Miliband denies housing policy is short-sighted
Ministers have rejected accusations that the government’s housing policy is only about buildings and does not focus enough on creating sustainable communities.
National Housing Federation chief executive David Orr yesterday warned that the government’s strategy was short-sighted and did not provide the investment in social and physical infrastructure needed to make successful neighbourhoods.
“While admirable initiatives in their own right, so far I have seen little evidence of a coherent strategy to ensure successful neighbourhoods exist in 30 years’ time,” he told the organisation’s annual conference in Birmingham.
“Instead, it’s all about building as many houses as cheaply as possible, as quickly as possible rather than a long-term vision.”
But this morning local government minister David Miliband expressed surprise at the criticism, saying the government’s housing strategy went “right through until 2016”.
And he insisted the concentration has been on community as well as housing, with an emphasis on the need to build schools and provide adequate transport around new developments.
However, he acknowledged the difficulty of balancing the 30 per cent increase in the number of households in the past 30 years with a 55 per cent fall in new house building during the same period.
“You’ve got extra demand and less supply and that is creating the sort of tensions that mean that first-time-buyers can’t get on to the housing market, that council tenants are frustrated and that is the agenda we’re determined to get at,” Mr Miliband told Today.
But he said the government was “very clear” about the fact that different policies were required to meet different needs across the country.
“While in the Thames Gateway there is a large programme of expansion of housing with the transport and the other services to match funded by government,” he continued.
“In other parts of the country we’re trying to revive housing markets by making sure there’s a mix of public and private housing together precisely to create the sort of neighbourhoods that people want to live in.”
Mr Orr yesterday urged the government to free up regulation of housing associations to allow them to improve delivery of non-housing services, such as employment training and childcare.
“The task of housing associations is to create successful neighbourhoods which people are happy to be a part of,” he told delegates.
“To do this we need to go beyond our traditional role of landlord and provide a broad range of services that will improve the quality of life for the whole community. This is our commitment. The government needs to adopt a similar approach.”
