Enough of the glass half-empty

I’m just back from the annual CIH conference at Harrogate and feeling rather depressed, not just because I am half a stone heavier. The tone of most of the sessions that my Chair, Sue Roberts MBE, and I attended was negative and flat, and the people I spoke to agreed.    

While I know there are worries ahead with benefit cuts and so on, surely we go to these annual get togethers to come away inspired and reinvigorated, better equipped and more enthusiastic to improve homes and lives locally?   

Most of the depression stemmed from the fact that building new council and other social homes is now much more difficult with less funding for building new homes. The cuts have hit housing harder than any other service. 

Houisng is suffering some of the deepest cuts of all Government services. The government sees new social housing being funded by increasing the rent on some new homes in the housing association sector to 80% of market rent. Councils can also borrow money for new building, if they have the headroom in their business plans, and pay it off using the rental income over the next 30-40 years. Whether or not they have the capacity to borrow, councils may be called on to contribute in kind by giving away land and allowing private homes to be built to subsidise the social ones.  

As an Arms Length Management Organisation, we don’t own homes or land and at the moment, we cannot access funding to build new homes in our own right. The challenge we face is to work out how can we contribute to getting more social homes in Wolverhampton where we now have more than l3,000 people on the waiting list. Many of these are our own tenants who desperately need larger or more suitable housing.  

One way is to work with investors – large insurance companies, pension funds and the like – who could buy or build homes and then lease them to Wolverhampton Homes to manage for the next 10, 20 or 30 years – or even longer. We already manage nearly 23,000 homes, so it would be both easy and cheap for us to manage several hundred more.  

As a three star housing organisation, the investor could be safe in thinking that their investment was in good hands and they would get a small but steady return on their investment. When the homes are eventually paid for, depending on whether or not the council contributed the land free of charge or not, the homes could be sold and profits split, or they would pass to the council forever.

Much of the talk at conference was about now being the time of management not building so I for one, feel cheered by the prospect of capitalising on our strength in managing homes while creating more Council housing for the people of Wolverhampton.

A foray into the world of blogging

This is my first blog post - I’m hugely excited to be able to communicate directly with Wolverhampton Homes’ tenants and the wider world. Blogging offers a great opportunity to spark discussion, hear what people think and explain my views.

This is a critical time for housing and for the City of Wolverhampton, and I’m looking forward to contributing my thoughts on the issues of the day. I hope you’ll humour me by commenting and responding, and above all, letting me know what you really think!

Thank you for reading it.