By Keith Cooper

Rachel Reeves’ first budget as chancellor felt like a damp squib for housing: a sop to keep things ticking over for the winter with the hope of something bigger in the spring.

While the NHS was promised an extra £22.6bn, England’s national programme for affordable housing, widely rumoured to have run out of money, got £500m. Pot holes got £1.6bn; homelessness services, £233m.

The announcement most likely to make a real difference, of course, was on right to buy. Slashing discounts should stem the haemorrhage of social housing it causes. More than 14,000 homes were lost to RTB in 2022-23, according to official figures. The prospect of a long-term agreement on rent rises for housing association and council housing landlords will steady their tippy finances to a degree.

But this budget should be noted for what it didn’t announce as much as what it did.

While the chancellor announced £3bn of loan guarantees to small and medium private housebuilders to build “tens of thousands of homes”, there was no mention of the crisis in section 106 housing, which has already left thousands of brand new affordable homes empty across England. There was the sizeable sum of £1bn for the discretionary housing payment hardship fund but nothing about ending the ludicrous misalignment of housing benefit levels set by ministers and the real-life cost of paying the rent.

These are serious omissions from a budget which will exacerbate two of the biggest problems in housing: the shortage of cheap rental homes and the increasingly difficult task of helping people who are homeless.

The difficulty of getting a housing association to buy affordable homes built as part of section 106 deals threatens to be a big brake on supply in need of urgent government intervention. The Home Builders’ Federation claims “tens of thousands of affordable homes” are held up because of it. Yet it feels like the Treasury has stuck its head in the sand.

Meanwhile, council spending on temporary accommodation hit £2.3bn in 2023/24 after rising 29% from £1.8bn in the previous year, according to official figures. This huge hike is driven by the fact that local housing allowance rates don’t cover the cost of the stop-gap accommodation for families who find themselves homeless.

And much of the accommodation which these billions pay for is, frankly, crap and even harmful to those who live in it. It’s often too small for the families and children crammed into it. There are no kitchens to cook meals, space for children to play, and they’re often far away, sometimes hundreds of miles, from support networks of friends, family and official support services, like healthcare.

This isn’t an issue that the Treasury will be able to easily ignore. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has notably announced that its first inquiry will be into the impact of temporary accommodation on children. It’s bound to hear some harrowing evidence.

Kier Starmer’s government can legitimately lay some of the blame for the awful mess in temporary accommodation at the door of the last administration. But it must also explain how it’ll deal with it, and it’s far from clear in this first budget how it will do so.

What Reeves has promised is more detail on her ambitions for affordable housing in the Spending Review. That’s due to report in the spring. But by then, it’s likely that even more records will be broken on the numbers of families and children in temporary accommodation, the budget-busting sums councils are paying for it, and how many brand new affordable homes are languishing empty because housing association are too broke to buy them. It could be a long winter.