registered on the scheme for a long time without being made an offer of a home.”
Why has social housing fallen so far behind what is needed? When so many new homes have been built what happened to those commitments to affordable homes?
The lack of social housing leaves many families in the hands of private landlords paying rent they can hardly afford and without security of tenure.
Meanwhile Government policy is to build 1.5m new homes. Whilst in green belt areas there are rules and expectations about the percentage of social homes that must be built in any new development, elsewhere it is pretty much up to the local planning authority.
Experience to date suggests that left to themselves, they will approve developments of three or four bed houses priced beyond the reach of those in our county on even average earnings. House of Commons library data published for September last year suggests an average house price of £450,000 in Bath and North East Somerset, £385,000 in North Somerset and £275,000 for the Somerset Council area.
Clearly unaffordable to a Somerset resident on an average salary of £30,000. Which leaves us asking what about those on below average earnings?
The three planning authorities in Somerset today (and in the Somerset Council area the four districts that preceded it) all boast ambitious plans for social housing.