Can off-site construction of new homes solve public sector housing pressures?

Social landlords are often under pressure to build high quality, best value housing quickly. Traditional house builders are finding skill shortages in many areas that puts pressure on house building costs.

There is a solution that provides an ideal alternative to social landlords wishing to build new housing quickly and efficiently – off-site construction. With many UK manufacturers now using state of the art manufacturing techniques in modern, highly automated factories, off-site construction has come a long way in recent years, offering landlords high quality and cost effective solutions for house building.

This is where LHC can help. Our free to use framework agreement for Off-site Construction of New Homes (design, manufacture, supply and erection) is available for public sector organisations in England, Wales and Scotland. For Wales, this framework offers a selection of 5 companies, that can service all regions whilst adhering to our strict quality standards.

Fully OJEU compliant, the framework provides local authorities and housing associations with easy access to off-site manufactured volumetric and panelised building systems for the use in new home build projects. The framework includes the option of a turnkey solution including design, manufacture, supply, installation and construction services. Alternatively, a supply option excluding construction services is also available.

Offering a supply only, as well as a full turnkey solution, the framework offers our clients flexibility of choice. The companies appointed to service this new framework meet the strict LHC requirement of offering superior quality while offering competitive pricing.

I would recommend that anyone interested in finding out more should attend our Factory Fortnight event in February 2016. This event will offer clients the opportunity to visit off site factories and find out about the benefits of modern off-site building techniques.

For further information or to register for Factory Fortnight please visit : www.lhc.gov.uk. Alternatively contact Noel Shapton directly on 07867 428777 or email noel.shapton@lhc.gov.uk.


Noel Shapton
LHC (London Housing Consortium)

No Cold Homes campaign

“Being on a meter has made me very aware of how much money is spent on energy. We make a conscious effort to use the bare minimum and check the meter every morning and night so we are constantly aware of what we are using. I dread the winter.”

“I feel guilty every time it is cold and the children have to sit with blankets around them because I am too worried to put the heating on.”

These are just a couple of the stories we’ve heard as part of our No Cold Homes campaign. As a charity fighting UK poverty, we know that millions of people are struggling to pay their energy bills and keep their homes warm - often going without food and other essentials.

As part of our campaign, we found that almost two-thirds (64%) of low income households in Wales are struggling with their energy costs, despite being in work. A huge 85% feel they will have to cut back on, or not use their heating this winter, whilst over two-fifths (42%) said they would resort to cutting back on food. Two-fifths (40%) anticipate that their energy bills will cause further stress and worry over the coming months.

It’s clear that more needs to be urgently done to tackle these serious problems and one way to help is by raising awareness. More than half (56%) of those households struggling in Wales have done so for more than a year, yet only 16% have told their energy supplier about their situation, and only 4% have turned to an advice organisation for help.

Through our campaign, we want to make sure that the help available gets to where it’s needed. We’ve been working in partnership with other charities and organisations to spread the word amongst their networks. Alongside working households, we know many other groups will suffer this winter too, and we want to reach as many people as we can.

Anyone who is worried about their energy costs this winter can use our free Benefits Calculator to check if they are entitled to any welfare benefits and tax credits, our Grants Search to see if they could be eligible for support from over 3,000 charitable funds, and find information on further sources of help including charitable trusts from energy companies, the Warm Home Discount and the Winter Fuel Payment.

We hope that our campaign will help to create more noise around fuel poverty issues and the help available, so that more people can find support that could make all the difference this winter and beyond.

For more information, please visit www.turn2us.org.uk/NoColdHomes.


Simon Hopkins
Chief Executive of Turn2us

Welsh Apprentice Challenge - hear from the winning mentor!

The first ever Welsh Apprentice Challenge was launched at Community Housing Cymru's Annual Conference on 19th November. 15 apprentices were nominated from all over Wales and were split into three teams. Each team faced the following challenge: 

How can we promote housing as a career of choice for young people?

I mentored the imaginatively named 'Team 3' which was made up of Emily (Cartrefi Conwy), Mathew (Coastal Housing Group), Karolina (Monmouthshire Housing), Oliver (Newport City Homes) and Daniel (Taff Housing Association). My team focused their presentation around a slogan of 'Find a Home For your Talents', recognising that the diversity of roles available in the housing sector should be promoted more widely. 

