Budget leaves big gaps to be filled
Posted: November 27, 2025 Filed under: Benefit cap, Budget, Housebuilding, Local housing allowance, Rents Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Even if it had not been leaked in advance, this Budget could have been defined as much by what was not in it as what was.
The astonishing mistake made by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in uploading a report containing all the key measures before chancellor Rachel Reeves had started speaking came after weeks of well-sourced stories about them.
We already knew the headline measures: the abolition of the two-child limit; a council tax surcharge on high-value homes; and freezing income tax thresholds.
They were joined on the day by a private landlord tax (higher rates of income tax on income from property), confirmation of more money for the Warm Homes Plan and a welcome move to tackle the ‘benefit trap’ facing tenants in supported and temporary accommodation.
But the Budget delayed one of the decisions most eagerly awaited by social landlords: they will now have to wait until January for the government’s final decision on rent convergence, in effect how quickly they can increase their lowest rents above the CPI plus 1 per cent limit.
Three months on from the consultation closing, the Budget background document explains that: ‘While the government remains committed to implementing social rent convergence, it is important to take the time to get the precise details right, taking account of the benefits to the supply and quality of social and affordable housing, the impact on rent payers and affordability.’
And there was no mention at all of the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) freeze, perhaps the housing issue raised by more organisations than anything else in the run-up to the Budget.
Read the rest of this entry »What will the Budget do on tax and housing?
Posted: November 5, 2025 Filed under: Budget, Stamp duty, Tax Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
With three weeks to go until the Budget, speculation is mounting about potential tax increases on housing.
Hemmed in by a manifesto that ruled out increases in rates of income tax, national insurance and VAT, the chancellor will have been looking at other options like council tax, stamp duty, capital gains tax and inheritance tax.
Rachel Reeves offered few specifics in her speech on Tuesday morning but it seems clear that tax increases are on the way that could have far-reaching effects on housing.
But while it’s easy to think of changes that might raise more money or be electorally popular, or make the tax system fairer or improve the functioning of the housing market, achieving more than two of those aims at the same time is a real stretch.
Doing all four is near impossible – and that’s before we even get to the welfare side of the Budget and the looming questions about Local Housing Allowance, the benefit cap and the two-child limit.
Read the rest of this entry »A merger too far
Posted: October 22, 2025 Filed under: Cornwall, Housing associations Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It may not be quite merger mania but the steady flow of housing association amalgamations continues.
So too do the questions. Where will this end? When does big become too big? Should business logic always trump local connection?
The mooted merger between Bromford Flagship and LiveWest made me think again about all those questions precisely because of that local factor.
When I first moved to west Cornwall in the 1990s, the council housing stock had just gone through a stock transfer, one of many carried out by small district councils following approval by tenants in a ballot.
In 2007 Penwith Housing Association became part of Devon and Cornwall Housing. DCH in turn merged with Knightstone to form LiveWest in 2018.
The tenants’ landlord became larger and larger and also more remote – with headquarters more than 100 miles away in Devon – and there was no further ballot but at least those organisations made some kind of regional sense.
Now, 30 years on from that original stock transfer, we potentially have merger number three, with LiveWest in talks to become part of Bromford Flagship (itself the product of a merger that only happened in February).
The merged landlord will become one of the largest in the country, owning or managing more than 120,000 homes stretching from Land’s End to Norfolk via the Midlands, with a headquarters 230 miles away in Tewkesbury.
Read the rest of this entry »Cracking the code on Section 106
Posted: October 17, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Section 106 Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For something so important, the Section 106 system of providing affordable homes seems to exist inside a black box.
We know what goes in (developments all over the country, local councils trying to get the contributions they can) and we know what comes out (almost half of affordable homes delivered for year).
We also know that this is just part of a wider system for capturing land value not just for affordable homes but also community infrastructure and facilities.
But the inner workings of the system seem hidden.
This is most obviously true when it comes to the dark arts of viability assessments that allow experienced developers to run rings around under-resourced local authority planning departments.
