Agenda item

The committee received a report which gave an update on the progress towards the Mayoral Pledge to deliver 5000 sustainable, affordable homes.

Delivery of the pledge (remains a challenge):

•           The delivery of the Mayor’s Pledge of 5000 sustainable, affordable homes remained a challenge (the target figure was at least 2000 units over past delivery figures). There would need to be a significant increase in delivery rate to meet the target and therefore remained a risk around the CA meeting the pledge.

•           There was value in setting high ambitions and it had provided the ability to continue to build and shape programmes in a way that drives delivery of affordable housing. It helps to build momentum and push for those delivery ambitions to be met in the region.

•           Although monitoring aligned to the mayoral pledge was important, the work of the CA went beyond this as driving an increase in provision of affordable housing was a long-term aspiration.

•           A new Strategic Place Partnership with Homes England was due to be launched.

•           The CA was in the early stages of writing a housing strategy and community housing was one of the things so far in consultation with partners that had been raised by partners that they would like to profile amongst others.

Risk:

•           On delivery risks aligned to construction, the CA’s ability to spatially monitor risks, at the current time local authorities were monitoring those risks on a site by site, district by district basis, but it could be useful to look at whether risks seemed to be layered in particular locations more than others.

Brownfield Housing Fund:

•           The CA was working in partnership with local authorities on the Brownfield Housing Fund. The land supply and delivery of housing sat with local authority partners as a responsibility. The CA assisted in identifying the pipeline of sites.

•           There were some constraints on the programme which included the inflexibility of the way that government had designed the programme. There were only certain things the CA could spend funding on and specific rates that the CA had to hit in terms of return on investment which were limiting especially as brownfield sites often already had viability challenges.

•           A further constraint was that housing had to be built by 2025 (or the money would be returned to government) and for long-term stalled sites or very difficult brownfield sites it was an extremely hard deadline to meet. This resulted in more viable sites, often private sector led, schemes being eligible and funded but prevents means that the fund could not be applied to some of our priority brownfield sites across the region.

•           The Brownfield Housing Fund had not been designed to drive affordable housing delivery specifically.

•           The CA had not responded to the media directly on the matter of inflexibility in application of the Brownfield Housing Fund however in conversation and interview The Mayor may have raised points regarding the issues.

•           Letters had been written by the 10 Mayoral authorities to push the point and try to explain that the inflexibilities around the programme were making it very difficult to meet local needs.

•           Everyone across the country had the same level of challenge around how to spend the funding and how to ensure it was meeting local needs.

Region’s needs & housing waiting list:

•           Calderdale had 8000 people on the waiting list and in Leeds, there were approximately 26,000 active ‘bidders’ on the housing waiting list, (6000 of which were band A). Only 2000 properties were available in Leeds each year.

•           The responsibility to assess housing need was a local authority function and in turn setting policies through planning to help deliver for that need. There was a balance to be made, particularly on brownfield sites, where there were other viability challenges, affordable homes was one infrastructure type across a series that had to be brought into the balance around what could be secured, and this was a function that was led by district partners with CA support where possible.

•           Some members felt that the ‘right to buy’ and ‘buy back’ schemes were a significant issue, removing homes from the housing stock, hindering housing growth.

Definitions of ‘affordable’ and ‘sustainable’:

•           The CA was using the National Planning Policy definition of affordable which included all categories of affordable (not just social housing).

•           The reason the CA was using it was because the data was monitorable against the national data set. The CA and Mayor were mindful of all of the categories of affordable housing and the need in West Yorkshire for additional social housing.

•           The CA was working with local district partners around local provision and local need.

•           Sustainable was even less easy to define, there was not an easy way for the CA to monitor the sustainability of new properties. EPC data was used for the housing stock across West Yorkshire to feed into the programme development activity such as retrofit, but the data was not yet available for new build only.

•           There was a live conversation within the district partnership regarding our ability to define a measure of sustainability for properties that were being built and whether there was something we could do locally to monitor our progress and the pledge.

The West Yorkshire Housing Partnership (the Partnership):

•           The Partnership was a voluntary partnership (it was not facilitated by the CA).

•           The Partnership continually sought additional partners. It would be positive if it were a comprehensive group of all the providers in the region but as they are private organisations it had to be done on a voluntary basis.

•           The private organisations were obviously operating in a commercial context so even though they may be part of the Partnership, it wouldn’t be appropriate for them to share all of their data with partners.

•           The Partnership had various workstreams, working proactively together across the region on various issues and affordable housing delivery was one of them.

Resolved: That the committee’s feedback is considered further, and affordable housing is brought back to the committee in the following municipal year as an update on the progress of the Mayoral Pledge.