Today the APPG for Ending Homelessness and for Housing Market and Housing Delivery have launched their joint report and call on the Government to act to turn empty buildings into good quality, genuinely affordable homes to help end the housing and homelessness crisis.
Davitt Jones Bould has provided contributions to Habitat for Humanity and their recommendations to the APPGs.
Christopher Kerr, Head of ESG, who provided key recommendations comments: There are a number of key points in this report. The first is that public policy, as it exists today would make it very difficult to deliver conversions at a significant enough scale to be useful in solving the housing crisis.
The second is that, to make empty spaces to homes, a viable and possible option, five key recommendations will need to implemented. They include things like giving Local Government more power to require affordable housing contributions from PDR conversions, giving Local Government more control of where conversions take place, incentivising conversion projects from non-profits and community groups via a funding pot and, of course more.
The third point is that by far the biggest concern raised by all contributors was the need to strengthen existing quality standards. Now, it had looked like the Regeneration and Levelling Up Bill was going to do this, adopting the Town and Country Planning Associations Healthy Homes standards, but disappointingly this was read out of the final Act.
We can’t be building homes of low standards in 2023 – there are so many studies that show, beyond any doubt, that the state of our home impacts our physical and mental health. And by building low-quality stock we are not only exacerbating the housing crisis but we are contribute to making others worse too – for example the National Federation of Housing estimates that poor quality housing is costing the NHS up to £2bn per year.
I’d love to sit here and say, in this modern age, we don’t need regulation on this but sadly the evidence suggests otherwise. If we look to PDR conversions, UCL found that just 22% of PDR conversions met minimum space standards, only 3.5% of them had communal space, and 72% of them had single-aspect windows. A large proportion of PDR properties were also built in places cut-off from basic amenities and community too. And all of that certainly contributes to poor health."
Kerr also recently attended a hearing with Habitat for Humanity at Audit Wales, as they seek to publish a report on increasing housing delivery in Wales.
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