The DTLR select committee’s empty homes inquiry report, published this week, said that the issue must be tackled in this summer’s comprehensive spending review. It blamed continued greenfield building for stifling urban regeneration.
This was in contrast to the influential Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s land inquiry report, also issued this week, which called for more building on greenfield sites to satisfy demand. It urged increased use of greenfield sites to provide the extra 4.5m new homes needed by 2016 (Housing Today, 7 March).
The MPs’ report slammed the government’s National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal for, “naively assuming every neighbourhood can be saved without looking at the long-term viability of an area”.
They concluded, “radical intervention is needed” in inner city areas where housing markets have collapsed.
“The housing market renewal approach needed to achieve this must be on a large, conurbation-wide scale,” the report said. “It will take a long time and so must be started as soon as possible. It will require significant additional funding, of the order of hundreds of millions of pounds per annum.”
As this magazine revealed, the National Housing Federation, councils in the Key Cities Group and the Northern Consortium of Housing Authorities submitted a bid for a decade-long £600-800m a year fund late last year (Housing Today, 8 November).
Such a fund should be sufficiently flexible to allow a council to act as soon as an area appears to be at risk of falling demand, the select committee said.
Its report also called for greater emphasis on prevention in regeneration packages to stop low demand spreading to other areas, and for a further shake-up of the planning system.
The right to buy should be suspended in areas where stock clearance is under discussion, it recommended.
If low demand is not addressed, “northern cities will consist of a centre surrounded by a devastated no man’s land, encompassed in turn by suburbia”, it warned.
The report’s conclusion was that a range of government policies and initiatives have undermined efforts to meet the DTLR’s target to turn low demand around by 2010.
Planning guidance was not enforced and a concentration on more deprived areas ignored districts on the brink of becoming deprived.
It criticised regional development agencies for neglecting regeneration, calling on them to work with the Housing Corporation and government regional offices to tackle unpopular housing.
Other recommendations included reducing VAT to 5 per cent on refurbishment and raising it to 5 per cent on new build, private greenfield schemes.
The report said that planning permission should not be granted on greenfield sites in the north west and “similar” regions, as this undermines urban renewal.
Empty homes. Stationery Office. £14.50. Tel: 0845 7023 474.
Source
Housing Today
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