But it can also be true in reverse, with the complexity of the system holding development back and sparking calls for reform.
Read the rest of this entry »Missing the target and missing the point
Posted: September 22, 2025 Filed under: Housebuilding Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A year into the government’s five-year target to build 1.5 million additional homes and signs of progress are thin on the ground.
Indicators of new supply published on Friday estimate that 231,300 net additional homes were delivered in the just over 14 months between the start of the parliament on 9 July 2024 and 14 September 2025.
At this rate, the government will struggle to hit one million additional homes in this parliamentary term, let alone 1.5 million.
Worse still, the supply indicators are currently moving in the wrong direction. In the first quarter of 2025/26 (April to June), building control reported completions were down 5 per cent on a year earlier while the number of energy performance certificates (EPCs) issued for new dwellings was down 14 per cent.
Further back in the pipeline, the number of homes granted planning permission fell 7 per cent in the year to the end of June to 221,000, the fourth annual decline in succession.
The estimates published by the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government provide a more accurate picture of new housebuilding than the familiar starts and completions figures and a more timely one than the net additional dwellings statistics that form the basis of the target.
The official figures on net additional dwellings for 2024/25 will not be published until November but MHCLG estimates (based on EPCs for new dwellings but allowing for demolitions) that the annual total will be 199,300. That’s just over 100,000 below the annual rate required to hit the target.
Read the rest of this entry »The right’s way to more council housing
Posted: August 14, 2025 Filed under: Council housing Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
England should be building 100,000 new council houses a year, says a new report out this week.
It’s a call that would be routine if it was being made by one of the usual suspects, but this time it comes from, of all places, Policy Exchange.
The right-wing think tank was the incubator for the ideas that dominated the Conservative agenda in the 2010s and its alumni played a key role under successive Tory-led governments.
Among its greatest hits in the glory days of the coalition were calls for all social homes to be nationalised, with most sold off to tenants and only a rump left for the most vulnerable.
That was followed by proposals to sell off all ‘high-value’ social housing and fully commercialise housing associations.
True, the ideas were usually justified as ways to generate more affordable homes overall but the underlying agenda seemed to be that, far from tackling social exclusion and poverty, social housing was a cause of them
In the wake of the 2024 election, Policy Exchange is playing a less partisan tune and this report comes with endorsements from Labour as well as Conservative politicians.
Read the rest of this entry »Starmer reassures and worries on homelessness
Posted: July 28, 2025 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If you’re looking for a chink of light ahead of the promised government strategy on homelessness, the number of homeless households living in bed and breakfasts (B&Bs) is down for the third quarter in succession.
But it’s only a chink since government figures for the end of March saw the total number of homeless households (131,140) and children (169,050) in temporary accommodation rise to new records.
At the most expensive and temporary end of the spectrum, there were 3,870 families with children in B&Bs, down 28 per cent since Labour took power in July 2024. Of those, 2,300 had been there for longer than the six-week legal limit, a decline of 39 per cent.
However, those falls were more than matched by an increase in the use of nightly paid, privately managed accommodation. This is also expensive and temporary but self-contained so that families do not have to share a bathroom and kitchen.
This sub-sector took off after 2013 when the coalition government tried in vain to cut use of B&Bs and private landlords and management companies realised they could charge more on a nightly basis than for longer-term leases.
Over the next seven years, the number of homeless households in nightly paid accommodation doubled and since 2020 it has almost doubled again to 46,710. Since Labour came to power the number of families with children in non-B&B nightly paid accommodation has increased by 27 per cent to 32,160.
Of those, more than half (17,810) had been there for more than a year and 14 per cent (4,640) for more than five years.
By contrast, there were just under 25,990 households in private sector leased accommodation, roughly the same as in 2013 despite a doubling in the total numbers in temporary accommodation overall.
Trends like these highlight what’s at stake in the homelessness strategy both for homeless families stuck in temporary accommodation and for local authorities creaking under the strain of paying for it .
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Jules Birch 