Ten years after

Posted: September 29, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging, Grenfell Tower, Mortgages, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally posted as a column for Inside Housing on September 28.

When I started blogging for Inside Housing in September 2007 I wondered if I’d find enough to write about.

As it turned out there was no need to worry. A week before my first post Northern Rock went bust and the world changed.

What began in the United States as a sub-prime mortgage crisis was transformed by a series of financial acronyms into a Global Financial Crisis.

The connections to housing in this country at first seemed indirect: the UK did not have sub-prime lending on anything like the same scale; we had Northern Rock but there were plenty of other lenders; and the problems at Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns seemed a long way away.

The direct effects didn’t take long to make themselves felt as credit markets dried up, share prices crashed and politicians panicked at the prospect of cash machines running out of money.

At the time it seemed like we were set for a repeat of the housing market crash of the early 1990s with soaring mortgage arrears and repossessions and families plummeting into negative equity.

One or more of the major housebuilders looked certain to go bust. And the combination of the two would send the banks even further under.

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Sajid Javid’s apparent conversion to social housing

Posted: September 20, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Social housing | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally posted as a column for Inside Housing on September 20.

So seven years after all funding ended, three years after the chancellor said it just produces Labour voters and little more than a year after the government legislated to sell a huge chunk of it, social housing is now so ‘treasured’ that it deserves its own green paper.

It’s hard to under-estimate the shift in rhetoric by communities secretary Sajid Javid in his speech to the National Housing Federation (NHF) conference this week but will it be matched by the reality?

He’s not the only one to change his tune. It’s only two years since the same conference saw housing associations rush to endorse the voluntary deal on the Right to Buy.

They did so even though it would be financed by the sale of the most valuable third of council housing and even though replacements for social rented homes sold off could be for shared ownership, part rent-part buy or even starter homes.

That was then. This is now with a weakened government and a context changed utterly by the Grenfell Tower fire.

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What a way to run a housing system

Posted: September 14, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally posted on September 14 as a column for Inside Housing.

The balance of funding between government funding for home ownership and affordable housing schemes continues to astonish even after the change in emphasis under Theresa May.

Revised figures prepared for Thursday’s publication of the UK Housing Review Briefing Paper show that total support for the private market up to 2020/21 is set to total £32 bn compared to support for affordable housing investment of just £8.6 bn.

This pie chart really brings it home:

These are revised figures that take account of the extra money for affordable housing announced by chancellor Philip Hammond last November. Even after that, even after adjustments for lower than expected spending on mortgage guarantees, and even including the Right to Buy pilot in the pink part of the graph, we are still spending £4 on support for the private market for every £1 we spend on support for affordable housing.

What really leapt off the page at me in this chart was that the government is set to spend £4.2 bn on Help to Buy and Lifetime Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) over the same period as it spends £4.3 bn on the main Shared Ownership and Affordable Homes programme.

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Radio review: Streets Apart

Posted: September 11, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: History, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally posted as a column for Inside Housing on September 11.

In case you missed it, you still have chance to catch up with a superb history of social housing that ran over the last two weeks on Radio 4.

Lynsey Hanley’s Streets Apart told the story from the beginning of council housing in the 19th Century in Liverpool to the present. I got the impression that most of it was made before the fire at Grenfell Tower, but its shadow looms over everything.

Why is the series so good? Partly that Lynsey Hanley knows what she is talking about (as author of Estates: An Intimate History and Respectable: The Experience of Class). She is also an engaging presenter with an accent not normally heard on Radio 4 that comes from her upbringing on the Chelmsley Wood estate in Solihull.

Partly because her interviewees know what they are talking about: they are a mixture of experts in local areas, in architecture, planning and housing and local residents who are given time to tell their stories.

But also because she recognises the nuances and contradictions in the history of social housing and in its present: Michael Heseltine comes out of it surprisingly well for the minister who introduced the Right to Buy; another Tory minister Harold Macmillan gets the last word; and the final episode features more than one side to current regeneration controversies.

Her message may be obvious in one sense and, as she says, naïve and utopian in another: in the wake of Grenfell Tower, housing needs the same national priority as health and education.

But the thesis behind it is also a challenge to those of us who would agree with all of that: ‘Social housing in Britain has suffered from the flaw of being regarded as being only for poor and working class people and not for everyone.’

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The state of owner-occupation

Posted: September 5, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Mortgages | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on September 5.

The decline of owner-occupation in England resumed in 2015/16 after a brief uptick in the previous year.

The English Housing Survey shows that owner-occupation as a whole fell below 63% to return it to levels last seen in 1985, when the Right to Buy and Margaret Thatcher’s drive for a property-owning democracy were in full flow. The ownership rate is now down eight percentage points on its peak in 2003.

However, even that conceals the full scale of the decline. Owner-occupation is made up of two very different groups – people who own their home outright and those who are buying with a mortgage – and the split between them has changed radically over time.

Here are some key points that I picked out from the English Housing Survey for 2015/16:

1) Owning’s rise…

Outright ownership is still rising as people who first took out a mortgage 25 years or more ago pay it off. From 25% of households (4.5 million) in Mrs Thatcher’s heyday, it has grown to overtake mortgaged ownership two years ago and reach 34% (7.7 million) in 2015/16.

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