Stevenage Borough Council

Where are we now - Housing Issues

National policy on housing is set out in the recent Housing Green Paper. This is the first comprehensive statement of the Government's housing policy and the first such document to be published for over 20 years. It puts in place a number of expectations of housing authorities and social landlords:

• The encouragement of a strategic approach to housing 
• An improvement in the quality of housing and housing management
• More choice for tenants and housing applicants
• Greater tenant empowerment

Additionally, the government wishes to see a progressive shift in ownership from local authorities to registered social landlords, (RSLs) and will support a transfer programme of 200,000 homes a year. Housing finance and rent proposals support this policy. There will be a major injection of additional funds into housing with most of it going to the RSL sector and the harmonisation of rents to a level similar to that of RSL rents. The government will however allow extra scope for borrowing to authorities that show high levels of performance, that is gaining two or three stars in an inspection report. The government has also said that Council homes must achieve a "Decent Homes" standard in ten years.

Locally, the Council's housing service has suffered a number of problems. Its performance against statutory indicators on managing empty properties, repairs and maintenance, rent collection and management and repair costs has shown a number of weaknesses. A number of steps have been taken to address these and performance in 2001/02 shows improvements over previous years. (See Best Value Review).

Stevenage suffers from the "New Town Factor" in which very large estates of houses all built at the same time are now deteriorating at the same rate and therefore require high levels of investment if it is to comply with the "Decent Homes" standard. Heavy investment in housing over the coming years will reduce maintenance costs whilst improving tenant satisfaction with their homes.

Stevenage has joined the Powergen EnergyAdvantage programme to secure funding for insulation and other energy saving works to help meet Government targets to eliminate fuel poverty.

Stevenage is an area of relatively high private sector house prices. Indeed, the recent Housing Needs Survey found that over 50% of Stevenage households could not afford to buy homes or rent privately. More than 1000 affordable homes are needed to meet future housing need.

To address this need the Council will continue to work in partnership with registered social landlords to enable affordable housing to be built or acquired.