Dealing with homelessness whilst looking after Nature.
The main reasons for homelessness are: being asked to leave by friends or family, domestic abuse and losing private rented accommodation. Walking past Howden House in the evening, you may see a number of people sleeping rough outside, in their own desperate attempts to put pressure on the Council to find them a home.
There has been a record-breaking increase in the number of street-homeless individuals and families with children in Sheffield.The rising numbers being placed in hotels and B&Bs is described as being at an ‘unsustainable and unaffordable level’. Over the last 10 years, Councils have faced a reduction to core funding from the Government of nearly £16 billion.
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Hide AdAccording to Sheffield’s Homelessness Prevention Rough Sleeping Strategy document, there is a shortfall of 902 new affordable homes per annum in the city. Nationally, we are only building 12,000 social housing units per year, but are losing more through ‘the right to buy’, so building is below the replacement level. But the Government plan to build 1.5 million new homes lacks joined-up thinking on how this is to be achieved. Like elsewhere, there has been much controversy in Sheffield particularly over the use of Green Belt Land.

What might be the cost to Nature of house-building?
If the building industry was to build this number of new homes, it would use up our annual total carbon budget, because of the use of concrete, tarmac and other materials.
Rosie Pearson of the Community Planning Alliance has stated that it is absolutely possible to solve the housing crisis without building on countryside: “there are about 3.5 million units that could be built, without building on countryside or farmland, including 1.2 million brownfield homes, over 1 million empty homes that could be put back into use, as well as private commercial properties and public sector properties that could be adapted for housing.
In a recent interview, Kevin McCloud (of Grand Designs) said ‘we are a world leader in homelessness. Homelessness has doubled since 2010. The legislation for housing needs to be fit for purpose, and the reason that it is not, is because of the power of lobbying’ (by the house-building companies). He described the most pressing challenge as being that the house-building market is controlled by 3 companies : Barret, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon (the latter of which turned over £4.4billion pounds last year and made 25% gross profit, going into the pockets of the shareholders). This is an effective cartel which has a huge power of lobbying and also huge power in the building of homes. Average purchase cost of a new home includes £65,000 profit. These companies control the supply chain. The building companies deliberately fail to meet the targets, because meeting demand would reduce the price of the product. This sellers market is protected by an archaic planning system, which was never designed with these profit-making forces in mind.
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Hide AdAdditionally, he said “We could look to Europe for examples of best practice. Everything we need to do already exists. You can visit zero energy projects, higher density schemes, schemes of fantastic biodiversity that improve the quality of life for all living creatures, ourselves included”.
Chris Packham (of Springwatch), recently in Sheffield filming at the Longshaw Estate, is passionate about these issues: The housing crisis is one of affordability. 1% of the population own 50% of the land. We have the capacity to build homes that are almost fully self-sufficient, yet we still build houses with the lowest mandatory requirements for insulation in Western Europe, in the times of an energy crisis. We should not be building homes that people cannot afford to heat, and with an unaffordable carbon cost.
He goes on to talk about the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Part 3 is devoted to restoring Nature. Developers will be able to destroy Nature to a certain monetary value ‘Biodiversity Net Gain’, then deliver 110% equivalent on supporting Nature elsewhere, which often means that this ineffective scheme is an oversimplification and greenwash, a commodification of Nature with a multitude of loopholes and problems. Habitats may be irreplaceable, monitoring is under-resourced, exemptions undermine its effectiveness, costs are passed to the house-buyers rather than out-of-profits, to name but a few.
Last year Packham commissioned a report by the University of Sheffield to investigate whether new housing developments honour their agreed ecological conditions to prevent biodiversity losses from the changes in Land use, the granting of planning permission being contingent upon agreement to these ecological measures (such as wildflower meadows, tree planting, bird boxes etc) . They report that only 53% of these features mentioned in planning conditions were actually carried out.
In the words of Chris Packham “ we need the right houses, built in the right way, in the right place”.