Here is a useful summary of the queens speech from the CIH – very helpful.

What you need to know about the Queen’s speech 2016

…and here is the same from Servce Matters:

Queen Speech – 18 May Briefing for Housing

DH officials will carry out initial scoping work that will examine local data on housing stock conditions and link this to the health of local populations. It intends to estimate the costs to health bodies and local authorities of poor housing.

The move, which housing figures believe to be unprecedented, signals a growing willingness at the top of government to strengthen the links between housing, health and social care policy.

This is a very helpful publication from the CIH which you may wish to read – its a great summary of the new act:

What you need to know about the Housing and Planning Act 2016

The government will legislate to weaken town halls’ ability to impose some planning restrictions on developments, in a new bill announced in the Queen’s Speech.

According to Inside Housing:

“A new law will address the “overuse and, in some cases, misuse of certain planning conditions” to ensure housing can be built more quickly, a government briefing note on the proposed bill said.

The Neighbourhood Planning and Infrastructure Bill will ensure local planning authorities can only insist on pre-commencement planning conditions “when they are absolutely necessary”.

Pre-commencement planning conditions are conditions attached to a new development that must be in place before building begins.

They mostly apply to infrastructure, such as a new road near a housing development, however developers have raised concerns that planning authorities have been using them excessively.

The bill will also strengthen neighbourhood planning by “making the local government duty to support [neighbourhood planning] groups more transparent and by improving the process for reviewing and updating plans”.

It will reform the compulsory purchase order process system to make it “clearer, fairer and faster for all those involved”.

The National Infrastructure Commission, a body which provides the government with advice on infrastructure chaired by Lord Adonis, will be put on a statutory footing. The bill will also privatise the Land Registry.

David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, said: “The new measures in the Neighbourhood Planning and Infrastructure Bill could be a real catalyst for speeding up locally-driven housebuilding, particularly in rural areas.”

Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation, welcomed the change to pre-commencement planning conditions. However, she added: “We would like to see more detail on how this is going to be enforced and how already-stretched local authorities will cope.”

Terrie Alafat, chief executive of the Chartered Institue of Housing, criticised the government for not incluidng a proposed new duty on councils to prevent homelessness in the Queen’s Speech.

Ms Alafat said: ““At a time when more and more people are becoming homeless, we are disappointed that government has not taken this opportunity to introduce a new duty for local authorities to prevent people losing their homes.

“We’ve seen the positive impact that a homelessness prevention duty has had in Wales with a 70 per cent success rate in the first three quarters of 2015/16 – so we urge government to consider seriously the scope to introduce similar measures in England.” ”

A lack of detail surrounding plans for portable discounts could slow the introduction of the government’s flagship extension of the Right to Buy to housing association tenants.

Members of a ‘sounding board’, which is working with the National Housing Federation (NHF) to develop the policy, have flagged the issue as a major source of concern.

According to Inside Housing:

“Under the ‘voluntary’ Right to Buy extension, housing associations will be allowed to exclude certain properties from the scheme at their discretion.

This is likely to include hundreds of thousands of homes built under Section 106 agreements, homes in rural areas and socially rented properties funded by historic charitable trusts.

Tenants living in these properties will qualify for ‘portable discounts’ which will allow them to buy another housing association property elsewhere- an aspect of the scheme which has not been piloted.

One member of the sounding board, who asked not to be named, said: “There is a lot of work going on to try and figure out how that would work practically and at the moment we are finding more difficulties than solutions.”

Concerns surround the ease of finding an alternative home in areas where there is limited development or association stock and what happens if a property cannot be found.

There are also calls for clarity over mechanisms for securing agreements with other housing associations for tenants to buy from their stock where necessary.

The sounding board has three meetings remaining, the first next Tuesday, after which the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) will produce a draft scheme for association boards to consider, before the extension is introduced in the autumn.

Sounding board members said this timescale would be “challenging” and suggested the portability element may take longer to develop.

One added that the sounding board had hoped tenants would be allowed to buy any home on the open market.

However, the government has not agreed to this as it wants the compensation for discounts to be paid to housing associations to ensure it is invested in new supply.

Paul Hackett, chief executive of Amicus Horizon, said his organisation plans to limit exemptions to as few properties as possible to avoid issues with portable discounts.

Sue Chalkley, chief executive of Hastoe which works mainly in rural communities, said many of its homes will be excluded, but is “concerned” about where suitable homes would be found for a portable discount.

The NHF, which set up the sounding board, did not comment.

A spokesperson for the DCLG said: “We are continuing to work with [housing associations] on the detailed implementation of this.”