During their research, the team failed to find any delegates who had consciously made the decision at school to go in to housing, nor any member of the public on the streets in Cardiff that had considered housing as a career. The team highlighted that other sectors, such as the Army, had very effectively developed marketing and advertising demonstrating that there is a far wider variety of roles in the Army than fighting at the front line. 

As the other teams also referred to on the final day, an obvious approach to engaging younger people is through social media. Emily pointed out that, according to research, young people look at their phones over 160 times a day. This means that using Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn would be far more productive than leaflets and advertisements. 

The team members themselves demonstrated the wide variety of job opportunities available as they were from such varied roles such as a gas engineer, business administrators, a carpenter and a plumber. 

After two days of discussing, researching, preparing and practising, it was finally time to present the team's ideas to the Annual Conference delegates. All three team members did a fantastic job of presenting their ideas, then it was over to the delegates to choose the winner... it was a win for Team 3!

Lots of conference attendees have commented that the Apprentice Challenge was the highlight of the conference, and I certainly got a lot out of it along with my fellow mentors. Most importantly, the apprentices themselves thoroughly enjoyed the experience and felt that their confidence grew throughout the two days.
 

Come to housing and find a home for your talents!

Jason Wroe
Newydd Housing Association

Helping people to live independently

The Supporting People Programme Grant means people get help in their own communities without adding extra costs and pressure to public services.

I recently stopped a Torfaen man from being illegally evicted from his flat and becoming homeless. This would have worsened his mental health issues and put him in unsuitable accommodation.

His privately rented flat was flooded and his landlord moved him to another home. During one of my support visits, I was checking his letters and he showed me a three-month eviction notice. I could see it had been illegally post-dated.

This had been making him anxious. He is bi-polar, schizophrenic and has anger management issues.

I spoke to his landlord who wasn’t very happy that I had spotted what he had been trying to do. The extra time meant that we could get his application into Homeseeker ready to start bidding for a new place to live.

I supported him through this and, in a lovely coincidence, a flat that he lived in many years ago became available and his application was successful.

He couldn’t manage the contact with the different agencies such as removals, housing benefit, the health charities and the Department for Work and Pensions. My work with him made sure it was smooth and he knew what was happening at every step.

He is meeting all of his support outcomes which we agreed when I began working with him. It won’t be long before I stop seeing him and take on another person to help live independently.


Amanda James
Support Officer, Bron Afon Community Housing

Little by Little - Small Changes lead to Better Living

Welsh Government's Warm Homes Wales project has funded 5 Local Authorities (RCT, Torfaen, Cardiff, Blaenau Gwent, Merthyr) to take a joined up approach in order to support its households to take action to save energy alongside the installation of energy efficiency measures. The South Wales based energy behaviour change project, Little by Little, has been supporting households across the local authority areas, targeting over 1400 households who have previously received energy saving measures under the Welsh Government's Warm Homes Wales.

The project's key aims are to educate and empower householders to use their energy more efficiently through looking at the whole household's approach towards energy, whilst providing support to improve the quality of life of all those they engage with.

Advisors carry out a home health check with each household, along with energy saving advice that provides information on how to switch providers and the savings that could be made.

Using its partners, the project signposts those who require onto training, education and employment opportunities, digital inclusion advice, along with debt support and other house management opportunities.

As well as providing adults with an OCN level one in Understanding Home Energy via its training sessions, the project is also working with schools encouraging children to become Junior Green Energy Champions via its fun workshops. The project will also be carrying out local energy fairs where energy providers, partners and other community groups can engage with the community to help reduce those affected by fuel poverty.

The project is being run on behalf of the five local authorities by Melin Homes. Allison Cawley, Project Manager said: “This really is a fantastic programme that is helping those in the community who are on the verge of or already in fuel poverty to make some big savings as well as supporting them with their employment, training, digital and financial requirements.”

For more information or to discuss the project, please contact: Allison on 01495 745947, 07791 657386 or allison.cawley@melinhomes.co.uk.

Allison Cawley
Project Manager, Little by Little

Tech makes life easier, but what if you can’t see?

If you couldn’t see or hear like most of the population, you might think that smartphones, tablets and e-readers would be of little or no use to you. Fortunately, you would be wrong.

