Labour sets out its stall on affordable housing
Posted: April 20, 2018 Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Housing associations | Tags: Labour Leave a commentThe green paper published by Labour on Thursday represents the most comprehensive plan for affordable housing put forward by a major party in England in 40 years.
The document launched by Jeremy Corbyn and John Healey does not just reject the market-based and Conservative-led polices of the last eight years, it also goes significantly further than the policies adopted by the last Labour government and in some ways even beyond what the party proposed at the last election.
In broad outline, it is an attempt to reclaim the word ‘affordable’ and spell out what housing ‘for the many’ would mean. And it explicitly rejects the current government’s claim that the only way to make housing affordable is to build as many new homes as possible:
‘Conservative housing policy is the wrong answer, to the wrong question. It is not just how many new homes we build, but what we build and who for that counts. We have to build more affordable homes to make homes more affordable.’
Five wasted years
Posted: April 17, 2018 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Migration | Tags: Dominic Raab, Eric Pickles Leave a commentOriginally published on April 17 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Dominic Raab’s comments about immigration and house prices may have sparked a furore but they also shine a light on something else about the recent history of housing.
Amid mounting pressure, on Friday the Ministry for Housing and Communities Local Government (MHCLG) published updated analysis that he had relied on for his claim that he had been told by civil servants that immigration has increased house prices by 20 per cent over the last 25 years.
When I tweeted about it, the man himself came back to me with this:
In fairness, he could have added that the increase was actually 21 per cent but, as I suggested last week, that is minor by comparison with the 284 per cent total rise in prices that happened between 1991 and 2016 and accounts for just £11,000 of the £152,000 increase.
According to the analysis, increases in real earnings were a much more important factor in price rises.
Look a little deeper, though, and the analysis does not really prove very much either way.
Mr Buggins, immigration and house prices
Posted: April 9, 2018 Filed under: Housing market, Migration | Tags: Dominic Raab 1 CommentOriginally published on April 9 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The latest Mr Buggins to take his turn in the housing minister job gave a revealing first print interview on Sunday that speaks volumes about his priorities.
The new(ish) minister – I forget his name, they come and go so quickly – makes the seemingly incendiary claim that immigration has pushed up house prices by 20 per cent over the last 25 years.
He tells the Sunday Times that he is writing to the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to urge it to consider the negative effects of immigration on housing demand as well as its positive economic benefits.
Mr Buggins is playing a key role in the drive to boost housebuilding but he says: ‘You’ve got to deal with demand as well as supply. You can’t have housing taken out of the debate around immigration. If we delivered on the government’s target of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands every year, that would have a material impact on the number of homes we need to build every year.’
He says he’s been told by civil servants that immigration has had a sizeable impact on prices based on the Office for National Statistics house price index from 1991 to 2016.
Rough sleeping initiative deja vu
Posted: April 3, 2018 Filed under: Rough sleeping | Tags: Homelessness Reduction Act Leave a commentOriginally posted on April 3 on my blog for Inside Housing.
If the new initiative to reduce rough sleeping sounds vaguely familiar it’s because we have been here before.
The package of measures announced by Sajid Javid over Easter includes a new Rough Sleeping Team made up of external experts, a £30 million fund for 2018/19 with further funding for 2019/20 targeted at areas with high numbers of rough sleepers and £100,000 of funding to support frontline workers across the country.
It’s a welcome news just as the Homelessness Reduction Act is about to come into force, and it comes on top of existing investment in homelessness programmes, piloting of Housing First and closer collaborative working inside and outside government.
But it also made me think back to the last time a Conservative government faced a rough sleeping crisis and announced a Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI).
In 1990 the number of people sleeping rough in central London soared in the wake of a recession and benefit cuts that hit 16- and 17-year-olds in particular.
Then as now, ministers denied that benefit cuts were to blame. Then as now, the sight of people sleeping in doorways and makeshift camps got national media and political attention.
April arrives with some rare good news
Posted: March 29, 2018 Filed under: Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housing benefit, Local housing allowance, Mortgages, Private renting, Uncategorized, Universal credit Leave a commentOriginally published on March 29 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve written a blog at this time every year with the headline ‘April is the cruellest month’.
It’s not that I have a TS Eliot fixation nor (I hope) that I endlessly repeat myself but because ever since 2010 the start of the financial year seems to have meant yet another benefit cut or housing policy change to cope with.
This year is a bit different not so much because there is no bad news but because there is some good news as well. Here are some examples:
- The u-turn on the withdrawal of support for housing costs for 18-21 year olds under universal credit announced on Thursday. This was a cumbersome policy that required significant exemptions and barely saved any money but it’s still a significant change to the original pledge to make young people ‘earn or learn’.
- The Homelessness Reduction Act passed in 2017 applies from April 3. The legislation should be a big step forward in ensuring that more people get help earlier but despite a recent announcement on funding there are still well-founded concerns about whether councils have the money to implement it.
- Claimants already getting housing benefit who move on to universal credit will from April be paid an additional two weeks of housing benefit. That may not be much consolation for the (in theory) five-week wait for their first universal credit but the payment (worth an average of £233) should ease the transition a bit –and it is not recoverable.
- It will be unlawful for landlords to give new tenancies on the least energy efficient property from April 1 – all rented property will have to qualify for at least an Energy Performance Certificate rating of E so (in theory) tenants will no longer be stuck paying high heating bills for the worst F and G property.
- More measures introduced against rogue landlords in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 come into force, including powers for councils to issue banning orders against the worst offenders and implementation of a database of landlords and letting agents convicted of some offences.
Bear in mind too that it’s not so long ago that I would have been writing about plans to apply a Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap to social and supported housing from…April 2018.
For all that good news, though, the suspicion remains that it will at best mitigate the impact of policies already implemented and still in the pipeline.
Where the money really goes in housing
Posted: March 21, 2018 Filed under: Affordable housing, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: UK Housing Review Leave a commentThree comparisons leap out from the latest edition of the indispensable UK Housing Review published on Wednesday.
The first two are not new in themselves and the third is only a crude estimate but all three need repeating again and again for a real appreciation of where spending on housing goes and exactly who is subsidising who.
First comes the main one highlighted by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH): the shift from bricks and mortar to personal subsidies, or from grants for new homes and repairs to old ones to housing benefit.
This series of pie charts from the Review shows the change over the last 40 years and the total amount of housing subsidies in real terms:
Note first that supply subsidies have sunk to just 4.3 per cent of the total pie – this despite all the cuts in housing benefit seen since 2010 and the fact that the figures to not include continuing tax reliefs for home owners (see below for more on that).
Second, note that this does not save money. Total subsidies are now 48 per cent higher in real terms than at the turn of the century (when admittedly social housing investment was very low) but they are also approaching the levels of 30 years ago (when investment was significantly higher and the unemployment rate was three times what it is now).
