Our pick of the best Housing Today features from the past 12 months
Throughout the year Housing Today brought you hard-hitting campaigns, investigations and analysis pieces.
See more of Housing Today’s best articles from 2024
Below is our pick of our best features and campaigns in 2024.
11. A crisis hiding in plain sight: is the UK’s built environment failing children and young people?
Published in October
The covid-19 pandemic revealed a troubling truth about the UK’s built environment: it often seems to be failing the youngest in society. While public discourse often focuses on housing supply and affordability, less attention is given to how new developments cater to children and adolescents. The lack of access to safe, recreational spaces – crucial for mental and physical well-being – remains a major oversight within many developments.
Only 6% of new homes in the UK are designed by architects, according to the RIBA, a fact that the institute believes is reflected in the poor design of many developments, which often fail to provide access to green space and areas for play. Research suggests that these shortcomings disproportionately affect young people, particularly in lower-income areas, and highlight the urgent need for solutions.
10. How and why Stewart Milne collapsed: analysing the numbers
Published in January
The collapse of the Stewart Milne Group left many in the industry scratching their heads. How such a large housebuilder could find itself in administration? And is its failure a bad omen for the rest of the housing sector?
Housing Today took a look at the firm’s accounts going back nearly a decade to find out how this once healthy firm fell into trouble and discovered a homegrown crisis of dwindling assets rooted in the slump in the oil-linked property market around Aberdeen and the firm’s hesitance to buy land during Covid.
Click here to read the full article
9. ‘The figures on starts are terrifying’. What’s really happening to the Affordable Homes Programme
Published in February
“We do not believe there is any funding gap,” said a junior housing minister under the last government in January.
Baroness Scott had been pressed by MPs on the housing select committee over the government’s troubled £11.5bn affordable housing programme.
In February Housing Today investigated what is happening to the AHP and what could turn the situation around.
8. The big social media question: should housing associations leave X (Twitter)?
Published in November
The role of social media in fuelling far-right riots was a big talking point this year, not least for housing association leaders, some of whom had been already questioning whether to remain on the platform before the summer’s disturbances.
Some social landlords describe X as “toxic” but for others it is still a “shop window” and remains an effective route to communicate with residents.
As the platform sheds more and more users, Alex Funk looked at the pros and cons of its continued use in the housing sector and how individual landlords are responding
Click here to read the full article
7. How worried should the sector be about Vistry?
Published in November
For the past year, it is fair to say that partnerships housebuilder Vistry has been the toast of the housebuilding sector. While others have been reducing their output, Vistry has grown rapidly, saying in September that it had become the UK’s biggest residential developer – with its eyes on delivering 30,000 to 40,000 homes a year in the long term.
Its focus on the vital affordable housing space means that it has also made itself a key part of the government’s 1.5 million homes ambition.
But, on 8 October, events took a turn for the worse. More than £1bn was wiped off the value of the company in a single day following a profit warning related to what it initially said were £115m of “understated” cost projections on its projects.
Joey Gardiner looked at why Vistry lost half its value after two profit warnings in two months.
Published in September
With Barratt and Redrow joining forces in the first deal of what some expect to be a wave of industry consolidation, Joey Gardiner looked at whether the ground-breaking merger is likely to help or hinder the government’s chances of hitting its sky-high 1.5m housebuilding target
Click here to read the full article
5. Top 50 Housebuilders 2024
This year has been a tough for the housebuilding market, and this year our annual Top 50 Housebuilding list, which ranks housebuilders by turnover, showed just how difficult it has been.
Only one of the top 20 housebuilders (ranked by revenue from housebuilding activities) saw a profit increase in the latest figures.
Daniel Gayne looked for silver linings in a gloomy year
4. A Fair Deal for Housing: 21 recommendations to boost housebuilding
Published in January
In January, Housing Today’s A Fair Deal for Housing campaign to boost housebuilding published 21 recoomendations to boost delivery.
The campaign, working in collaboration with the Building the Future Commission, called for a review of affordable housing funding and changes to the planning system.
The report’s recommendations covered four main areas: significantly increasing affordable housing delivery; raising private sector supply; boosting brownfield regeneration and estate redevelopment; and reforming the planning system.
Several of the report’s recommendations, including focusing on planning at a strategic level, were subseqently adopted by the new Labour government.
Click here to read the full article
3. What does the collapse in section 106 demand mean for housing delivery?
Published in August
Housing associations have stopped bidding to buy section 106 homes in many parts of the country, resulting in a drop-off in affordable homes and major delays on for sale schemes.
Joey Gardiner asked what the implications are and how the problem can be resolved.
2. The ins and outs of Labour’s new National Planning Policy Framework
Published in August
Keir Starmer’s government has put planning reform at the heart of its ambition to get Britain building, to the delight of many developers.
The new government certainly did not waste time, publishing a proposed National Planning Policy Framework within weeks of gaining power.
Daniel Gayne looked at the proposals and assessed their chances of success
Click here to read the full article
1. Every Person Counts campaign and Top 30 Housing Champions
In March Housing Today launched Every Person Counts - an initiative to share insights around workforce issues across the whole of the housing sector.
Every Person Counts aims to provide a place where debates about skills, employment, regulatory compliance, equality diversity and inclusivity and workplace culture can play out and solutions can be shared.
Over the past few months we’ve published articles on various topics affecting the housing workplace, including consumer regulation in social housiong, dealing with increased demand for temporary accommodation, tackling anti-social behaviour and the use of technology to improve customer service.
We have shared stories from frontline housing workers on the day to day challenges and opportunities they find in their job.
As part of the campaign in October we published our Top 30 Housing Champions list, celebrating those housing professionals who are going above and beyond in their day-to-day roles to improve services for residents
Click here to read more about the Every Person Counts campaign
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