‘Help to buy’ scheme planned to tackle Rochdale’s ‘shocking’ housing problem

Rochdale Council is planning a ‘help to buy’ scheme to get people into their first home and bring down the borough’s ‘exceptionally high’ social housing waiting list.

A ‘shocking’ new council report notes how there are more than 7,500 applications on the housing register. And given current availability and the rate new homes are being built, the majority will ‘not be housed in the foreseeable future’.

Demand on social housing is also likely to be further ramped up by the ‘evident cost of living crisis’, the document adds.

But the council is taking homelessness prevention and the Home Choice service – which allocates social housing in the borough – back ‘in-house’ from April.
 

Read more: ‘Vital’ housing and homelessness services to be taken back ‘in-house’ by Rochdale CouncilPublished: 10 March 2022

And bosses say they plan to devise a ‘help to buy’ scheme as part of a ‘housing solutions package’ once staff transfer over from Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH).

Councillors expressed dismay over the situation when the report was presented to a scrutiny committee meeting on Monday night, describing it as ‘shocking’ and ‘sad’.

Chair Councillor Tom Besford questioned whether the authority could do more to get people on to the housing ladder.

“It seems to me that the problem here for a lot of tenants is not that they can’t afford housing, they can’t afford the deposit for a house,” he said.

Councillor Besford noted that average rent of a two-bed home in Rochdale was £597.50 per month [as of July 2021], was ‘probably significantly more than a mortgage with a 10% deposit’.

“Is there anything the local authorities can do, based on ‘help to buy’ schemes, to mitigate this?” he continued.

“Because it feels those people who are most in need of housing are paying rent which would be significantly more than a mortgage if they had the liquidity to put a deposit down on one of those spaces.”

Peter Maynard, the council’s strategic housing manager, said a ‘help to buy’ scheme was something the council ‘intended to do.’

“It’s on our list of things to achieve as going to be part of the housing solutions package we will be looking to put together as soon as we have in-sourced the RBH teams and revisited how our services are delivered,” he said.

“It is on our list to try and get to a point where we can facilitate people into home ownership, rather than having to rent.”

However he warned the financial climate had changed considerably since the council last ran a ‘very good’ mortgage guarantee scheme, which cost the authority ‘basically nothing’.

“The thing that has changed since the mortgage crash and the debacle about lending to anybody, is it’s much harder to get a mortgage now,” he said. “The criteria is much stronger than it has ever been before and there are more rejections than acceptances at the moment.

“If we put a scheme in place, we would have to do something about the lending criteria as well as offering a security to the lender.”

Rochdale Council’s communities, regeneration and environment overview and scrutiny committee met at Number One Riverside on Monday night (22 March).

Nick Statham, Local Democracy Reporter