By David Mullins and Halima Sacranie
Working Paper 2, the Evaluation of Empty Homes Community Grants Programme (EHCGP) Midlands Region, shows how the Empty Homes programme has led to a significant expansion of the self-help housing sector in the Midlands as existing charities and social enterprises got involved in housing refurbishment work to provide good quality homes for their clients.
The decision to allocate an initial £30million, and an overall total of just under £50million to 110 community-led groups over two EHCGP funding rounds, is seen as a bold departure from large scale procurement of affordable housing schemes and is worthy of detailed evaluation.
The paper profiles six projects in the region and assesses their impacts which include employment, training and volunteering opportunities as well as tackling blight and bringing empty homes into use. It also highlights the key role played by external partners in enabling the success of these organisations and the benefits of the programme to local authority empty homes strategies and to empty property owners themselves. A database of organisations was developed, regional meetings were observed and six case studies were undertaken, each involving up to 5 semi-structured and qualitative interviews with key individuals, including project champions, workforce, residents and partners. Observation of regional meetings with EHCGP recipients organised by Self-help-housing.org (SHHO) and HACT, and further expert interviews and discussions informed the drafting of the report as did an early findings seminar presentation at the University of Birmingham in Autumn 2013.
The aim of this first working paper in the overall programme of research is to provide a rounded evaluation of the impact of the EHCGP in the Midlands and build on existing knowledge about the self-help housing sector and its expansion, and thereby to add to wider knowledge on community-led housing initiatives in England. To contribute to this aim, this paper identifies the existing scale and nature of self-help housing projects in the Midlands, and explores the barriers and enablers to the expansion of the sector. It also explores the wider community benefits, as well as the direct outputs of the programme in terms of empty homes brought into use. It begins to assess the impact of EHCGP on the national map of the sector and on the sustainability of individual projects.
The report finds that, despite its origins as part of a larger Empty Homes programme conceived primarily as a way of tackling empty property, the EHCGP can be regarded as one of several community-led funding programmes loosely associated with the Localism Act (including the community right to build and community-led housing programme). This is as a result of a successful response by SHHO and its allies to the opportunity to make the case for a designated programme for non-registered providers to achieve a deeper local impact (Mullins 2013). While EHCGP is part of the Empty Homes Programme, it is targeted at organisations that are not registered providers of housing and which have much in common with community-led housing groups such as community land trusts, co-housing groups, co-operatives and community self-build groups.
Six interim recommendations are proposed in this report to build on the learning of this working paper for wider discussion and debate:
- Set more realistic timescales and provide greater flexibility to enable new non-registered housing providers to take part in programmes such as EHCGP.
- Join up support and capacity building at local and regional levels to maximise impacts. (There is also scope for more coordinated support and to explore ‘buddying’ type partnership models to harness housing association’s expertise.)
- Undertake a social audit of the wider impact of the projects through a low burden self-assessment framework to inform future investment, transfer learning and improve future practice.
- Promote organisational sustainability for community-led groups through continued opportunities to engage in housing and where possible to grow their asset base.
- Overcome barriers to accessing properties by improving property-owners’ understanding of the scheme and enabling community-led groups to take on empty or poorly managed social housing and ‘meanwhile use’ of long-term empties in development pipelines.
- Stimulate continued bold and innovative thinking by community-led groups and thereby unleash resources of creativity to take on the biggest challenges in street level regeneration.