Lois Beech highlights key recommendations for regenerating sheltered housing

While attending the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool, Lois Beech, Consultancy and Partnership Manager at Housing LIN had the pleasure of participating in an event hosted by the National Housing Federation's (NHF) Older Persons Housing Group over lunch.

The focal point of these discussions was to have a strategic discussion around housing policy.

Lois shared with the group the findings and recommendations from the recent APPG on Housing and Care for Older People report on regenerating outdated sheltered housing stressing the importance of retaining what is, with c.527,000 homes, the UKs single largest specialist housing for older people.

The APPG inquiry report recommendations include:

• Changing Homes England and GLA capital grant funding rules so that housing providers can apply for and use capital grant to regenerate and upgrade existing sheltered housing schemes and sites, ending ‘additionality’ requirements.
• Permitting RPs to be able to recycle and use ‘historic’ grant funding previously awarded to them for regeneration purposes.
• Allocating 10% of the Affordable Homes Programme to older persons housing with 1/3 of that 10% focused on sheltered housing regeneration projects.
• Local authorities having a better understanding of the number of homes in sheltered housing and supplying this info to MHCLG to enable them to plan for works and understand the scale of the problem.

We hope to work with others to make these recommendations a reality and it was great to see so many at the Housing Community Summit interested in making this change happen whilst recognising the financial difficulties.