1.5 million new homes, and net zero by 2050: can the Government do both? Latest episode of Committee Corridor podcast tackles the housing crisis

• Environmental Audit Committee
• Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee

Listen to episode 4 now

The latest episode of Committee Corridor, the podcast from Select Committees at the House of Commons, tackles the housing crisis. Ahead of next week’s Spending Review, host Toby Perkins MP, Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, asks: how do we build enough homes, ensuring they are both of high enough quality and contribute to meeting our environmental and nature goals?  

Providing enough quality homes to the public has driven many governments, to varying degrees of success. The current administration has set out a clear ambition to “back the builders, not the blockers,” and deliver 1.5 million new homes over this Parliament.  

Toby hears from Kate Henderson, Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation (NHF), a trade body for social housing associations, as well as Joe Powell, Labour MP and member of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, and Lord Moylan, former Chair of the House of Lords Built Environment Committee.   

In the episode, Kate Henderson sets out the scale of difficulties facing vulnerable people in the private rented sector. Nearly two-fifths of older private renters are struggling to buy food, heat their homes, or pay for clothes, she says, while over 165,000 children are growing up in temporary accommodation, meaning they often don’t have access to basic things like a space to play.   

This crisis “didn’t happen overnight,” Kate says. “The housing crisis has taken decades to get to this point and it’s going to take a real system-wide change to address it.”  

Temporary accommodation was the subject of a recent inquiry by the Housing Communities and Local Government Committee. Committee member and Labour MP Joe Powell tells Toby what the Committee found.  

“This problem is not going away, it’s getting worse,” he says, and it is having an impact both on children’s education and on council finances. “I can’t tell you how frustrating it is when someone brings in a doctor’s note from their GP saying that this child has been made sick, has a respiratory illness because of the home that they’re living in, and we still can’t fix it,” he says. “That’s simply unacceptable.”  

The Committee recommended improving the quality of accommodation through measures including regular inspections, investment in temporary accommodation, and data sharing between local councils to prevent people falling through the cracks when they move. But the long-term solution, he adds, is to increase the supply of social and genuinely affordable housing.  

The House of Lords Built Environment Committee has considered the Government's proposals to use 'grey belt' land for potential housing developments. The Committee's inquiry was chaired by Lord Moylan, who shares his concerns about the clarity of proposed planning reforms.   

“Are they looking to find sites in the greenbelt which are possibly isolated sites: a former factory site, a former petrol station, or whatever, and looking to develop those? Or are they looking to develop what you might call urban extensions to the existing townscape, so that you get to the limit of the town, then you build a bit more?” 

Housing is a high-cost and a high-carbon endeavour. Is it possible for the Government to achieve both its housebuilding and climate targets? 

“Of course it is,” says Lord Moylan. “But we have set up a system which ensures that the two operate antagonistically to each other, a very legalistic type system, in which you have different state agencies working in opposite directions and nobody bringing them together.” 

Concerns have been raised about the quality of homes in the social housing sector. Campaigners have highlighted slum conditions in the worst cases, and complaints to the Housing Ombudsman have risen. The tragic death of Awaab Ishak from prolonged exposure to mould led to a new requirement for social landlords to investigate and fix dangerous damp and mould within set time periods.   

“Social housing providers are absolutely committed to ensuring that the failures that led to the very tragic death of Awaab Ishak never happen again,” Kate says. “We want all of our homes to be free from serious hazards. This is absolutely the top priority for housing associations”.  

As the MP for the area surrounding Grenfell Tower, Joe says he has a particular interest in the balance between housing supply and building safety. “The last thing the Grenfell bereaved and survivors community would have wanted, he says, is that we slow down the supply of new social, affordable, market all tenure type housing that we need.”

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