This will enable housing associations, and others, to build the desperately needed 70,000 new social homes a year".
This deal will enable housing associations to avoid legislation which, they believe, could see them being reclassified as public bodies.
Offering landlords local housing allowance levels is not enough to tempt them into this market unless local authorities can top this up with additional funding to enable housing associations to make a better offer.
Key points: Liam Booth-Smith, chief executive of thinktank Localis, welcomed the £1.4bn injection into the affordable homes programme, which would enable housing associations, developers and councils to bid for a larger pot of money to fund new affordable housing.
The program is designed to enable housing employees to access as much information as is available about tenants all at once, instead of using the current scattershot system, which has long been criticized as being slow and inefficient.
We are investing £31.7m in 37 partnership projects across England to enable housing providers and voluntary sector organisations, local authorities and financial service providers, to prevent an estimated 150,000 of the most vulnerable social housing residents from falling into a spiral of debt.
Although there is still a degree of uncertainty about the extent to which social landlords will be able to access energy company obligation subsidy, these two initiatives will enable housing providers to make or facilitate tenants to receive the necessary capital investments to improve the energy efficiency of their homes upfront.
Matt Leach, chief executive of the Housing Action Charitable Trust, provided a glimpse of these possibilities during a session on its collaboration with the Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion to produce the Community Insight website – a tool that plots open data on community resources on to a map and enables housing organisations to upload and overlay their stock data.
The Government's confirmation that rents will rise by CPI +1% for 10 years is welcome, but we need to discuss the fine detail of how this will operate in practice if it is to enable housing associations to plan with confidence.
Low-tech baby monitors are being swapped for hi-tech wearables that monitor a baby's breathing and heart rate; children's board games have evolved into smartphone apps; and Barbie now lives in a Wi-Fi enabled house.
