Strivers and scroungers

Posted: October 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit | 4 Comments

In place of Labour’s ‘One Nation’, David Cameron today gave us two – with housing as the dividing line between them.

In an interview with Andrew Marr ahead of the opening of the Conservative conference he repeatedly pressed home the party’s appeal to ‘strivers’. ‘This week here in Birmingham you’re going to hear in huge detail how we get behind people who want to get on and want to make something of their lives,’ he said. ‘That’s what it’s about.’

He also signalled more cuts in welfare before the next election, despite ruling out the mansion tax that Nick Clegg has said will be the price of Lib Dem support for them. The most striking thing for me about the interview was the way that Cameron repeatedly used housing benefit as a proxy for the welfare system as a whole.

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Popular posts Q3

Posted: October 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging | Leave a comment

These were the most viewed posts on my blog in the third quarter (July to Sept):

1) Victorian values – reflections on the legacy of Octavia Hill for housing, welfare and planning on the centenary of her death.

2) My criminal past – squatting, my own housing history and how what I did in London in the early 1980s would make me a criminal 30 years on.

3) More trouble with troubled families – a John Humphrys interview with Louise Casey got my goat but the problems with a programme based on unreliable and heroic assumptions had not gone away.

4) A lot of quid, not much quo – the continuing mystery of why the government has given housebuilders a multi-billion pound bail-out and asked so little in return.

5) Our dysfunctional housing market – or rather a non-market that is pricing out the young, undermining the welfare system and damaging the political system.

Interesting that the top three are the ones I enjoyed writing the most. Thanks very much for reading and also for commenting.

 

Conference calls

Posted: October 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

Another week, another party conference that seems longer on talk than action on the housing crisis. Like the Liberal Democrats in Brighton, the Labour party in Manchester made all the right noises. It even advocated many of the same policies – if you can call carefully crafted aspirations policies.

As I noted in my blog for Inside Housing on Monday, the headline commitment by Ed Balls to funding 100,000 affordable homes and a stamp duty holiday from the proceeds of the 4G mobile phone auction is not actually a policy commitment at all, just a call for the government to do something in the next two years. If Labour wins the 2015 election, George Osborne will have already spent the money (almost certainly on something else) and in the absence of another one-off windfall housing will have to take its place in the queue for the zero-based spending review planned by Balls. His speech this week is a promising signal that housing could be a priority but no more than that.

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Rogue state

Posted: October 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Legal, Private renting | Leave a comment

There is good news and bad news in a Shelter survey about rogue landlords out today but neither is quite what it appears at first glance.

The bad news is that complaints by tenants to their local authority about their private landlord are up 27 per cent in the last three years.

Worse, of 85,000 complaints in the last 12 months, 62 per cent related to category I and II hazards – things like dangerous electrics and damp that are serious or life-threatening, And there were 781 cases where health services had to get involved because of the behaviour or neglect of private landlords.

Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Phoning home

Posted: October 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding | Leave a comment

It’s great to see Ed Balls putting his – or rather mobile phone companies’ – money where his mouth is on housing but his speech still begs some big questions.

It’s good news too see housing finally making the headlines at the start of a Labour party conference rather than becoming a footnote before they sing The Red Flag at the end.

Media briefing ahead of the speech by the shadow chancellor was all about housing and his call for the £3-4 billion proceeds of the sale of 4G mobile phone licenses to be spent on 100,000 affordable homes and a new stamp duty holiday for first-time buyers. The idea seemed to go down pretty well with delegates judging from the applause in the hall.

Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

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