Housing crisis? What housing crisis?
Posted: October 24, 2013 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market, Private renting 7 CommentsThe housing minister for England gave his first TV interview yesterday. I think it would be fair to say it did not go too well.
A week ago Kris Hopkins was ‘not available’ to appear on Channel 4 News to debate homelessness and house prices. This week the news peg was a 40 per cent increase in mortgage approvals and a 10 per cent increase in asking prices in London in a single month. He was interviewed as part of a package that asked ‘Is the housing market overheating?’
Interviewer Jon Snow presented him with four ‘key stats’ on completions (up slightly but still down by a third on the pre-crisis peak), house prices (up 5 per cent in a year), foreign home buyers (responsible for half of sales over £1 million in London) and the gap between prices in the north and south (up from £66,000 to £103,000 in the last year).
Here’s how it went with a few comments from me along the way.
Beyond facts
Posted: October 23, 2013 Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Tags: Benefit cap Leave a commentThe routine is familiar by now: researchers question government policy, government rubbishes researchers.
Last week it was the University of York, the bedroom tax and Esther McVey, today it’s the Chartered Institute of Housing, the benefit cap and Mike Penning but the gist was the same.
Where McVey embarrassed herself on the World at One, Penning had definitely got out of bed on the wrong side before he arrived in the Today programmestudio. That was compounded when presenter Justin Webb introduced him as Mark rather than Mike. ‘Let’s start as we mean to carry on, shall we?’ he harrumphed before attacking ‘the BBC and The Guardian’ for being the only media outlets to report the story. Read the rest of this entry »
Balancing act
Posted: October 17, 2013 Filed under: Private renting, Regulation Leave a commentGovernment action on private renting looked a distant prospect when it brusquely rejected plans for light-touch regulation as ‘red tape’ in 2010.
So today’s statement by Eric Pickles announcing a package of measures to give private tenants a better deal is evidence that even the Conservatives have woken up to the fact that they are a growing part of the electorate and testament to the efforts of campaigners over the last three and a half years.
Following up an announcement made – significantly – during the Conservative Party conference, the communities secretary says ‘we recognise there is more to do to support a vibrant private rented sector’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Who buys it?
Posted: October 8, 2013 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market, Mortgages Leave a commentIt’s under attack from all sides but the strongest arguments for Help to Buy 2 are the ones that ministers cannot mention.
No matter how much David Cameron, George Osborne and the new junior housing minister go on about aspiration and opportunity, the critics refuse to go away. In just the latest example, the all-party Treasury select committeescorns government assurances to repeat its earlier warning that the controversial scheme will boost house prices and be politically impossible for future administrations to exit.
Here’s my analysis of the stated – and unstated – arguments made by ministers:
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
2020 vision
Posted: September 24, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentEd Miliband’s conference speech was much vaguer about housing than the advance briefing but it still sounds like good news.
The Labour leader said that ‘we’ll have an aim that at the end of the parliament Britain will be building 200,000 homes a year, more than at any time in a generation’.
He said that in 2010 there were a million too few homes in Britain but that the shortfall would rise to two million – the equivalent of five cities the size of Birmingham – by 2020 if we carry on as we are.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Sanctions impact
Posted: September 23, 2013 Filed under: Homelessness, Labour market, Welfare reform Leave a commentAs everyone focuses on the bedroom tax, there is worrying evidence today of the impact of another part of the benefits system on vulnerable homeless people.
Tougher benefits sanctions were introduced in October 2012 for people on job seekers allowance (JSA). The period that benefit can be stopped increased from between one and 26 weeks to four weeks and three years. Changes for those on employment support allowance (ESA) followed in December 2012.
The changes are part of steadily escalating conditionality requirements, including the claimant commitment that will be introduced in 100 job centres a month from October as part of the government’s conviction that ‘looking for work should be a full time job’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Export market
Posted: September 21, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, Tax Leave a commentWhat price homes for Londoners when new developments are marketed first to overseas investors with a promise that there will be ‘no social housing’?
As The Standard reported yesterday, the ‘fully private’ flats at Capital Towers near the Olympic Park go on sale in Malaysia this weekend in what it dubs a ‘no riff raff row’.
That example comes from a report out today by Darren Johnson, a Green Party London Assembly member, who claims that a third of all buyers of new homes are from overseas and that two-thirds go to investors rather than occupiers.
He accuses mayor Boris Johnson of actively encouraging a process that leads to increasing concentration of housing wealth, a severe social housing shortage and the unnecessary demolition of existing stock and a lifetime of insecure renting for most Londoners.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 