Housing
Using data to meet growing housing demands Ken Lee, chair of the CIPFA Housing Panel, explains how Housing 360 can support local authorities in addressing and meeting local housing needs and better understanding their housing resilience Housing professionals have been pointing With local authorities’ annual spending on to a growing housing crisis for a number homelessness fast approaching the £1 billion of years. With over one million households mark, the need for social rented housing on council waiting lists, the government has grown ever more acute. Furthermore, has been striving to find an answer that with Housing Associations concentrating reduces this pressure, but also increases on so-called affordable housing, it falls to the availability of homes that people can councils to step up to the plate and deliver. own and recognises the role of renting in The removal of the borrowing cap on local the private and social sectors. It has set authority housing expenditure has meant itself an ambitious target for the number that many councils have started of homes that need to be built to plan how they could reannually. Although more new enter the house building homes are being built, market. We could The rem numbers are still well short see activity that o v a o l f the bo of what is needed. parallels the drive rrowing cap on Unfortunately, the spearheaded by l o c housing al authority Covid-19 pandemic Conservative has exacerbated this minister Rab has me expenditure crisis. Around 40,000 Butler in the a n t th council homeless people are years following s have at many started now in hotels and the Second plan ho to w hostels looking for World War. re-ente they could homes that are within A thorough r their financial means. understanding build the house
ing ma rket
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of the Housing Revenue Account, which records all the transactions of a local authority’s tenants, is a prerequisite to releasing resources to invest in the provision of these much-needed long-term assets. Housing statistics For many years, CIPFA produced a steady stream of housing statistics that were relied on to inform and shape housing services at a local, regional and national level. However, the introduction of Direct Labour Organisations (DLO) in the 1980s meant that much of the detail about the Housing Revenue Account was lost in commercially sensitive DLO trading accounts. Over time, this lack of detail reduced the credibility and usability of the statistics. Following on from this, and our work on the Financial Resilience Index for local authorities, CIPFA recognised that more needed to be done to provide information about Housing Revenue Accounts. The result, developed over the last 18 months with the input of local authority housing finance
