Peter Hubbard

1. Overview Whilst the Housing White Paper provides a welcome shift in emphasis, away from solely focussing on home ownership, it is not as radical as expected and sometimes reads more as a research paper than a policy paper, concentrating primarily on housing supply.

First, there is now arguably £8.4bn worth of capital funding made available by government through the recent Autumn Statement for “social and affordable” housing development.

Many annual reports contain a range of facts and figures with performance reporting for the past year, setting out the goals reached and where the challenges have been.

Health and Social Care: Matthew Wort provides some key questions about your readiness to provide new solutions in a changing social care environment and how to provide a public service to be proud of.

Local Government: Mark Cook navigates the tough decisions for local authorities as they contemplate greater devolution, business rate independence, asset sale freedom and austerity all at the same time.

The likely long term consequences of the ONS decision to classify housing associations as part of the “public sector” are, as we have said in our recent e-briefing, not going to make any practical difference.

In announcing the Government’s new housing association Right to Buy (RTB) policy on the Today programme this morning, Greg Clark left an obvious gap in the Government’s proposals that was left unchallenged in the interview.