The battleplan to solve city’s housing crisis
The council has set up its own company to build 500 new homes per year, but local democracy reporter Niall Griffiths asks whether it’s going to meet the unprecedented demand for affordable accommodation
MANCHESTER council says it is taking ‘control of its own destiny’ with a plan to alleviate the housing crisis that is continuing to grip the city.
This City, the housing company which has been set up by the town hall, will aim to build 500 new homes – including ‘truly affordable housing for Mancunians’ – every year.
Around 13,000 people are on the city’s housing waiting list - 70 per cent of those are in the most urgent need - while single properties attract hundreds of bids.
Meanwhile the number of people presenting as homeless has risen above pre-Covid levels, with thousands - including children and their families - living in temporary accommodation.
The city’s population has also grown by 50,000 in the last five years, and this number - as well as demand for housing - is only expected to get bigger.
The picture looks even starker cast against the towering skyscrapers reaching further into Manchester’s skyline boasting homes that are unattainable for many.
There have long been calls for the city council to build more affordable housing from the public, campaigners, opposition councillors and even from the Labour group’s backbenches.
Frustrations have also been consistently voiced regarding developers not proposing properties for affordable or social rent, but the schemes being approved regardless.
Town leaders insist they are on track to exceed targets to build more than 7,500 affordable homes by 2025, and believe their new housing company, This City will bring them closer to that goal.
As per Manchester council’s local plan, a fifth of new housing built in the city needs to be affordable - but what does affordable mean?
Affordable homes, as defined by the council, should cost no more in rent or mortgage than 30 per cent of the city’s current average gross household income of £27,000.
They include properties for affordable and social rent or shared ownership, where buyers purchase a share of a home while paying rent towards the remaining cost.
Between 2015 and 2025 the council expects more than 32,000 new homes to be built or in the planning pipeline, and of these 7,633 will be affordable.
In the last five years 954 affordable and social homes have been completed in north and east Manchester by developers and housing associations, with 855 homes with planning permission or awaiting approval.
Coun Gavin White, the council’s executive member for housing, says: “When you look at the city as a whole we are building more affordable homes than we ever have done.
“There’s more to housing than the city centre, and we understand why here is a focus on that given the size and scale of some of the developments, but there’s high demand across the city including the north and east, which wasn’t the case 15 to 20 years ago.
“But we face some serious challenges with the housing register and temporary accommodation and we need to tackle that head on through providing a mix of tenures, but a lot more social and affordable housing.
“We’ve got about 70,000 social homes in Manchester, which is a large stock, but we probably need 5,000 to 10,000 more on top of that to meet demand.”
The one word that sums up the housing market in Manchester is ‘polarisation,’ the disparity between house prices across the city.
A property in Didsbury, in south Manchester, fetches on average £378,092 - compared to £111,843 for a house in Harpurhey in the north.
Nearly three quarters of Manchester’s housing stock falls within the A and B council tax bands, and the overwhelming majority are social rented or affordable homes.
The council also says the city is undersupplied for housing of all tenures, with property agents informing them that they are struggling to get enough properties to let. Research by the local authority suggests that the city is under supplied by a minimum of 500 homes per year - despite building roughly 4,000 homes per year across all tenures. But through developments such as Clarion’s regeneration of the former Boddingtons Brewery, which is proposing 60 per cent of its 442 homes to be affordable, the council’s affordable housing pipeline ‘could double overnight,’ a source told the M.E.N.
According to the council, there is ‘no tradition’ among registered housing providers like Clarion to build large scale affordable housing developments in the city centre, and that work is being done to encourage them to develop at scale in locations of the highest demand.
The plans to create This City first surfaced last March, as the country was preparing to enter the first of many national Covid lockdowns.
Coun White’s predecessor, Suzanne Richards, said it was important for Manchester council to ‘consider every option open to us to ensure new affordable homes are built as quickly as possible.’
At the time it looked like the council was going to fall short of its housebuilding targets, though the council now says it will meet and exceed the original target of 6,400 affordable homes by 2025.
“We’re at a time of high demand and amidst the 11th year of government cuts where we haven’t had the money to deliver truly social housing as a city,” Coun White says now.
