Beyond Decent Homes - Communities and Local Government Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 140-145)

MR PETER MORTON, MR BOB MCCANN AND MR JOHN CLAYTON

9 NOVEMBER 2009

  Q140  Mr Turner: Obviously the private sector is important to housing just as much as the public sector is. Could you just tell us what you do under section 3 of the 2004 Housing Act to ensure that the private sector is brought up to a Decent Homes standard? I wonder, from Sandwell, whether or not you could tell us a little bit more about the funding that you have identified to bridge some of the gaps that have been existing within that.

  Mr Jones: Certainly in terms of what we are doing under section 3, we are really starting off by following CLG guides in terms of stock condition surveys; we are particularly working with the BRE to develop their stock condition model so we can identify where we have pockets of non-decency and vulnerable people. We can target our interventions to those particular areas. It is becoming more challenging to achieve the Decent Homes target in the private sector. One of the key things that has been a blow to us is that PSA7 has certainly declined in terms of its profile within the local authority and we are quite disappointed that there is not a section in the national indicator 158 which relates to private sector housing, whether that be specifically to vulnerable people or to private sector housing generally. One of the difficulties we have got in terms of meeting PSA7 is the link to vulnerability. It does make it difficult to target interventions because effectively, if we target activity on area basis we have to either justify not doing works to people who are not vulnerable or do we do works for those vulnerable people which do not contribute to our targets under PSA7. Linking it to vulnerable occupiers specifically does make it difficult to deliver on the ground. Maybe the way forward would be to have a target under NI158 but leave it to local authorities locally in consultation with their regional government office about actually how they are going to deliver targets on the ground. In terms of what we have done, it has been a struggle recently. We have seen capital funding decrease significantly year on year and all the messages back to us are that it is going to decrease further with funding moving towards new building costs. Because of that we have had to work quite creatively with a range of different partners. Councillor Lines before spoke about Kick Start which provides equity share loans for owner/occupiers. The scheme is expanding out regionally now and one of its key aims is to attract private finance. We have already tendered once but because of the change in the economic climate that fell through really just as we were at the point of signing contracts with a private sector lendor. We think we have a model that will work but we need to make sure that we keep the momentum up within the local authorities so at a point in time we can go back to the market and say, "This really is a product that is worth investing in". Obviously there the key is to get private financing to the sector to guarantee sustainability in terms of offering assistance to private sector occupiers. Without that unfortunately we need to rely on continued grant funding, whether that is directly through the Housing Investment programme or by what we have been doing working with funding streams like the Housing Market Renewal Area, the Working Neighbourhoods Fund and the PCT to try to make the case that housing interventions work across a whole broad range of policy objectives, health, education, employment. We have been quite successful in doing that but to make it attractive to other partners you always need that capital leverage that you have got through your own grants regime.

  Q141  Chair: Is most of your private sector housing owner occupier or private rented?

  Mr Jones: It is mostly owner occupier but we have seen a massive increase in the private rented sector over the last five years. It has doubled over five years.

  Q142  Chair: You said that the target of going for vulnerable people was difficult, which I can understand. Might you be delivering the same thing better if you went for a target on fuel poverty?

  Mr Jones: Potentially yes, because one of the difficulties we have is that people can be fuel poor but not vulnerable because the definition of vulnerable is very much about being in receipt of income related benefits whereas obviously fuel poverty is about spending more than 10 per cent of your income on heating your home. That makes the delivery of fuel poverty programmes quite difficult because there are no specific targets around fuel poverty. In terms of meeting targets that we set out in our local area agreement we are dealing with people who are not vulnerable, not necessarily meeting any targets under NI187 (tackling fuel poverty).

  Mr McCann: As far as the total housing stock in Sheffield, 74 per cent of it is private sector, of that we have 22,000 private rented stock. The conditions we have at the moment, at 2002, were showing that 42 per cent of that was non-decent.

  Q143  Chair: Was that 42 per cent of all private housing or the private rented?

  Mr McCann: Private rented. We have just carried out a new, up to date house condition survey. We have not got the final details of it yet but it is showing the amount of money needed, an early indication, to remove non-decency, 38 per cent of the 190,000 properties surveyed, it is looking at £311 million.

  Q144  Chair: The issue that we are trying to get at, which was raised by one of the witnesses we had in our first session, was whether local authorities are enforcing standards on the private sector as a means of dealing with non-decent homes, in which case you do not have to pay for them, or whether you are persuading.

  Mr McCann: We are doing a lot of work with our private sector landlords.

  Q145  Chair: Are you enforcing standards, not doing a load of work with them?

  Mr McCann: We are enforcing but we are trying to make the private sector landlord a part of the solution rather than to make them the problem. We are trying to build a relationship with them which is starting to work very well. We have a responsible landlording scheme in Sheffield which is just coming up to the 500th member signing up to that. That has worked very well because within that there is an accreditation level which is linked to the universities as well for them recommending landlords. There is a lot of work being done but again the biggest problem is tee funding for it.

  Mr Jones: We have an accreditation scheme. The main thrust of our policy is to work with private landlords but we will enforce HHSRS where we are just not able to get compliance through working with landlords. What I would say is that due to lack of resources we are not able to do that in a strategic way, we are very much responding to complaints. We do now have information from stock condition surveys about where we have private landlords where there may be category one hazards, but we do not have the resources to proactively go out and deal with those. Although you say it does not cost anything, theoretically that is right but ultimately we may need to do work in default and clearly there is a cost to that. Ultimately we should be able to get that back through charges but that could be at any point in the future, so there is a cost even in enforcing in the private sector.

  Mr McCann: The cost is providing the staff in order to deliver.

  Chair: I understand that; that is the point that Mr Jones has made. Thank you very much indeed.


 
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