The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) has submitted its Comprehensive Spending Review to the Treasury for the Autumn Budget Spending review.
As one of the leading housing organisations CIH, has used this opportunity to call on the Government to take drastic action to tackle the plight of the ongoing housing crisis.
CIH believes the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of home and the extent of the many inter-related challenges affecting the housing market.
The submission includes a package of proposals designed to make sure that homes, and the people who live in them, are at the heart of post-covid green economic recovery plans over the next three years.
Director of policy and external affairs with CIH, James Prestwich, reveals, “We firmly believe large-scale investment in social housing can provide a key building block for the Country as we look to recover from the pandemic.
“Government’s desire to “build back better” and “level up” the UK can be best achieved by a generational investment in new and existing social homes.
“We are calling on the Government to boost the post-covid economy by providing a multi-year funding package to support the delivery of up to 90,000 new social homes per year for 10 years. We believe the economic and societal case for a programme of this scale is well-established and though it would have been an easier option, in the context of under-pressure public finances, to scale down this ask we believe the housing crisis can only be solved by an ambitious programme of social housebuilding.
“Our submission is as much about existing homes as it is new ones. Ensuring there is sufficient capacity within the social housing sector to drive better outcomes for tenants is essential. We need investment in retrofitting existing housing to achieve net zero carbon and align investment for retrofitting of homes with measures to improve wider housing conditions and adaptations. In addition, we need increasing support to enable social housing providers to carry out works to make buildings safer.
CIH believes that tackling the human, social and financial costs of rough sleeping and homelessness are spend-to-save initiatives, and our submission sets out a raft of proposals in this area.