Bristol City Council’s drive to see 500 new ‘affordable’ homes built every year is faring ‘significantly worse’ than the target, and the worst case scenario is that barely more than half the target is met this year.
The council’s housing team is blaming external issues that are affecting the construction industry as a whole, with a labour shortage and spiralling costs of materials slowing down the rate at which all homes are built in the city.
Yesterday, Bristol Live revealed that the city’s housing chief had written to one developer wanting to build 850 flats in South Bristol to say he had ‘serious concerns’ with the fact that only seven per cent of them would be classed as ‘affordable’, but across the city, the council has lowered the proportion of affordable homes being required of developers, in a bid to get more homes built overall.
READ MORE: How affordable are the 'record levels of affordable housing' being built in Bristol
The third quarter performance report for Bristol City Council’s cabinet meeting next week has an update on how the city is doing to meet its target of 500 ‘affordable’ homes being built a year in Bristol.
The cabinet will be told that up to the end of the ‘third quarter’ - so until the end of December - just 167 new ‘affordable homes’ had been built in Bristol since last April.
This represented a ‘significant level of…slippage in the programme across all forms of affordable housing delivery’, the report said. It added that the ‘worst case scenario’ would be that only 257 affordable homes would be completed in the year to April 2023. If all the homes that are scheduled to be completed go ahead, that could rise to a more respectable 460 new homes - which is 92 per cent of the target.
“In reality, it is expected that delivery will sit somewhere between the two,” the housing chiefs said. “Availability of labour contractors and sub-contractors entering administration, unforeseen requirements around utility connections, developer defects issues with material supply chain and availability of second-hand market homes for acquisition are all causing delays in delivery,” the cabinet will be told.
“These are external factors that reflect the current state of the construction industry and housing market and are outside of the providers' and the council's hands to manage,” it added.
Earlier this year, Bristol Live revealed that the council’s own housing company, Goram Homes, which is partnering up with private developers to get new homes built on council-owned land, was also running behind on its schedule - and had secretly decided not to tell those private construction firms of those delays.
What is affordable housing?
‘Affordable’ housing is classed under planning laws, and includes a variety of different types of housing, from ‘keyworker’ homes specifically for NHS staff or teachers to council houses rented out by the council itself.
The vast majority of ‘affordable’ housing being built in Bristol at the moment fall into three different types. The first is under a ‘shared ownership’ scheme where a housing association sells between a quarter and three-quarters of a house or flat and then the buyer pays rent on the rest. The second is ‘affordable rent’, which is a home rented through a housing association at typically around 80 per cent of the local market rent, and ‘social rent’, which is a home rented through a housing association or the council itself, at a rent that is - in theory - set to be affordable to someone on housing benefit.
The council’s policy is that any medium or large-scale development should make 40 per cent of its homes ‘affordable’ under the planning definition if they are being built in the city centre, or 30 per cent if built outside the city centre.
Bristol City Council’s policy is for 30 per cent affordable outside the city centre, where it is 40 per cent. However, five years ago, the council triggered a development rush by lowering that policy to 20 per cent if the developers agreed to build their flats and apartments within a certain time frame.
That kickstarted other large-scale projects like the Castle Park View development, with the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, saying that the city can’t ‘let the perfect be the enemy of the good’, and 20 per cent affordable was better than no flats being built at all. Most recently, the Dove Lane regeneration project in St Pauls was given planning permission with only 20 per cent of the 350 new homes classed as ‘affordable’.
At Bedminster Green, affordable housing provision is so far much lower than even 20 per cent, with three of the five plots that have already been granted planning permission only containing 21 ‘affordable’ homes out of a total so far of 1,315 new homes (albeit 819 of those are student rooms) - a running total so far of just 1.6 per cent. And those 21 affordable homes were only added in when the council included a disabled car park as part of one of the developments.
City council planners and council chiefs have had some success in boosting the number of affordable housing. Three major developments in South Bristol were originally given planning permission to be sold as private flats, but switched during construction so that they are 100 per cent ‘affordable’ - albeit mainly as shared ownership homes.
That happened at the Boat Yard, the huge development on Bath Road in Totterdown, when the site was bought by a London-based housing association, at the Old Brewery site in Ashton Gate, which is also currently under construction, and at a separate site near East Street in Bedminster, where a local firm got planning permission to build an apartment block and then signed a deal with a housing association.
The council’s housing chief, Cllr Tom Renhard, told Bristol Live about his struggle to get developers to include affordable housing provisions in new developments, with the planning system weighted in favour of those developers.
But even where the council is in control of the process and owns most of the land, it’s still an issue. At Whitehouse Lane in Bedminster, the city council has produced a masterplan which proposes around 2,000 new homes on a large industrial estate, which is mostly owned by the city council itself, with a couple of other developers and landowners. The proposal there is for just 20 per cent of the homes to be classed as ‘affordable’, with the council saying that is what has been agreed with those private developers.
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