Seeing the cracks
Posted: September 17, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Legal Leave a commentWhether it’s the UN, the Lib Dem conference or tribunals in Fife, the cracks in the bedroom ceiling are growing by the day.
As Pete Apps reports for Inside Housing, only two members of the junior coalition party voted against a grassroots motion at the conference in Glasgow yesterday calling for an immediate evaluation of the controversial policy.
The motion condemned the policy that Lib Dem MPs were instructed to call the ‘spare room subsidy’ for ‘discriminating against the most vulnerable in society’. Richard Kemp, former leader of Liverpool Council, called it ‘reprehensible and evil’ and Baroness Shirley Williams, probably the party’s senior figure, called it a ‘big mistake’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Silly season
Posted: September 13, 2013 Filed under: Economics, Housing market, Mortgages Leave a commentSilly? Naïve? Bonkers? Proposals by the RICS for managing house price inflation are getting about as warm a welcome in the property industry as the UN got at Conservative HQ.
Some of the reactions are just as self-interested too since an end to house price volatility would be good news for people who want to buy but very bad news for some of those queuing up to say the whole idea is crazy. While some critics point with good reason to the practical difficulties of implementing the idea, others seem personally offended by the very idea of putting a stop to the house price gravy train.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Asking for more on new homes
Posted: September 12, 2013 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding 4 Comments‘We will build more,’ the major housebuilders are promising housing minister Mark Prisk. And they will – but strictly on their own terms.
Final results from Barratt published this week show that its completions rose by 6.3 per cent to 13,663 in the year to the end of June. The fact that the country’s biggest housebuilder is building more homes has to be good news. Even better, it is planning 45,000 over the next three years and it believes 16,000 completions are achievable in the year to June 2016.
But forget any notion that there has been any change in the strategy it and the other major housebuilders have followed since the credit crunch of managing their land carefully, minimising costs and maximising margins. That 6 per cent increase in completions was matched by increases of 30 per cent in operating profits and 74 per cent in pre-tax profits before exceptional items. Shareholders will also benefit as the company pays a dividend for the first time since 2008.
Bedroom blues
Posted: September 11, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Private renting Leave a commentJust when you were beginning to miss him, Grant Shapps is back with a bang and a complaint to the United Nations about that ‘woman from Brazil’.
The Conservative Party chairman brought an international twist to his old housing stomping ground in a Today programme interview that pitted him against Raquel Rolnik, the UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing. Readers will need no reminding that in a preliminary statement following a two-week visit to the UK she is calling for the bedroom tax to be suspended immediately and fully re-evaluated.
Osborne’s symbol of turning a corner
Posted: September 9, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Economics, Help to Buy, Housing market 5 CommentsThe venue for George Osborne’s speech claiming that the economy is ‘turning a corner’ may turn out to be a symbol of rather more than the economic recovery he had in mind.
The Chancellor was speaking at One Commercial Street, a half-finished 21-storey development of shops, offices and homes on the edge of the City of London and his choice of venue was no accident:
‘You’re probably thinking that a construction site is a strange place to make a speech. But I’ve invited you here for a reason. This development – 1 Commercial Street – began in 2007. The plan was to turn this building into 21 floors of office space, private apartments and affordable housing. Construction began; and continued at a pace. Until in 2008 the work simply stopped. Investors pulled out. Jobs were lost. And the site lay silent for three years.
‘But last year, something exciting happened. Construction began again. Today, 230 people are working here at 1 Commercial Street to complete the development – and it will open its doors next year. I’ve brought you here because this building is a physical reminder of what our economy has been through in the last six years.’
Work on the development did indeed stop in October 2008, when the concrete frame had been built as far as the 11th floor. It took three and a half years and a change of owner before housebuilder Redrow restarted work on the tower in May 2012.
So far, so good for the Osborne narrative. Work stalled by the credit crunch is finally underway but work on what? What does 1 Commercial Street really say about the nature of the recovery he was proclaiming?
Out of credit
Posted: September 5, 2013 Filed under: Civil service, Universal credit Leave a commentTake your pick of today’s official criticisms of the universal credit. It was over-ambitious and high risk, it had no clear plan and it has offered poor value for money.
Has the National Audit Office (NA0) ever delivered a more damning verdict on a key government policy than the one it has just published?
Think of just about every rumour you’ve heard about the IT system, every assumption about the chaos behind the scenes and every time you reacted sceptically to DWP assurances that the latest changes to the timetable were all part of the original plan, and you will find them all in the report published today.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Shared vision
Posted: August 30, 2013 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing benefit, Legal, Shared ownership 2 CommentsShared ownership seems an obvious solution to the housing problems of people on low and middle incomes – so why does it remain on the margins?
A report out this week from Shelter looks at perceptions of and problems with the part rent-part buy tenure and ways that it could be reformed to take it into the mainstream.
In the process, it makes a pretty convincing case that the piecemeal, alphabet soup of government ownership schemes has done little to make housing more affordable for the squeezed middle and more to create confusion about the options available. In particular, it shows how shared ownership could make more homes in more places more affordable for more people than either version of Help to Buy. The report finds that almost eight out of 10 low to middle income families could not afford a family home with a 95 per cent Help to Buy mortgage.
Give and take
Posted: August 28, 2013 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market, Mortgages Leave a commentFinally I’ve found somebody who thinks that Help to Buy 2 is a good idea: the private equity owners of Foxtons.
I’m obviously exaggerating for effect here (I was just reminded of Simon Jenkins too for starters) but the London estate agent is famous for three things: its flashy sponsored Mini Coopers; the pushiness of its staff; and the timing of its sale in 2007. The founder of the company sold out to private equity firm BC Partners for £360 million just months before house prices and transactions crashed.
After a rare apology from BC Partners to its investors, and a rocky road to recovery, Foxtons is set to return to the stock market next month with a valuation of up to £500 million. That spectacular turnaround may have a bit to do with some canny financial engineering but, as the Financial Times reports this morning, it has far more to do with the fact that its timing could hardly be better.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 