Housing is at the heart of a good quality of life. This is especially true as we get older, when health and wellbeing, independence and end-of-life care can all be greatly enhanced by decent housing. Four recent reports have underlined the importance of good housing for older people, and the wider benefits for society. Housing […]
Two years ago, the UK became the first major economy in the world to pass a law pledging to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Achieving net zero means balancing the amount of greenhouse gases we emit with the amount we remove, and it’s a critical factor in tackling climate change […]
Long waiting lists, high rents, thousands sleeping rough, millions living in insecure or unsuitable homes and a generation of young people priced out of the market: these are the hallmarks of the UK’s broken housing system. In England, the government is committed to building 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s. But in 2019, […]
Philip Brown, University of Huddersfield Life during COVID-19 has not been a uniform experience. There have been distinct differences in how people have contended with lockdown, depending on whether they have access to safe, secure and decent accommodation. New research from the University of Huddersfield has looked at how people were coping while living with […]
Throughout this week, Inside Housing magazine has been providing a series of webinars offering debate, learning and innovative thinking on how housing providers are responding to present-day challenges and preparing for future demands. One of the webinars focused on the ways in which Covid-19 has accelerated the move to agile working for housing associations (HAs) […]
Last year, a development of 105 homes on the outskirts of Norwich became the first social housing project to win the prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize. The Goldsmith Street estate was built by London architecture firm Mikhail Riches for Norwich City Council, and is the largest Passivhaus scheme in the UK. Passivhaus […]
With the widening gap between the richest and poorest across different measures of inequality, there is growing awareness that income is not the only factor that impacts living standards. This has led to increasing interest in the distribution of wealth. While wealth can take various forms, the most visible way households accrue and store substantial […]
A key change in the UK’s housing market over the past twenty years has been the growth of the private rented sector (PRS), with more living in the sector than ever before. This growth has led to the view that there is now a ‘generation rent’ who are priced out of home ownership and stranded […]
Sometimes it takes an intractable problem to inspire an inventive solution. Faced with an ageing construction workforce and a shortage of apprentices, the Netherlands has come up with what may prove to be the makings of a housing revolution. Collaborating with the public and private sectors, Eindhoven University of Technology has been working on a […]
In April, the Labour Party launched its strategy for tackling the housing crisis in England. Housing for the Many presents a 50-point plan, with proposals that include: investing £4bn a year to build one million ‘genuinely’ affordable homes over 10 years lifting of council borrowing caps removing the ‘viability loophole’, making it impossible for […]
