HCA funding crisis
May 25th, 2010
This wonderful news which in any other circumstance would be bad news about housing, means that ill thought out and badly planned schemes like Wornington Green redevelopment, and many schemes of poor design funded hurredly under Kickstart, despite reservations of CABE, are likely to have their funding stopped or entirely withdrawn. Look at the row earlier this year:-
A row over the quality of publicly-funded homes rescued by the government’s £1bn Kickstart scheme has broken out between the two public bodies involved.
Documents obtained by Building under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a dispute between Richard Simmons, the chief executive of Cabe, and Sir Bob Kerslake, his opposite number at the Homes and the Communities Agency (HCA), over the scheme design assessments carried out by Cabe for the HCA.
The HCA was criticised in December after it emerged that more than half the homes in the Kickstart programme failed the government’s own design test. Of 136 developments, more than half achieved less than 10 out of 20 against the Building for Life design criteria.
The builders will complain and shed crocodile tears but the truth is this situation will force a re-evaluation of the quality of schemes to be funded in future and not yet underway which can only be a good thing for future generations. Let’s remind ourselves of what Nye Bevan had to say about housing quality:-
Bevan’s famous 1946 speech on the quality of council housing is quoted: “We must not only build quickly, we must build well. In the next year or so we will be judged by the number of houses we have put up. But in ten years we will be judged by the quality of those homes.”
https://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9931
64 years on his words still ring true.
Update: Inside Housing has a story today including lists of developments affected:-
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/home/stalled-schemes-get-83m-from-kickstart-18800