Shelter: '98% of councils have failed to meet affordable housing need'

Around 98% of councils have failed to provide the affordable housing needed in their area, a charity said today.

Shelter said only eight out of the 323 local authorities in England had managed to provide enough affordable homes to meet demand in 2008-09.

It added that 90% of councils had provided fewer than half of the homes they said were needed in their area during the year.

Local authorities are responsible for identifying housing needs in their area and ensuring the demand for them is met.

Shelter has created a website to show how well councils are performing against their own analysis of housing needs.

It hopes the website will provide councillors and members of the public with straightforward information on the levels of housing that need to be provided to keep up with demand. The group plans to update its league table annually.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said: "We know that the recession has created a difficult climate for house building, but these figures clearly show that councils must work far harder to ensure more desperately needed affordable homes are provided if they ever hope to meet the housing needs of their local population.

"With 1.8 million households on housing waiting lists and more than one million children living in overcrowded homes it is unacceptable that only eight councils have provided enough affordable homes to meet local need."

He added that with council budgets set to be slashed, it was important that all political parties made the provision of affordable housing a top priority.

The charity based housing need for an area on the council's own assessment in its Strategic Housing Market Assessment or Housing Needs Study.

It then compared this with the average number of affordable homes that had been delivered during the past three years, according to figures produced by the Communities and Local Government department.

South Norfolk Council, Malvern Hills District Council, Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council and Warrington Borough Council were the top performing local authorities in terms of the provision of affordable homes, with all four councils producing more properties than they had assessed as being needed.

But at the other end of the scale 81 councils had delivered only 10% or less of the homes they had said were needed, according to the group.

Gary Porter, chairman of the Local Government Association environment board, said: "It is depressing that an organisation which presents itself as a serious advocate for better housing policy is using flawed research to lay the blame for the shortage of affordable housing at councils' doors.

"Councils up and down the country want to build and refurbish homes that families need. A serious plan for increasing the number of affordable homes needs to address the barriers which stand in the way of councils building the homes they know people need.

"Town halls have also been campaigning for years to change the way council housing is funded to allow them to build hundreds of thousands of much-needed homes and have outlined proposals this week that could help councils deliver up to 500,000 affordable homes."

A Communities and Local Government spokeswoman said: "It is right that we need to provide more affordable homes and sooner and that's why Government has made housing a top priority, boosting funding for housebuilding by £1.5 billion to invest £7.5 billion over this year and next.

"Many councils are already taking the lead in delivering affordable homes in their area and we'll shortly be putting a deal on the table to dismantle the current system of council housing finance so that more money is available for councils to manage their housing stock and build new homes.

"On top of this we've made funding available to councils to start the largest council house building programme in two decades and are also providing housing associations with support to build more affordable homes."

Conservative Shadow Minister for Housing Grant Shapps said: “It’s great to see that 8 out of the top 10 councils in Shelter’s new league table of best housing performers are Conservative.

"This independent survey demonstrates that when it comes to meeting housing need it’s the Conservatives who are most likely to create the housing that is so desperately needed in this country.”

The website can be found at www.shelter.org.uk/housingleaguetabledata.