Housing insecurity takes centre stage

Posted: July 24, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Homelessness, Private renting, Temporary accommodation, Universal credit | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on July 24.

Two reports over the weekend put housing insecurity firmly under the spotlight.

On Saturday the Local Government Association (LGA) made all the headlines when it highlighted the 120,000 children currently in temporary accommodation.

That’s not a new figure (it comes from homelessness statistics published a month ago) but that does not make it any less shocking. And the LGA puts it into real perspective by pointing out that the increase since 2014 is the equivalent of one secondary school full of children every month.

On Sunday, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) published research looking at where much of that demand for temporary accommodation is coming from: evictions and forced moves from rented homes.

The report found that 40,000 tenants were evicted from their homes by landlords in 2015 and that private landlords are now carrying out more evictions than councils and housing associations.

That may not be much of a claim to fame for ‘social’ landlords but the rise in evictions reflects both the growth of the private rented sector and increasing use of Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions by private landlords.

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The state of social housing

Posted: July 19, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on July 19

Results from the English Housing Survey last week provide a detailed snapshot of who lives where and in what sort of conditions and how they feel about it.

The picture that emerges of social renting is not exactly a new one but it also confounds many of the stereotypes about the sector and the people who live in it.

Here is a baker’s dozen of the highlights that I picked out from the survey showing the state of the sector in 2015/16:

1) The overall picture: The social rented sector was home to 3.9m households in England – 2.3m with housing associations as their landlord and 1.6m with local authorities.

That total has stayed broadly the same for the last three years but the English Housing Survey does not separately identify a rising number of affordable rent properties (an estimated 123,000 by April 2015).

As home to 17% of households, social renting is now comfortably behind private renting (20%).

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Finding new homes for Grenfell families

Posted: July 12, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Council housing, Local government, London | Tags: | 1 Comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on July 12.

How difficult should it be for Kensington and Chelsea to find new permanent homes for the families made homeless by the Grenfell Tower fire?

A month on from the disaster, new council leader Elizabeth Campbell promised on the Today programme this morning (listen from around 2:10:00) to build new council homes and buy existing ones.

So far 68 social rented homes have been reserved for the families at a new development in Kensington but they were always going to be affordable housing anyway, built under a Section 106 agreement and bought by the City of London Corporation.

Only 14 out of the 158 Grenfell families currently living in hotels have accepted offers of temporary accommodation as they wait for permanent homes.

Cllr Campbell, who is also the new cabinet member for housing and regeneration, gave a contrite but awkward interview in which she claimed (wrongly) that the Royal Borough would be the first in London to build new council homes and admitted (eventually) that she has never been inside one of the council’s tower blocks.

However, she did at least perform better than her predecessor as leader, Nick Paget-Brown, and another Tory councillor, Catherine Faulks, who made an embarrassing appearance on the same programme last week.

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Time for cross-party co-operation on housing?

Posted: July 11, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing benefit, LHA cap, Right to buy, Social housing, Supported housing | Leave a comment

Originally published on July 11 as a column for Inside Housing.

If we need to ‘invest in good work’ what about good homes?

Theresa May was speaking at the launch of the Taylor review of the gig economy on Tuesday exactly a year after she became prime minister.

In the wake of her failed election gamble, she needs non-Tory support to address the challenges identified in the report.

And her plea to the other parties to ‘come forward with your own views and ideas about how we can tackle these challenges as a country’ is being interpreted as being about more than just the labour market.

So if the challenge of precarious work requires cross-party co-operation what about that of precarious housing?

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