Online Today is a Big Lottery funded project run by RNIB Cymru and its partners - North Wales Society for the Blind, Vision Support and Action on Hearing Loss.

In the next couple of years, we’re aiming to work with 6,000 people across Wales with sight and hearing loss in order to show, teach and demonstrate how inbuilt functionality and specialist software can open up the world of digital technology.

Lots of people just don’t know where to start when it comes to digital technology. That’s where Online Today comes in. We have a team of eight Digital Skills Officers scattered liberally across the country who are running events, small group sessions and delivering home sessions to those that have difficulty getting about or who live in remote areas. We take along a whole load of the latest technology, and a “mi-fi” to use where there is no broadband connection, so people can get hands on with an iPad, smartphone or laptop. People are given time and support to explore and play with the equipment. They are shown how to access accessibility features, set up e-mail, use Facetime or Skype, do their shopping or banking and even set up Facebook or Twitter accounts. And it's not just a one off - Online Today encourages people to attend as many sessions as possible or we’ll go to their home for as long as is needed to build up their confidence.

Who qualifies for this project? Anyone who has sight or hearing loss. They don’t need to be registered as visually impaired, hearing impaired or blind but their senses do need to be adversely affected due to age or health condition. If you’re not sure about referring someone, then give us a ring and we’ll see what we can do to help.

You can also check http://www.rnib.org.uk/online-today-event-search for up and coming events.

We’re on 029 2082 8518 for further details, or e-mail us at Onlinetodaycymru@rnib.org.uk


Chris Hoyle
Digital Inclusion Manager, RNIB Cymru

A view from housing: What would the draft Wales Bill mean in practice?

The draft Wales Bill, published last week, caused all the usual political rumblings. Amid all the talk of insults to Wales, Whitehall being a bad loser, and the looming threat of a constitutional crisis, there doesn’t seem to have been too much discussion about the practical implications of the proposals within the Bill.

A devolved legislature with extensive powers is now clearly the settled will of the people of Wales.

And while technical debates about constitutional mechanisms and legislation probably won’t be a topic of conversation as the people of Wales eat their tea tonight; job security, health, and housing probably will.

What will the draft Wales Bill mean to, for example, a social housing tenant in Bangor? Or a homeless woman in a hostel in Cardiff?

Housing is probably the area of devolved policy where we have seen Wales and England diverge most over the last 16 years.

Not only is devolved government the settled will of the people of Wales, but a vastly different approach to housing (amongst other things) is too.

In Wales, we have had successive governments committed to investment in social housing, through Social Housing Grant, which has allowed the housing association sector to provide an average of 2,000 additional homes each year. At the same time, Welsh Government supports a ‘Help to Buy’ product which allows better access to home ownership. Across the border, UK Government pursues home ownership as the be all and end all of housing policy, with funding for social housing sacrificed for a loosely defined ‘affordable’ home ownership offer.

Devolution has meant that the housing association sector in Wales has had an opportunity to define itself very differently from our friends across the border.

The Right to Buy for housing associations and the 1% cut to social rents will have a profound impact on affordable housing as we know it in England. In Wales, there are proposals afoot to abolish Right to Buy completely, and we hope that Welsh Government won’t follow the same path on rents – a path now roundly rejected by housing providers and tenants groups.

The draft Wales Bill threatens the ability to legislate for these policy differences – voted for by the people of Wales.

Welsh Government suggests that the Housing Act, which took action on the scourge of empty homes, created new models of co-operative housing and takes action to improve the private sector, would not have been within the competence of the Assembly. This is inexplicable.

It is not a leap to suggest that the proposals in their current form take us back to the dark days of the Legislative Competence Order (LCO). Those of us schooled in the history of LCOs, or indeed housing policy, will know that this didn’t work.

The Reserved Powers model this Bill seeks to enshrine should be about simplicity and clarity. For legislators and voters.

In its present form, the Bill adds to the confusion - not only threatening to slam the brakes on the devolution journey, but threatening to halt the significant progress Wales has made as a nation in a number of areas. For housing, devolution hasn’t just allowed us to do things differently; it has allowed us to better meet the needs, and the will, of the people of Wales.



Aaron Hill
Public Affairs Manager, Community Housing Cymru Group

This blog post was originally published on IWA's Click on Wales site. You can read it here.