Lates Northern Housing Monitor outlines state of housing in the region
A group of Northern housing associations has called on the government to commit £1.4bn to regeneration in the North.
The Northern Housing Consortium (NHC) last week launched its latest ‘state of the region’ report at an event in parliament.
The Northern Housing Monitor 2024/25 found that 27% of private rented homes in the North did not meet current Decent Homes standards and that rates of demolition in the region had dropped by around a quarter since 2019/20, indicating the worst homes were not being replaced.
On the back of these findings, the NHC has called for the creation of a dedicated five-year funding stream to support housing-led regeneration in the North.
It also said that the government could unlock up to 320,000 homes on brownfield land in the North through a ten-year £4.2 billion programme to remediate all the North’s brownfield land, and recommended additional investment in energy efficiency.
Previous NHC research found that £500 million of retrofit funding per year up to 2030 is needed for the North to upgrade all social homes to EPC band C.
“The government recently announced a £2 billion top up of the Affordable Homes Programme, something we’d been campaigning for to enable our members to continue building,” said Tracy Harrison, chief executive, Northern Housing Consortium.
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“However, to make a real change, longer term funding is needed to build more homes and improve existing homes and places.
“Lower land values make building in the North more affordable. We are leading the way with devolution, which means in many areas there is already the infrastructure and collaboration in place to better target funding.”
The monitor, which is produced by Arc4 and supported by Believe Housing, Bernicia and Yorkshire Housing, also found that only one in seven of the 600,000 social rent homes in the North sold through Right to Buy have been replaced.
Nearly 500,000 households on social housing waiting lists in the North during the period studied – a 13 per cent increase on the previous year - while the number of households forced to live in temporary accommodation is also rising fast with a yearly increase of around 16%.
More than 14,000 children in the region are now living in temporary accommodation.
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