Affordable housebuilding barely increased last year, rising just 1% and falling nearly 90,000 homes short of the number England is estimated to need to escape the housing crisis.
Construction of the cheapest social housing remained at close to its lowest level since the 1980s, with just 6,566 homes built between March 2019 and April 2020.
In England 162 local authority areas did not complete any social rent housing at all in the last year. These include Bolton, Liverpool, Hull, Nottingham, Walsall, Basildon, and Haringey.
The figures came as Crisis, the homelessness charity, warned that more than 200,000 households face the worst forms of homelessness this Christmas, including sleeping on the streets, in sheds and garages, in unstable accommodation such as B&Bs or sofa-surfing.
Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, said: “A few thousand social homes is a drop in the ocean. It is unbelievable that in the middle of a nationwide housing emergency over half of the country saw no new social homes built at all.
Following emergency government measures during the pandemic, including the “everyone in” programme and a ban on evictions, overall homelessness fell slightly on last year, according to the charity’s annual study with Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh. Rough sleeping fell most markedly, but those gains were erased by greater increases in reliance on night shelters, hostels, refuges and other unstable accommodation.
“We cannot let the progress made this year unravel,” said Jon Sparkes, the chief executive of Crisis. “We must look towards longer-term solutions, such as building the social homes we desperately need and ensuring that housing benefit continues to cover the true cost of rents, so that people can afford to keep their homes.”
Number of affordable homes built in England barely rises | Housing | The Guardian
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