“But it got to the stage where we thought that we had to be more in control of our destiny a little bit more, and to add to our own pipeline around 500 homes a year which are truly affordable homes for local Mancunians.”
More details about what would become This City emerged in September, with the council revealing the first sites that make up the first phase of the project.
The majority of the homes will be for market rent, the profits from which will subsidise the cost of affordable homes that will be available at an ‘accessible rent.’
Accessible rent is a new tenure created by the council, where homes are let at or below Local Housing Allowance levels, allowing access to people receiving housing benefits.
It would also make them affordable for people earning the city’s average wage of £27,000, as per council policy.
They would be exempt from Right to Buy, according to Coun White, and would be protected ‘in perpetuity’ for Manchester residents.
The first development in This City’s first phase would see 122 apartments and townhouses built at an unspecified site in the Ancoats and Beswick ward, where there is an average of more than 600 bids for each three-bedroom property that becomes available.
At least 37 of the homes will be let at an accessible rent. A full planning application is expected to be submitted in June 2022.
The second unidentified site in Piccadilly, said to be at a ‘less advanced stage,’ will have up to 82 homes - including 17 to be let at an
We want to go at scale; we want to build 500 homes a year which is pretty aspirational Coun Gavin White executive member for housing
accessible rent.
Coun White says: “The council does own a lot of land across the city through purchasing and sites becoming redundant, and we want to use that land to build homes for people at an affordable rate.
“We want to go at scale. We want to build 500 homes a year which is pretty aspirational and no other council in the country is doing that sort of scale of housebuilding.
“That is the demand, that’s what the city needs. I hope in the future as we move outside the city centre that there will be a higher proportion of affordable rent.”
When asked what would happen to the affordable homes if interest in the market rent homes falls short of expectations, Coun White adds: “Of course we will have to monitor take up but there is huge demand, and we’re going to pitch it at the level of income we need.
“We’ll have to do rigorous market testing and that part of it is robust so quite a lot of work is going on at the moment to get price point right in future phases.”
A council report says homes for sale at discounted and market rates could feature in future phases, though schemes with 100 per cent affordable housing ‘aren’t being ruled out,’ Coun White says.
Over recent years one of the biggest barriers to the delivery of affordable housing both in Manchester and across the country is the use of viability assessments.
They allow developers to limit how much they pay towards affordable housing on a site, or infrastructure in the surrounding area, by demonstrating that doing so would limit their profits to below 20pc. Viability assessments were first introduced by the government in 2012 through the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which sets out the planning rules for all local authorities to follow.
Coun White says the town hall wants to put further pressure on the government to tweak the NPPF further to empower local authorities.
But he admitted that developing sites in Manchester, which are often former industrial brownfield sites, costs a hefty amount before homes can even be built on them.
Greater Manchester has been given £81m from the government’s Brownfield Housing Fund to unlock post-industrial sites for development of housing - including affordable homes.
However the council’s sole Liberal Democrat councillor John Leech, a vocal critic of the council’s affordable housing policy, has told the ruling Labour group several times that this money does not go far enough.
He told a council meeting on October 6: “The reality is that there’s going to be enormous pressure on green sites that are classed as brownfield sites because there simply isn’t enough money coming in to deal with the contaminated land in parts of the city.”
A report written by council officers also said that while the £81m ‘begins to address viability issues it is not enough to enable the full potential of our brownfield land supply to be realised.’
At the same meeting Coun Leech praised the objections raised by Labour councillor Marcia Hutchinson at a meeting of the planning committee in September regarding the £58m regeneration Brunswick Mill in Ancoats.
The development would see 277 flats and townhouses built but no affordable homes, as the developer Maryland Securities relied on a viability assessment which said that providing such homes would affect its profit margins.
Coun Hutchinson said that a development of such a size ‘shouldn’t go ahead without any social housing and anything for the local area,’ adding that it was the ‘thin end of the wedge.’
Speaking last week Coun Leech said: “I was glad to see that one Labour councillor actually spoke out against approving this application but it was waved through regardless.
“This I’m afraid to say is yet another example of the cosy relationship between this Labour council and developers in this city allowing developers to consistently get away without providing affordable homes in huge developments.”