Sorry, the system's broken!

in #housing • 9 days ago

At least if you're in need of social housing in the good old county of Herefordshire!

Honestly, the mark of 2025 so far has been work, work, work, and more work, and the stand-out thing within work is the number of requests I get at the MP office to expedite requests for social housing.

Obviously I can't share specific details, but these are people who are either homeless and living in wholly unsuitable accommodation, or are living in problem social housing, typically with damp and mold and basically wanting to live in a dry house.

And of course the recent flooding hasn't helped pressure either.

I'm not 100% sure how I ended up with all the housing enquiries in my inbox, but there you go, every day there's a new one, and the old ones don't get resolved - I get a complaint, the constituent invariably lists every problem they can think of, I pass this on to the council and...

Well they used to respond to me back in the good old days at the back end of 2024, now they just seemed to have... stopped.

I've actually just started telling new cases the basic truth of the matter which is yes I can advocate for you but no they won't respond for three weeks or more and even when they do they won't listen because there's so much pressure on housing.

DALL·E 2025-01-30 19.06.18 - A dystopian urban landscape dominated by rows of crumbling, overcrowded housing blocks. The buildings have broken windows, collapsed roofs, and expose.webp

The causes of the problems...?

Honestly I'm interested....

Obviously it's supply being more restricted than demand - there is much less social housing available than people who want it... NB I can see why people want it, the typical rent for a social association two bed house is around £400-500, which is around 20-30% cheaper than what you'd get on the open market.

But what's behind this, is it lack of housing supply overall? I mean if there was a health private rental sector rents would be cheap, they are not.

Or is it that housing is just slow to shift, people need 2 months notice, once it's empty it needs maintaining, which can take time, so there's so slow turnaround.

Or is it that Herefordshire Council don't really give a toss about housing, they've chosen to underfund that particularly. I mean they've got to choose SOMETHING to not fund properly in the current economic climate, housing may well be that option!

Truth be told it's probably a combination of factors.

What to do....?

I'm at a bit of a loss TBH, I'm gonna have to bring this up at our meeting tomorrow.

I mean obviously longer term we need either more funding for social housing or just more housing, but there's little i can see that we can do in the short-term. There isn't any extra money for housing coming our way this parliamentary term.

This current situation can't continue it's a total waste of my time.

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9 days ago in #housing by
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       9 days ago 

      There's a couple of different factors:

      There is a housing crisis and not enough homes (and possibly the right kind of homes) for everyone who needs or wants one. The population has steadily grown, demographics and housing preferences have changed, notably the dramatic increase in single-person households - something like 40%? And at least one generation has been priced out of the market.

      For social housing, a contributing factor was the Right to Buy scheme where tenants had the right to buy their property. However, councils were not allowed to keep the receipts and replace social housing that went out of the supply. Some research recently found that the majority of social housing properties that were sold to tenants have now come into the hands of private landlords. So a plan that could have been argued, and has, was about the distribution of wealth more equally by offering people the opportunity to buy their own homes has, over time, simply become the privatisation of public resources and the transfer of wealth to already wealthier people.

      Housing lists in London boroughs can often have four times the number of households waiting for a home than they have properties in total. I'm aware of places in both London and Leicester where there are multiple generations living in one and two bedroomed housing both social and privately owned. A friend of mine lived in a hostel for fourteen years in Kensington and Chelsea (the richest borough in England) before he was offered a home. Private rentals are extortionate and often have poor conditions. London boroughs, between them, spend £4.0 million a day on temporary accommodation, mainly to private landlords.

      Since 2010, council budgets have been reduced by 60% and there simply isn't enough funding to fulfill their statutory duties. I imagine that housing officers are under intense pressure and it must be very dispiriting for them how little they can do.

      The Labour Party Policy has quite a bit about housing and their plans to build 1.5 million houses over the next Parliament in their manifesto. I can't get you to the exact section but the link will take you to the relevant chapter and you can scroll down a couple of sections to the housing bit under Get Britain Building Again.

      There are community housing schemes around the country, there's at least one in Leicester where housing was built on unused wasteland next to the railway line (there is a lot of unused land owned by transport authorities). Where I work, we have a collaboration funded by the Lloyds Foundation to look at a) getting more money into housing services and b) looking at alternative housing solutions. The collaboration is between expert organisations that provide services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence and, initially, five local authorities. Completely coincidentally, a friend phoned me on Tuesday with a contact in the construction industry who wants to do some charity work with women and children. That was really good news!

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       9 days ago 

      All very depressing. I'm sure my new colleague worked in Leicester - social housing is in a worse state here I think! There are no council owned houses here! It's 100% HA.

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       9 days ago 

      I agree, Shires have their own problems.

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       9 days ago 


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           9 days ago 

          Should immigration to the UK be temporarily curtailed if there is housing shortage, or crisis?

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           9 days ago 

          I think the problem is more lack of housing. In the long term immigrants tend to boost our economy.

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               9 days ago 

              It is very difficult for many people. I think the government should find a quick solution to this problem.

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                   9 days ago 

                  I read an article a few years ago which said that they're were only 4,000 homeless people in the UK. I was surprised as the number seemed so low considering the population and thought that it had to be incorrect.

                  I'd always thought that the UK was in much better shape than your progeny here across the pond until I heard back from my Brit classmates in Germany about the reality of the situation. It makes me wonder what the impact will be over time of the seemingly endless supply of asylum seekers being fished out of our English Channel and escorted into your country.

                  One wonders if a few of these billionaires might step up to the plate and put their patriotism to work at building social housing and donating it to the local councils. This is what I'd be doing if I was Elon Musk rich as a way of giving back to the country which helped to make me so rich. Less multiple mansions, more social housing.

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                   9 days ago 

                  This is what I'd be doing if I was Elon Musk rich

                  What a lovely idea.

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                   7 days ago 

                  There are definitely more than 4000 homeless people in the country, no idea where that figure came from!

                  Ultimately we do need more houses, we have plenty of room! But it's not just that there is a tonne of low quality housing with damp and mould problems, they also need sorting out!

                  Another factor is lonely old people in massive ex family homes that can't afford to heat them, it's bonkers.

                  The distribution is just all wrong!

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