CLG has confirmed that the bidding guidelines for a share of the £300million boost to affordable housing and empty homes will be published shortly and that the bidding will not close until late March. An email from Sally Turner sent to EHN today states:
Bidding for the share of the £300m will open shortly for the empty homes funding - it's just being finalised and cleared. There will be a long lead in period with bidding closing on 25 March 2013 and it won't be awarded on a first come first served basis so not need to panic.
Sally also confirmed that the funding would go through exactly the same grant regimes as the previous funding ie via HCA (and presumably the GLA in London) and Tribal. There is no indicative split between the two routes.
Given the continuing problems faced by many Local Authorities in steering delivery through the multiple hoops presented by the HCA funding regime - including reluctance amongst private RP delivery partners - this will be less than welcome. Don Foster emphasised the importance of "innovation" during his contributions to the Empty Homes Conference on Monday - but it's going to be innovation within very narrow limits indeed and the most innovative schemes developed by local authorities are going to continue to languish without signficant investment from central government.
We will be interested to hear how Pat Richie - shortly to be installed at Newcastle City Council - gets on with regime instituted by her erstwhile employer.
CLG can claim that their hands are tied by the Treasury as the Treasury control the conditions under which CLG receive the money. We wonder who the experts are at the Treasury on tackling empty homes.
It will be helpful that community groups can access more funding as such schemes tend to bring mutliple benefits to their communities beyond just returning empty homes to use: but even those schemes are heavily constrained by the funding conditions and anecdotally this may threaten delivery in some cases. We understand that the same value-for-money criteria will apply but hopefully this time there will be more attention given to the long-term advantages offered by purchase and repair schemes rather than just leasing, so that communty groups can preserve the benefits of their funding over the longer term.