Empty Homes Programme delivery in doubt

Followng the release of the official housing statistics on June 12th, EHN has prepared a spreadsheet that focuses exclusively on the empty homes element of the Empty Homes Programmes of the HCA and GLA. The figures do not look promising for meeting the March 2015 delivery targets, although success is not ruled out. Original programme in tatters What we can certainly say is that delivery against the numbers of units originally predicted to be delivered when the grant allocations were announced in 2012 has been disastrous. This is hardly news as there have been many stories, anecdotal and otherwise, of grant recipients handing grant back or drastically reducing numbers by shifting from lease to purchase and repair. To be more specific, the original Round 1 allocations within the HCA programme (incorporated into our spreadsheet) amounted to 4,537 units outside London and 1,118 units inside London - a total of 5,655 units. Delvery to date has been 1,180 units outside London (to end of March 2014) and 159 units inside London, about a quarter and a seventh respectively of the expected outputs. National release inadequate We were disappointed to find that the national figures released by CLG were sparse indeed, covering only different tenures. There were no figures for programmes such as Empty Homes or Mortgage Rescue. To produce national figures by programme we had to combine figures from the HCA and GLA releases, which were differently produced - the HCA figures were for 6-month periods, the GLA figures were for 12-month periods. And as noted below, there were no figures for the CGP (Tribal) stream, despite the CLG web-page claimng: "...the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)’s statistics aim to provide a complete picture on affordable housing delivered, irrespective of funding mechanism. While delivery through the HCA accounts for the majority of affordable housing supply, the scope of the statistics reported is wider than the HCA figures." Meeting Targets In conversation senior HCA contacts had said a while back that they were still expecting to meet the original government target of 3,300 homes from the £100million announced for the empty homes programme way back in November 2010. (Note: the original target was set on the back-of-a-fag-packet basis that the average grant across the whole of the £4billion Affordable Housing programme was expected to be £30,000: 100 million divided by 30,000 comes to approximately 3,300. The figure had no basis in any rational projections about the type of delivery that would be involved in bringing empty homes back into use). Since the original target was set, £30million was carved out of the £100million and allocated by CLG directly, as part of the Community Grants Programme administered by Tribal. No figures have been released about the Tribal (CGP) programme. Considering this is an official national dataset and the £30million was a part of the £100million announced for empty homes within the affordable housing programme, the absence of figures for the CGP strikes us unacceptable. We have asked CLG where and when the figures will be accessible. Without knowing the progress of the Tribal programme it is difficult to assess whether the original government target is likely to be achieved. Certainly success is not ruled out: in our analysis we have extrapolated from the existing figures and tried to project forwards to see if the original target could be met. Much hinges on the rate of delivery between now and the end of March 2015. To illustrate, the HCA figures for completions for the last 3 6-month periods were as follows:

• October 2012 - March 2013 321
• April 2013 - September 2013 172
• October 2013 - March 2014 608

If delivery continues at the rate of the most recent half-year (October 2013 to March 2014) - ie 608 units - for the remaining two-six-month periods before end of March 2015, then successfully meeting the target is not ruled out. And indeed with late signings of contracts delivery may still be ramping up. But you'll notice the apparently anomalous dip in the figures for the first part of 2013. There is a strong possibility that the first-half figures were relatively depressed by the absence of year-end urgency and that the shortfall was then made up in the second half, in which case the full-year figures might be a better basis for making projections of future delivery. We have therefore done two projections, one on the basis of the full-year 2013-14 figures and one on the basis of the October 2013-March 2014 figures. Of course, there must be considerable doubt that delivery will continue full speed up until March 2015 unless the government wants to roll underspend forward: the risks of half-completed projects would be too great for providers and they will already be having to assess the deliverability of projects against the March cut-off date. The risk factor would again tend to undermine delivery. And there is the big unknown of the state of the Triibal programme. For these projections, we have simply assumed delivery figures for Tribal at 30/70 of the HCA/GLA programme, ie based on the split of the money between the two programmes. The net result is that on the more positive delivery projections, 3,964 units would be delivered; on the less optimistic figures 3,229 units would be delivered. The HCA and CLG between them will hold the detailed figures that would make the predictions more accurate - we have done the best with the information available. (The foregoing relates to Round 1 funding; we have not done any formal projections for Round 2 funding as the programme is so recent; but we'd expect successful delivery to be unlikely. There were allocations for 1939 units, of which 91 have so far been completed). Our analysis is available to Full Members only (you'll need to be logged) from our Library here.