Housing
A Warmer Homes plan for every resident
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Decent Homes
A secure, warm home is central to wellbeing for individuals and communities. Security of housing helps children to thrive in their local school, workers to find and retain employment, older people to live healthily at home for longer, and all residents to know their neighbours and feel part of a neighbourhood. That is why improving the quality of housing in the North East is central to this manifesto.
The top priority in improving the quality of our region’s homes is to make them cheaper to heat, by ensuring that they are as well insulated and as energy efficient as possible. Draughty homes, with inadequate insulation, means increasingly crippling heating bills. My plan for a mass home insulation programme, available to all cold homes across the region, is at the end of this section. This Warmer Homes plan would:
- Cut fuel bills – the only long-term solution to escalating costs
- Create hundreds of new apprenticeships and jobs, as we build up the workforce required
- Support more people to stay, work, and thrive in their chosen community
- Enable people to join in more easily with local activities and build community resilience.
The failure of national and local government to sufficiently tackle the problem is evident from the statistics. Within our region, we have a higher proportion of social housing than the English average. This is housing where social landlords (Housing Associations, Councils and ‘Arms Length’ providers) have had the greatest ability to install energy efficient measures and many have done so – but as the figures show, less successfully in the North East than elsewhere.
| Social Housing | As percentage of all homes | Average (median) CO2 emissions per household | Percentage with good energy efficiency |
| England | 17.09% | 2.5 tonnes/year | 60.24% |
| North East | 22.87% | 2.7 tonnes/year | 53.55% |
My Warmer Homes plan would provide the funds, trained workforce and coordination required to deliver more energy efficient social housing. I would also work with social housing providers to ensure that all homes subject to a social rent are brought up to the revised Decent Homes Standard as early as possible after its publication.
Some of our coldest homes are within the private rented sector, where there is a huge quality difference between the best and the worst homes available. That is why I would support councils to use existing powers, and negotiate for further powers, to better regulate the sector:
- Support landlord accreditation schemes, and find ways to incentivise accreditation so that the bad landlords find it harder to market their homes
- Work with local renters’ unions and learn from the Greater Manchester Good Landlord Charter, to strengthen accreditation schemes and put some standards on a regional footing
- Negotiate to add a local licensing requirement to the reforms due under the Renters (Reform) Bill
- Support councils to use the Selective and HMO licensing powers available to them
- Lobby government to allow rent controls where specific local conditions and the health of the rented sector support them
- Provide top-up funding and green finance (as below) to landlords who meet the highest standards under accreditation schemes.
For home owners, I would work to ensure that the benefits of home insulation and green technologies are available by:
- Topping up funding available under government schemes where this is inadequate to achieve the changes required (e.g. for heat pumps under the boiler upgrade scheme)
- Procuring green finance (e.g. loans paid off by savings in bills)
- Directly funding earlier phases of the plan, where this will provide wider society benefits to the economy and local communities.
At the heart of the Warmer Homes plan would be programmes that would benefit householders regardless of tenure, as well as wider society:
- Providing free advice and assessment
- Housing needs survey, identifying need for both energy efficiency status, and other quality improvements in relation to housing condition, accessibility etc
- Identifying early pilot projects for harder-to-treat properties, so that later phases of the plan would coincide with an increasingly skilled workforce and effective approaches to insulation at scale.
Affordable homes
We need more genuinely affordable homes within the region, but these should not be provided only by the big house builders, usually in return for building on greenbelt land or allowing a sprawl of executive housing. As your Green Mayor, I will:
- Negotiate for new powers, so that Councils can more effectively limit the number of empty properties and second homes
- Support Community Land Trusts, co-housing schemes and other mechanisms, to ensure that land is developed for the benefit of the local community rather than for distant developers, e.g. by establishing an enabling body at regional level to provide technical, governance, planning and business advice for communities seeking a cooperative model of housing provision.
- Work with renters’ unions to improve standards in private rented housing
- Enable the conversion of existing, underused non-domestic buildings to provide genuinely affordable housing when practicable, to reduce the need for demolitions
- Assist local councils to establish a “right to rent” for owner occupiers facing repossession, so that they can keep their homes after selling to the local authority and rent them back under terms available to council tenants.
In general, research shows that our social priorities in connection with housing in the region should focus on quality of housing, rather than quantity. However, new housing will be needed, and I will set the highest standards for new homes funded by the Combined Authority, to ensure:
- Increased supply of affordable and social housing, including a significantly higher proportion at a social rent
- All new housing developed to high environmental standards
- Housing provision that is coordinated with good education, health, public transport links and active travel provision
- Housing that is accessible to all, including disabled people.
Andrew Gray in Byker, Newcastle, after talking with a local resident who is living in one of the region’s 120,000 homes without cavity wall insulation, January 2024
My Warmer Homes plan for the North East
Nearly a quarter of a million homes in the North East have inadequately insulated loft spaces or cavity walls. Add in the very large number of older homes with solid walls, and the scale of the challenge becomes clear.
| All North East homes | Total no. of homes | Poorly insulated cavity walls | Poorly insulated solid walls | Poorly insulated roof spaces | Inefficient windows |
| Social housing | 201280 | 19280 | 13845 | 21721 | 22518 |
| Private rented | 148634 | 26791 | 50243 | 37150 | 13317 |
| Owner occupied | 525612 | 88747 | 88717 | 123165 | 28527 |
| Other | 4653 | Data not available | Data not available | Data not available | Data not available |
| All homes | 880179 | 119958 | 135275 | 160531 | 64146 |
So any programme to insulate the region’s homes needs to be well planned and phased. But it also needs to proceed at pace, to deliver the step change in housing quality which our region’s residents deserve. This is an outline of some key elements of the plan:
| Phase 1 | Poorly insulated cavity walls and roof spaces within the Social Housing sector (estimate: 38,000 homes) |
| Phase 2 | Poorly insulated cavity walls and roof spaces within other housing tenures (estimate: 200,000 homes) |
| Phase 3 | Solid walled and other hard-to-insulate housing (Social Housing) |
| Phase 4 | Solid walled and other hard-to-insulate housing (other tenures) |
| 2024 (8 months) | Housing quality survey, across all communities and tenures Work with Further Education colleges to provide additional training and courses from September 2024 Support social housing providers to step up retrofit activity |
| 2025 | Phase 1 begins Provide information and advice to all householders in phase 1, work required and timescale for their area Continue to expand skills provision to increase workforce available Explore options and funding for pilot work to insulate older, solid-walled properties at scale |
| 2026 | Phase 1 completes Phase 2 begins: expand information and advice to householders, introduce additional grants and loans Phase 3: complete and assess pilot projects Establish funding streams to support further grants and loans to owners of homes |
| 2027 | Phase 3 expands to cover all areas Phase 4 begins on a selective, place-based basis Phases 2 & 4 (owner occupiers and private rented): enable ‘green finance’ loans to increase takeup of insulation |
| 2028 | Phase 4: learning from two years of pilots, rolling out insulation schemes more broadly across the region |