The Government set the tone on housing before the Autumn Budget, pledging to deliver 1.5 million new homes in the next five years. Described by Keir Starmer as a “source of national shame”, the investment in new homes will tackle the rise in homeless families with Chancellor Rachel Reeves stating: “we are rebuilding Britain by ramping up housebuilding and delivering the 1.5 million new homes we so badly need”. 

The first key aspect of the Budget is the £500 million boost to the existing Affordable Homes Programme, raising its total to £3.1 billion for 2025-26. This investment is expected to deliver 5,000 new social and affordable homes and bring the UK closer to Labour’s target of building 1.5 million homes within this Parliament. In addition, £3 billion has been allocated to support SMEs and the Build-to-Rent sector through housing guarantee schemes, ensuring developers can access low-cost loans to deliver homes at scale. 

The second key highlight was the new five-year social housing rent settlement, which was welcomed and will help councils and housing associations plan and invest more effectively; this in turn will make them more attractive to long-term investment. The mood across the sector, however, is that this measure has fallen short and that for substantial results a 10-year settlement is what is required. The Chartered Institute of Housing said: 

“to fully support effective planning and sustainable investment, a 10-year settlement is needed…this level of certainty would empower housing providers to make the long-term commitments required to deliver the affordable homes that our communities urgently need and provide greater transparency for residents” 

With our experience in delivering newly constructed affordable homes we believe that these injections of funding are required, now and in the future, if the Government is going to unlock stalled projects and speed up delivery, as many current projects in the sector are struggling with significant financial viability issues. We believe that realising the Government’s 1.5 million homes target will require close collaboration between local authorities, housing associations, developers, and their supply chains to ensure success through medium and long-term partnerships. 

Beyond new construction, the third highlight was the Government’s acknowledgement of the necessity to provide funding for works to existing social homes. The Budget prioritised further announcements to provide investment into building safety projects with £1 billion being dedicated to the remediation of unsafe cladding in 2025/26. Plans were also announced for continuing efforts to make homes more energy efficient with £3.4bn being dedicated to Labour’s Warm Homes Plan to improve a further 225,000 households. 

On building safety, and specifically cladding remediation, the Chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council said in response to the Government’s statement: 

 “We welcome the Government’s commitment to improving building safety and accelerating the remediation programme, including the new investment to speed up the remediation of social housing.” 

We have been involved in many successful re-cladding and building safety projects, and whilst we are buoyed by the success of these projects, we are also acutely aware that there is still a lot of remediation and building safety work to be carried out to HRBs across the affordable housing stock.  

Landlords that have been able to establish a delivery programme of work to deal with their existing stock over the coming years, are now able to budget and plan more successfully not only on the delivery of their asset management improvement programmes, but they are also able to better understand their future costs for planning in investment for the future. 

If you would like to talk with us about our experience of using Joint Ventures or partnerships as successful methods of delivering new affordable homes, please visit our website here. Similarly, if you would like to find out more about our building safety and cladding remediation projects, please visit our website here.