Council monitoring of affordable housing

[legalalien]

As some people will be aware there has been some discussion in various council meetings about the council?s seeming inability to keep track of whether developers are complying with their contracted obligations to provide social and affordable housing, and for how long the housing stays affordable. The council paid a couple of hundred thousand for an IT system to do this several years ago but there?s no sign of a working system

Campaign group https://www.35percent.org/ seem to have been digging on this and I?ve just seen an FOI response online that people might be interested in - at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_about_the_monitoring#incoming-1849828

Not the initial response (where the council failed to provide the relevant info), but the one given after a request for review - scroll down to the 6 August response.

Here?s a summary by a council officer as at Jan 2020

?Following our call on Friday afternoon, below is a summary of the situation with the AH monitoring

project.

2016 - Southwark made several promises after the Ombudsman found that were had failed to properly

monitor AH.

2017 - An audit of 11,999 properties found that it was not possible to link the newly created addresses of

properties held by housing associations and the council, with the reference on historic planning applications

and legal agreements.

2018 ? Planning department agreed to procure the services of an agency to help design and develop an AH

monitoring service. This was delayed for 12 months following the award of contract.

1

2019 - The research outlined why it will never be possible to link existing properties with historic planning

records - there is a disconnect between the planning and the physical / build world. Dxw and I designed and

developed a service to resolve this issue and handed it over to the council in December 2019.

2021 - This service still has not been used by the planning department.

2016 - 2021 - Five years on, we are still not monitoring AH, as promised.

This delay has now been picked up by the 35% campaign, councillors and the housing scrutiny committee.

....

Further delay is likely to result in increased interest from the 35% campaign and the media (local news and

journals such as Inside Housing), and most likely a second complaint to the ombudsman (we would be in no

position to justify the five year delay and I understand that a repeat offence carries a harsher penalty).

Last year we won a number awards and good press for this work, to not be using the service that we paid

?230kof public money for would be embarrassing for both the department and council.

Additional embarrassment will come from spending further public money, persisting to try and do this in a

way that we have proved, categorically, doesn?t work. ?

There are subsequent emails regarding potential ways forward, which involve a trade off between inadequate historical data, risk of human error and much more cost, as far as I can tell.

What a mess.

[ianr]

This article, found following the Jam Factory reference, provides some useful background to the perceived need for Affordable Housing monitoring. https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/the-court-battles-over-section-106-delivery--56141. What, btw, is 'staircasing'?

[legalalien]

I think it?s when the occupier has shared ownership with the housing association and they pay to have a bigger percentage, kind of like buying more shares in a company?

[legalalien]

Interesting 2019 presentation from the project team at

https://www.southwark.gov.uk/assets/attach/11530/alpha-report.pdf. These guys don?t seem to be the problem. What concerns me is that there is a big problem (in Southwark and elsewhere) in tracking this stuff, while councils use developers? potentially unfulfilled promises as firm evidence of achievement of social housing goals.