No certainty on social housing programme

Herefordshire’s goal of building 1,500 new social housing homes “could be reversed” if elections in a year’s time go against the current administration.

This was according to the council’s head of economy and environment Coun Ellie Chowns to a meeting last week, organised by the local Labour party, on ways to address the lack of affordable housing in the county.

Coun Chowns said the council “is inching towards laying the first bricks” on its social housing building programme, which “every group on the council except the Conservatives is supportive of”.

But while it aims for 1,500 sustainable new homes over the next 10 years, “every policy is reversible, and we won’t have signed the contracts by next May”, she pointed out.

Conservative group leader Coun Jonathan Lester said afterwards: “The Conservatives welcome more social housing provision. What we have concerns about is the council having to borrow money to build the housing when a limited amount may not be viable.

“It would be better for the council to keep its financial resources directed at the services it must provide and at the same time take the appropriate steps to incentivise housing providers to provide more social housing.”

Even if its building programme progresses, the council “can only scratch the surface”, Coun Chowns said. “The rest will be from social housing providers like Connexus, or private.”

Connexus, which is Herefordshire and Shropshire’s largest housing association, aims to build 250 new homes a year across the two counties, its head of governance Nicola Griffiths told the meeting.

“But our funding isn’t as it used to be, and implementing net zero will cost us millions,” she said.

Former Hereford and South Herefordshire Labour candidate Anna Coda said on the affordability question: “With Help to Buy and the stamp duty holiday, our political masters are determined to keep house prices high.”

Local campaigner Amelia Washbourne said this “creates a false economy, as we all pay more to landlords, and more in housing benefit”.

Coun Chowns added that the council’s new draft Core Strategy for the county, as well as a supplementary planning document it is bringing in on environmental building standards, “will give more weight to higher energy efficiency in new homes”.

Meanwhile, improving the heat efficiency of Herefordshire’s existing 85,000 houses “will cost hundreds of millions of pounds”, Coun Chowns said.

“We are looking at how to give grants for home efficiency surveys.”

Ben Whittle, a senior analyst with the Energy Saving Trust, told the meeting that by 2025, all new homes will be banned from installing gas and oil boilers, which “focuses the mind” on the alternatives.

“We need to take electrification of heat seriously,” he said. “The argument for it is particularly compelling for rural homes on oil or LPG (liquid petroleum gas).”

But there is still “a massive price premium” on both air-source and ground-source heat pumps, the former costing around £10,000 to install, the latter £25,000 and upwards, he said, while the saving over gas might be no more than £200 a year.

Meanwhile, Herefordshire will be “stuck with” the moratorium on development in large parts of the county for the next three to five years, according to Herefordshire Construction Industry Lobby Group spokesperson Merry Albright, also creative director of family design and development practice Border Oak.

The county “needs all sorts of housing, its persistent under-delivery is a problem for all of us”, she said. But the block on development in much of the north of the county, due to the potential impact of further phosphate pollution on river catchments, has been “catastrophic”.

When this was introduced in 2019, the prevailing wisdom was that half of the pollution in the county’s river systems was down to households, the other half, agriculture, she explained. But that was soon revised to just 23 per cent from homes.

“The rest is from farming, which has had no changes required of it, compared to just 0.2 per cent from new homes,” Mrs Albright said.

Rather than waiting for solutions to arrive, Border Oak is pursuing its own, having already taken over a local intensive farm “which was producing 250 houses worth of phosphate” in order to take it out of production.