Ever-increasing circles

There are plenty of flip sides to success, as Bristol knows well. Economically, it is Britain’s most successful city of the past 20 years as well as the fastest-growing in Europe outside London. From 1995 to 2001, 67,000 new jobs were created in the council areas of Bath & North-east Somerset, Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset.

But while there may be plenty of jobs, the supply of housing is not growing at the same rate. “Lack of affordable housing is a really serious problem. There are 18,000 people on the housing list,” says Ian Crawley, director of neighbourhood and housing services at Bristol council.

A report from consultant DTZ Pieda confirmed the city needs 3700 new homes a year. Right to buy, which loses Bristol council 500 homes a year to the 250 it builds, exacerbates the problem.

To tackle it, the four local authorities have formed the West of England Partnership. Its first priority, says Crawley, is to decide who will be responsible for building new homes. A stock options appraisal is under way in Bristol: on 22 January, tenants voted to stay with the council and a report on the appraisal will be published this month.

In the mean time, the council is replacing obsolete stock with brand new at almost no cost. The city used to have 5000 post-war prefabs but only 330 remain, many with large gardens. High-density properties are being built in their place by developer Bovis: it gets the land for free and will build up to 900 homes, 330 of which will be given to the council. The project has gone so well that a similar one is now planned that will replace 600 homes.

To achieve economies of scale, the West of England Partnership has formed a consortium of local registered social landlords, Homes West, to set up procurement partnerships.

But building more homes won’t solve all of the council’s housing problems. Crawley estimates that it needs £2m a year to hit the decent homes standard by 2010. To help raise that sum, some of the council’s 11 area offices and four sub-offices are to be closed to save on rent and back-office staff will be brought back onto a central site in the next 18 months.

Hopefully, this will also improve the consistency of the service: in its report last December, the Audit Commission gave the council’s landlord services one star and criticised disparities in service delivery across different offices.

The council has 1000 units that won’t be decent by 2010 and will have to be cleared or sold on. But this could be a hidden blessing: at auction six months ago, the council sold 14 properties for £2m. Crawley says even if homes aren’t run-down, selling them can make sense. “A one-bed flat in the city’s Clifton area might sell for enough to house three or four families in another area.”

Homelessness is a significant problem in Bristol, with an estimated 400 homeless individuals, including the hidden homeless. The council invested £400,000 in homelessness prevention teams last April, employing 14 staff to act as mediators to prevent people moving away from families or falling out with private landlords. It has also brought about 30 units marked for demolition back into use as temporary accommodation.

Next month the city’s Home Office-sponsored anti-begging trial, which it claims has stamped out begging by making contact with individual beggars and referring them for drug treatment where necessary, is up for audit by the government.

Bristol hopes to widen the initiative’s remit to cover issues such as street drinking, fly-posting and graffiti.

The West of England Partnership will launch the initial findings of an affordable housing needs model for the subregion and Bristol council will follow this up with a study on the needs of Gypsies and Travellers and, later this year, a register of people with supported housing needs.

So the council doesn’t lack ambitious plans and the Audit Commission at least thinks it has the right idea – last year’s one-star rating was accompanied by “promising prospects” for improvement. Now it’s up to the council to prove them right.