One and a half cheers for the Housing Green Paper
Yes, the new Housing Green Paper does promise 70,000 affordable houses a year to be built by 2010-11, including 45,000 social homes, and that is more than double the (very low) number built in 2004. But that still leaves a lot of key questions still unanswered:
How many of these will be Council houses, under the democratic control of local authorities? The Government won't say. Yvette Cooper, the Housing Minister, made clear they still hanker after other forms of tenure - RSLs (housing associations), ALMOs (arms length management organisations), shared equity ownership - anything but local authority housing. In recent years a miniscule 100 houses have been built a year by local authorities because of central government cold-shouldering the idea, despite the fact that homelessness and Council waiting lists have doubled.
There is still no commitment to the Fourth Option (i.e. that Council tenants will not be blackmailed into agreeing to transfer to a private landlord or an RSL or an ALMO under the threat that otherwise repairs and improvements to their Council houses will not be carried out).
There is real doubt whether the Government's figures stack up. They've promised £8bn for investment in more affordable housing by 2016, but the Local Government Association thinks half as much again will be needed.
Making new homes from 2016 all zero-carbon and setting out bids for 5 new eco-homes of up to 20,000 homes each is good. But these 100,000 homes are less than 0.5% of the housing stock. What plans for reducing carbon emissions and radically improving energy efficiency in the other 99.5%?