Source · Select Committees · Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee
Recommendation 5
5
Deferred
Paragraph: 39
Publish longer-term funding plans for social housing retrofitting and private investment beyond 2025.
Recommendation
We also reaffirm the conclusion of our Local Government and Net Zero report that the Government should set out its longer-term funding plans beyond 2025, and to encourage and outline the share of funding for retrofitting it anticipates will come from The Finances and Sustainability of the Social Housing Sector 43 private investment. The Government has acted on our recommendation to encourage the UK Infrastructure Bank to support private financing of retrofitting: it should now investigate how to bring in other sources of private financing.
Government Response Summary
The government agrees on the importance of understanding and scrutinising the for-profit social housing sector, outlining actions like recruiting specialist staff and undertaking a 2024-25 review of its knowledge. It does not, however, commit to setting out longer-term funding plans for retrofitting beyond 2025 or investigating new sources of private financing for this purpose.
Paragraph Reference:
39
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
18. We agree with the committee that it is important we ensure that we can understand and scrutinise the for-profit part of the sector. To support this we have recruited staff with experience of banking, financial markets, consultancy, and corporate law/legal structures to for-profit providers and corporate finance in our regulatory engagement, strategy and legal teams and we train and develop our staff. We have regular engagement with advisors to the sector which enables us to keep abreast of the latest developments in the sector in relation to equity investment and new structures and models. 19. We use a variety of ways to keep our regulation under review including through our audit function. The Government Internal Audit Agency (GIAA) recently carried out an internal audit of our regulation of for-profits which received a substantial assurance rating. We have in our 2024–25 priorities a review of our current knowledge and future development of for-profit providers. As with all our internal audit activity this work was reported to our Audit and Risk Assurance Committee the minutes of which are published on our website.10 We also provide details on our performance in our annual report.