Birmingham leader calls for social housing reset under Burnham

Birmingham’s new council leader has made boosting social house-building his first demand of incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham, warning the city’s housing crisis cannot be solved without more government resources.

Burnham becomes Labour leader today, and will doubtless inherit a burgeoning inbox when he takes over from Kier Starmer as Prime Minister on Monday.

But Cllr Roger Harmer, whose Liberal Democrat-Green-Independent coalition took minority control of Birmingham City Council last month, said he wants more backing from government to help take more than 33,000 people off the authority’s waiting list for housing and into more permanent accommodation.

Speaking at yesterday’s Connections for Prosperity conference in Edgbaston, Harmer and deputy leader Cllr Julien Pritchard told over 250 delegates that sorting out the city’s dilapidated and shrinking supply of council housing was a “big priority” for the incoming administration in Birmingham.

The city’s stock of homes available for social rent has shrunk from a peak of 120,000 to less than half that amount over the past four decades.

Acocks Green councillor Harmer also called for extra regulatory powers for so-called supported exempt accommodation, with the city council currently having to find beds for up to 11,000 vulnerable adults in unregulated residential properties.

“The new Prime Minister has talked a lot about housing and as a society, nationally, we’ve been living off past investments for maybe a couple of generations,” he said.

“We have over 10,000 children living in temporary accommodation,  and the biggest hotel in my ward is now effectively a permanent temporary accommodation centre, the two biggest former nursing homes in my ward are permanent temporary accommodation centres and that is a stain on society nationally.

“We’ve effectively let that happen by not investing enough year-on-year, and we have to turn that around. But when you turn that round and start investing enough, it will be another generation before you get there, but we have to start that process now.

“Give us collectively, as a city, the opportunity to sort out our housing problems. Let us build social housing that we need, let us regulate supported and rental housing properly, give us the options to do that and we’ll get on with it.”

According to government statistics, just over 12,000 social homes for rent were built in the UK last year, down from a post-war peak of almost 200,000 annually in the late 1950’s. Estimates from the National Housing Federation suggest England needs around 90,000 social rent homes a year to meet need, roughly seven to eight times current rates of delivery.

Meanwhile, a report issued by the Local Government Association earlier this month showed council expenditure on temporary accommodation has risen by more than 1,000% since 2011, with local authorities nationally spending around £2bn per year.

The West Midlands region has the second-highest rate of households in temporary accommodation outside the Greater South East, with Birmingham believed to be the highest-spending local authority on temporary accommodation excluding London.

Deputy leader Pritchard said the city needed “investment and tools” to help tackle the city’s accommodation issues, also calling for fiscal devolution for Birmingham to help the authority raise more money.

“We have a massive housing crisis and it’s an affordability crisis primarily,” he said.

“The solution to that is building more genuinely affordable social rent homes and that’s got to be done at a scale to really make a difference, and that’s something that’s at the top of our priority list. The issue is that building houses at scale that are genuinely affordable isn’t something you can do in a year.

“I’ve been asking for, probably, about three things. The first one is real fiscal devolution, not just for the combined authority but for the council as well, to give us more powers to raise our own resources. Secondly, the investment the city region needs is in its transport infrastructure to really make that step change, I think that that’s really, really important.  And then thirdly, we need the investment and the tools to really ramp up that genuinely affordable social housing [offer] as well.”