NHF: Recommendations for the Spring Budget

What are we asking the Chancellor to include in the Spring Budget 2024?

SUBMISSION SUMMARY:

Protect vital homeless services by boosting and ring-fencing funding for housing-related support to ensure spending at least matches the £1.6bn per year allocated to local authorities in England in 2010.

• Relieve homelessness by investing in homelessness prevention advice, support services and financial support to the hardest hit families. This includes:
• Review the household benefit cap, the two-child limit and the removal of the spare room subsidy.
• Review the five-week wait for Universal Credit and deductions system.

Reinstate uplifted funding for Discretionary Housing Payments so tenants with a rent shortfall can be supported to avoid rent arrears.

Make increased support available to all low-income households through the benefits system.

Reinstate the £300m Housing Transformation Fund, to support the integration of housing into health and social care systems and the development of more specialist housing.

Make sure everyone can feel safe in their home by: implementing the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign call for equal access to government building safety funding for housing associations – ensuring contractors, as well as developers, remediate defective buildings that they built for housing associations, applying a zero-rate on remedial works for VAT purposes.

Deliver more social homes by allocating funding for regeneration programmes over a longer period and ensure Local Planning Authorities have the necessary resources to enable timely granting of planning permission.

Deliver a long-term, inflation-linked rent settlement, with a reintroduction of a convergence mechanism.

Make a long-term commitment to decarbonising our housing stock by committing to release the remaining Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund in full.

Extend the temporary zero-rate VAT relief applied to the installation of energy saving materials to 2030 and include double and triple glazed windows and insulated entrance doors in its scope.

Commit to new burdens funding for new requirements introduced through the review of the Decent Homes Standard. This will enable housing associations to continue to provide the high quality, affordable homes the country needs.

Support low-income residents with their energy bills by reopening the Energy Bill Support Scheme Alternative Funding to ensure all households who missed out receive their payment and introducing an energy social tariff to protect low-income residents in the longer-term.

The government has launched a consultation on reforms to social housing allocations, and the NHF are collecting member feedback on this consultation until 6 March.

Email us with any questions or feedback on the proposals.