Housing associations failing to build homes
David Orr, Chief executive of the National Housing Federation recently said, ‘The election didn’t make any difference to the underlying fact that we hadn’t built enough new homes,’ ‘We had not focused sufficiently on regeneration; unless we start doing both of these things very quickly we will not be able to house our children.’
Housing associations are not keeping up with private housebuilders who are forging ahead with new projects, last year in England according to reports, private housebuilders started building works on 115,000 new homes whereas housing associations managed just 23,300. Given that 1,500 such associations exist, that means they are each building on average just 15 homes a year. Social housing is just not getting built, even through better times such as 2007/8, housing associations lagged behind both private and council sector house building.
Channel 4 news in a forthcoming investigation highlights the extravagant salaries that housing association executives are paid for just managing their stock of properties, which in many cases were given to them on a plate.
It would appear that housing associations are less entrepreneurial than private housebuilders, that is no surprise when executives can earn a high salary for just managing rather than building, there appears to be no incentive for them to stretch themselves any further.
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