Housing Partnership - aim and scope of work

To define the scope of work of the partnership, members decided to focus on the spectrum of social housing, affordable rental housing and affordable home ownership according to the Housing Continuum:

The Aim: Development of an Actionplan

The deliveries of the Housing Partnership as listed in its Action Plan of December 2018 can be clustered in four big strands of actions: better regulation, better funding and financing conditions, better knowledge and governance, good housing policies, practice and themes for future discussion.

On better regulation, Housing Partnership identified legal uncertainties in EU state aid rules as major obstacles to public investments in affordable housing and delivered a set of three actions in this area: An analytical guidance paper4 to showcase the problems and identify solutions, a capacity-building workshop5 on public support to housing organised jointly with the CoR for legal experts and practitioners in Brussels, where the findings were reinforced in more detail, which led to the recommendation to revise SGEI decision 2012 with the aim to delete the narrow target group for social housing in EU competition law.

On better funding and financing conditions, the partnership deemed that as housing situations vary a lot from city to city and country to country, it is very difficult to compare. However, generally speaking, old EU Member States are able to absorb more EU funds and EIB financing than new EU Member States. The existence (or not) of frameworks, aggregators, structures for funding were identified as main reason. Capacity building is therefore identified as vital to overcome this, and the need to explore the constraints on the basis of specific case studies was stated. Cohesion policy and EIB financing are very important sources for affordable housing; however, they are not the primary ones: social, public and affordable housing is mostly financed on national and subnational level – and by the users. Therefore partnership set out an action that can allow to de-block public investment in the frame of the European Semester. Amongst others, it is recommended to develop an indicator on social and affordable housing in the Social Scoreboard that better takes into account the realities of socio-economic situation of EU citizens. The reference threshold of total housing costs should not be higher than 25% of the disposable income of a household, when calculating the housing overburden rate. A more active use of the investment clause for affordable housing projects is another recommendation in this action.

On better knowledge and governance, the partnership has elaborated several strands of actions, covering instruments for cities (IT-database, guidance brochure and city-to-city-exchange), recommendations to improve the EU urban housing market database and a recognition of the gender dimension in affordability and, on an institutionalised level, actions addressed to the European Commission to create a “Monitoring system for affordable housing in the EU” as well as to Member States to reinstall the “Housing Focal Points” and Infomal Meetings of Housing Ministers.

In the context of good policy, a general recommendation on good housing policy on local, national and EU level in eight priority areas was developed. They focus on eight core themes for policy development in the housing sector and should be seen as a “toolbox”, as not all recommendations will fit all housing situations all the time, given the diversity of systems and traditions in European countries, regions and cities. An approved solution in one context may work in another city, region or country, but as governance context and housing systems vary substantially, the proposed recommendations are seen as inspirational and in full respect of the principle of subsidiarity.