The Housing Forum’s response to the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement

The biggest announcement in this year’s autumn statement – with the biggest budget attached – was on the Local Housing Allowance. This was previously set at the 30th percentile of market rents – meaning those on low incomes should be able to find somewhere affordable in the bottom third of the market. However it’s been frozen since 2020 and is now well below market rents in many areas. The chancellor announced that it will be re-pegged to 2023 rent levels from April. This will be welcome news to local authorities in particular and should help ease pressure on Temporary Accommodation from people unable to afford private renting.

We’d been hoping for some funding to help unlock the problems with nutrient neutrality rules that are holding up housing in many areas (see our explainer on nutrient neutrality for details). There’s £110m for nutrient mitigation measures which the government thinks will help unlock 40,000 new homes over 5 years. This is welcome, though the HBF have estimated that 140,000 homes are currently held up by nutrient neutrality rules.  And we remain concerned that mitigation schemes are patchwork and failing to address the root causes of pollution, whilst expecting housebuilders to pay for improvements to water treatment, even though the housing itself has minimal impact on overall nutrient pollution levels.

There’s an extra £5 million for DLUHC’s Planning Skills Delivery Fund for Local Planning Authorities to tackle planning application backlogs. This is welcome, but with enough funding for around half a new planner, per local authority – it won’t go very far to tackle the big shortage of planners. Our recent report on the planning system highlights some of the ways that local authorities could tackle the shortage of planners and help steamline planning.

The slow speed of the planning process is also to be tackled via higher fees for applicants, with a “premium” planning service, with guaranteed refunds if timescales aren’t met. This seems a positive move and is broadly in line with what we were calling for in our response to the consultation on fees but we await the details of how this will operate in practice.

The chancellor also announced an extra £450m for the Local Authority Housing Fund – this is a scheme to help councils buy up existing homes for rehousing people out of temporary accommodation, or for resettlement of Afghans. It was also good to see the government has confirmed an extra £3bn for the Affordable Homes Guarantee Scheme – this is a scheme that reduces the costs of borrowing for Registered Providers building social housing and will help the sector invest in existing homes as well as building new ones.

There’s a bit more detail on plans for unlocking some of the barriers to new urban quarters in Cambridge, Leeds and London with funding to tackle water scarcity in Cambridge and for a new a new bus network in the London docklands.

So what was missing?

There was disappointingly little support from the Chancellor to keep the struggling housebuilding sector building here and now. Funding is urgently needed to build much-needed affordable homes, as well as to help keep the sector as a whole building. Last year, £255m of funds earmarked for affordable housing went unspent and returned to the treasury. More flexibility is needed to ensure it is spent as intended.

We had been calling on the Chancellor to release funds from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund beyond 2025, but there was no mention of this. Social landlords were sometimes unable to achieve best value with the previous rounds because of the tight timetable for procurement and to spend the funds. We continue to call for the next round of funding to be released as soon as possible and before the spring budget.

There was no support offered for first time buyers. Help to Buy was ended earlier this year and for the first time in decades there is no support offered to first time buyers – and at a time when it’s harder than ever to buy and housebuilding rates are falling. Help to Buy ISAs and Lifetime ISAs caps remain at levels that aren’t sufficient to buy a home in many areas, having failed to rise with inflation.

There had been discussion about the possibility of linking Stamp Duty to EPC ratings – creating better incentives for homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their home. But nothing was announced on this.

You can read the statement in full on the government website:

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