JARGON BUSTER

Portable discount: Where a home is excluded from the voluntary Right to Buy by a housing association, tenants can use the discount they would have qualified for to buy another property. This must be another housing association home, but could be one owned by another association.

Voluntary Right to Buy: Right to Buy discounts will be extended to housing associations ‘voluntarily’ after the majority of the sector backed an NHF-brokered deal with government in September. In exchange for the deal, the government offered greater flexibility, full compensation and no legislation to introduce it.

In numbers

1.3m Number of housing association tenants the government has pledged to offer the Right to Buy to

10 years Residency in social housing the current eligibility period to qualify being tested in the pilot scheme

£103,900 Maximum discount under the scheme, available to tenants in London. £77,900 is the maximum outside the capital

443 Housing association tenants which had applied to buy their home under the pilot scheme as of April. There were 48,000 housing association properties in the scheme “

The phasing out of lifetime tenancies will not negatively impact protected demographic groups overall, the government has said.

According to Inside Housing:

“The government is proposing phasing out lifetime tenancies for new social tenants and instead requiring landlords to offer fixed-term tenancies. The government announced last week that social landlords would be able to offer lifetime tenancies for “up to 10 years”, rather than five years as originally proposed.

In its equalities impact assessment , the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) assessed the potential impact of the policy on several demographic groups, including older people, younger people, families, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities and women.

It said: “While it is possible that there may be some negative impacts on some members of protected groups, for instance increasing concerns about future security of tenure where their housing need is marginal, this is outweighed by the wider benefits to protected groups as a whole.

“All the protected groups should benefit from better use of the social rented stock and from the regular assessment of tenants’ circumstances that should ensure a better fit between the household and their social home.” Inside Housing has asked DCLG for more information about the methodology used for the impact assessment.

The government is expected to publish guidance on the use of 10-year tenancies later in the year. However, the equalities impact assessment states: “Five years will be the normal maximum (for households without children of school age), with 10 years applicable for those with longer-term needs, such as older people, the disabled and their carers.”

The assessment said older people are “much more likely” to under-occupy their social rented home. It said 58% lifetime tenancies for under-occupying households had a tenant aged 60 or over compared to 36% of social rented houses overall. It said older people will benefit from the policy because it will make it “easier for social landlords to support older tenants’ move to more manageable-sized accommodation, freeing up larger homes for families”.

Younger people are “overrepresented” in social housing compared to other age groups, according to the assessment. It said 21% of lettings were made to people aged 18 to 24 in 2013/14.

The assessment concluded: “There is a potential for them to benefit from the increased freedom for landlords to offer shorter-term tenancies (i.e. between two and five years), where for example landlords use them to support young people into work.”

The government conceded there may be a negative impact on individuals who are forced to leave a tenancy, but “the policy will not have a substantial impact on discrimination overall”.

“The policy should have benefits for the wider community by ensuring a fair distribution of a limited, subsidised resource,” it added. “

This update is in April 2016 from the CIH.

Always useful.

What you need to know about the progress of the Housing and Planning Bill 2015

Read Clifton’s farewell message here:

HDN-eBriefing-April-2016

According to IPPR:

“The north of England has always been characterised as having a rich and vibrant civil society. However, civil society in the North is currently undergoing considerable change. Over the next three years, IPPR North will undertake a programme of research on, and entitled, the Future of Civil Society in the North. It will form a coherent evidence base to help inform and shape local, regional and national policymaking regarding the role of civil society in the north of England.

This short briefing paper sets out a different way of thinking about civil society, which will inform our ongoing programme of work. We propose that civil society can be understood in terms of three key principles.

• Civil society is about relationships: it is about people coming together on the basis of a mutual interest, a common goal or a shared space, and about the networks of relationships that emerge through this process.
• Civil society is about space and place: it takes place in local communities, in neighbourhoods and public spaces; it helps to shape and bring meaning to local areas; and it constitutes a public sphere in which people can come together to converse. In each of these respects, the forms and nature of civil society are necessarily determined in part by wider structural trends.
• Civil society is about value: it is both about how we value its activities and the types of values, beliefs, opinions and attitudes that underpin it.

Informed by these three key principles, our work on the Future of Civil Society in the North will investigate different ways of thinking about and understanding civil society. Our programme of work will be particularly focussed on the following themes.

• The types of civil society relationships and institutions that are likely to survive or thrive in light of ongoing structural changes across the north of England.
• How civil society is shaped by, and in turn shapes, different spaces – from the level of the neighbourhood to that of the devolved city region, and across entire regions, including the North as a whole.
• The different ways in which civil society is valued in the North, and how that value is shaped by political, economic, environmental and social contexts.”