The Housing Committee rents out about 1,600 domestic properties, but it is decades since the States built any homes itself, having more or less given up its traditional role as a developer after the 1990s.
Deputy Williams told the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast that there was little chance of providing the number of additional social housing units needed over the next few years unless the States restarted its own construction programme in some form.
‘I think we’re going to have to do that to provide the level of affordable housing required. I think the States has got to do that,’ he said.
‘We need to add more affordable housing and I think that’s the best means of doing it. We have the staff to be able to do it who currently manage and maintain properties.’
Listen to the full interview with Deputy Williams on the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast
Since the turn of the century nearly all new social housing has been built by the Guernsey Housing Association. It now manages just over 1,000 domestic properties, most of which were built when Deputy Williams was its chief executive.
The GHA is currently finalising a small project of specialist housing at Sandy Hook, which has been hit by delays, and working alongside private developers on key worker housing at the Oberlands. It has planning permission for 69 homes on the former CI Tyres property in La Charroterie. And it is involved in plans for a mixed development of private homes and 69 social housing units at the Mallard site in the Forest.
However, virtually no new social housing units have been completed in the past three years, despite the States agreeing in 2023 that the island required at least another 700 by 2027, and Deputy Williams believed that neither the GHA nor a second housing association mooted previously could be expected to meet the level of unmet demand.
‘The GHA has probably morphed more from a development association into consolidating the management and maintenance side of things,’ he said.
‘It would be a long process to try to create a whole new housing association and I don’t really see the benefits of that. There would be no economies of scale there at all.’
It was during another of the island’s periodic housing crises, in 2001, when the States agreed to set up the GHA, seeing it as a more efficient developer and landlord of social housing.
After six months in the Assembly leading the newly created Housing Committee, Deputy Williams said he was relaxed about the States resuming a more direct role in housebuilding, although the construction and financing arrangements are likely to differ from those used in the 20th century.
‘We’ve got to go through all the checks and balances and make sure it all works, but that’s definitely available to us, and I think we’re going to have to do it in order to supplement the market,’ he said.