Angela Rayner says the Government is “tilting” towards council and social housebuilding in a bid to reduce the number of homeless families in expensive temporary accommodation.
A total of £10bn worth of funding is going to councils and housing associations to build more than 70,000 homes across England, 60 per cent of which must be social housing, Rayner told The i Paper.
Some of these homes will be built on “low value” parts of the green belt, the Housing Secretary said, if they are reclassified as “grey belt”.
Hundreds of UK bathing spots have sewage alerts
Hundreds of bathing sites in England and Wales have recorded sewage alerts this bathing season.
It makes much of Britain’s waters potentially unsafe to swim in during one of the hottest summers on record.
How bad is the situation?
The charity Surfers Against Sewage has recorded
764 alerts
for sewage at 244 bathing spots since 15 May.
This means sewage warnings have been triggered at
43%
of the 573 official bathing spots in England and Wales since the start of the bathing season.
Alerts are triggered when a company is dumping sewage or heavy rainfall raises the risk of pollution.
Where have alerts been the worst?
Many of the worst-performing bathing spots are in north-west England where there has been more rain.
Spittal Beach in Northumberland had the highest number of alerts (11).
Sandy Gap Beach and Biggar Bank Beach on Cumbria’s Walney Island both triggered ten.
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Why is this happening?
Water companies are allowed to discharge sewage during extreme rainfall to stop their pipe networks from getting overwhelmed and sewage backing up into homes.
But they also regularly dump sewage during dry weather or following minimal rainfall.
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The health risks
- Gastroenteritis is a common illness if bacteria like E.coli is swallowed.
- Skin, eye and throat infections are also common.
- Blue-green algae, found in warm or polluted waters, can cause rashes.
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Photos: London Zoo animals head for annual weigh-in
The animals went in one by one for their yearly weight check at London Zoo this week.
Here are some highlights of the more than 10,000 beasts that took to the scales.
Healthy habits
Every year, all of the zoo’s inhabitants are weighed to monitor health and identify pregnancies.
Some, like Gizmo the capybara, were lured onto the scales with food. Others had the devices disguised in their habitats.
More than 4,000 species were weighed
Scientific helpers
Regular weigh-ins help zookeepers track the health of our animals – including insects like the magnolia land snails, the capybaras, and Humboldt penguins – and genuinely help us manage the care of these animals, who play a vital role in our global conservation efforts.”
London animal operations manager Daniel Simmonds
Bank holiday roads
to be busiest in more than 10 years
This Friday is expected to be the busiest
on the roads for more than a decade, with millions of holidaymakers scrambling to
get away for the weekend.
How bad will it be?
The RAC predicts
20 million
leisure trips will be made between Friday and Monday, the highest number since 2015.
4.1 million
journeys are predicted on Friday alone.
Saturday will see 3.8 million journeys.
Sunday and Monday won’t be quite so busy, with 3.8 million and 3.1 million respectively.
Another 5.5 million don’t yet know which day they’ll travel.
Which roads will be worst?
- M25 anticlockwise from J17 to J12 and clockwise from J15 to J19.
- M5 south from J15 to J23 , and north from J11 to J1.
- M1 south from J16 to J6.
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Early bird catches the worm
It looks like Brits are buoyed by the persistent warm and dry weather and are more confident in making plans for the late summer bank holiday weekend… Drivers should be ready for frantic Friday and think about setting off before 10am if they can.
RAC breakdown spokesperson Harriet Hernando
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She said there are “golden rules” for building on “grey belt” land, which means there should be 50 per cent of social housing in any given development as well as supportive infrastructure. The Government will be “working with strategic authorities to see how we can develop homes” in these areas.
Under Sir Keir Starmer, Rayner agreed 10 years of funding for a landmark Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) to be delivered over the next decade. However, there was less emphasis on building homes for social rent, on involving mayors in the process of building new homes, or on encouraging councils themselves to build.
In a major shift from former housing secretary Steve Reed’s focus, which was to support private housebuilders to deliver new homes for market sale, Andy Burnham has made clear he wants to see more social and council housebuilding, and tasked Rayner with making his vision a reality.
Rayner said the Prime Minister was “really clear” when he took office that “he wanted to see the biggest generation of council house building for a generation” and the £10bn was a way of “ramping up” that pledge.
The number of people living in temporary accommodation because they are homeless has surged under Labour to 135,000 households.
This includes 86,460 households that contain children. A total of 177,530 children were homeless and living in private rentals, hostels, B&Bs and hotels at the end of March. This now costs local councils in England a record £2.8bn a year.
Rayner argued that this crisis is “having a knock-on effect” on councils’ ability to deliver new homes for all because they have to “pay more” for temporary accommodation.
Britain’s housing market is currently stalled and struggling, while Labour faces a crunch point on its manifesto target of building 1.5 million new homes by 2029.
The £10bn announced today is set to be followed by approximately £21bn for council and social housing, which has not yet been allocated (£16bn outside of London and around £5bn for the capital).
The Housing Secretary hopes the Government will boost overall “confidence” in the housing market by bringing this funding forward.
“We want councils to come forward,” she said. “We want to build social homes because we know that’s where there is an acute shortage at the moment.”
However, she stopped short of confirming when these new social and council homes will be completed, or confirming a date for helping first-time buyers and young people with other affordable housing options – such as shared ownership or “help to buy” schemes.
Another major gear shift under Burnham is the involvement of mayors and strategic combined authorities.
Rayner said the Government was giving mayors more power to build housing, including the ability to overrule councils if they reject planning applications.
Of the £10bn, the following mayoral authorities will receive:
An additional 33 “strategic partners” that will receive the rest of the money will be announced in due course, the Government said.
“All local authorities have to have a mandatory plan,” she said. “The previous government didn’t do this, which meant that there was more opportunity for houses to be built in areas where the local people didn’t want [them].”
The Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, will be given £6bn to spend. Rayner said London hosted the highest number of children living in temporary accommodation, and nodded to Khan’s existing focus on homes for social rent.
She said this has seen the capital deliver high numbers of council houses. “We want to see that across the country working with the mayors,” she added.