The implications of the leasehold scandal

Posted: March 19, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing associations, Leasehold | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally published on March 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.

The leasehold scandal will have far-reaching implications for housing that will be felt well beyond the major housebuilders with whom it began.

A report published by the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on Tuesday takes as its starting point the doubling ground rents and onerous contract terms faced by buyers of new homes who it says were treated ‘not as homeowners or customers but as a source of steady profit’.

And it also highlights the issue of leaseholders facing huge bills to remove and replace combustible cladding raised in its work on fire safety.

But this report goes well beyond those recent high-profile problems with leasehold and poses some fundamental questions about a tenure that only exists in England and Wales – and they are ones that will require answers by social landlords as well as private sector housebuilders and freeholders.

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Housing in the Spring Statement

Posted: March 13, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Climate change, Housebuilding, Land, Permitted development | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally published on March 13 as a blog for Inside Housing.

With Brexit dominating everything, the Spring Statement seems at first glance to be just as underwhelming as the chancellor hoped when he moved the main Budget event of the year to the Autumn.

The most eye-catching details from usual array of announcements and re-announcements on housing includes are £3bn Affordable Housing Guarantee Scheme to support 30,000 homes and a proposal to ban fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025.

But to add to the sense of Brexit drift, the first re-introduces a coalition scheme that lowered borrowing costs for housing associations but was abolished in 2015 while the second does something to address climate change but will be arriving nine years later than the zero carbon homes that were scrapped by the coalition.

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The shift to renter rights

Posted: March 11, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Private renting, Social housing, Tenants | Tags: | 3 Comments

Originally published on March 11 as a blog for Inside Housing. 

Can it really be less than five years since Labour’s plans for three-year tenancies in the private rented sector were attacked by the Conservatives as ‘Venezuelan-style socialism’?

And is it really less than three years since Royal Assent for a Housing and Planning Act that included provisions to abolish secure tenancies and make fixed terms mandatory for new council tenants?

A plan for that to apply to housing association tenants as well was only dropped because of concerns over their public-private status but many associations enthusiastically took up the voluntary option of fixed terms they were given in the 2011 Localism Act.

Until very recently it seemed that social housing was set to follow the private rented sector into a marketised world of flexibility and insecurity.

However, the pace of change on this issue in the last 12 months has been rapid and it is still accelerating.

The biggest move so far came on Friday when Labour followed up on its conference pledge to scrap no-fault evictions by announcing plans for indefinite private tenancies.

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Freezing out ‘No DSS’ landlords

Posted: March 5, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Local housing allowance, Private renting, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Originally published on March 5 as a blog for Inside Housing.

The way that responsibility for housing is split between different government departments means that sometimes the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

The classic example of this came in parliament yesterday when even as MPs were approving another year of frozen working-age benefits, the housing secretary was making a written statement attacking landlords for refusing to let to tenants on housing benefit.

The vote means that the local housing allowance (LHA) will be frozen for the fourth year in succession and the benefit cap will stay stuck at the reduced rate of £20,000 (£23,000 in London).

The impact of that will fall directly in the ‘thousands of vulnerable people and families’ mentioned by James Brokenshire in his written statement and will be felt most by families with children and those living in the most expensive areas.

And it will come on top of the continuing impact of the transition to universal credit and all the problems with waiting times, delays in payment and supposed simplicity for tenants and landlords that it brings in its wake.

If it reinforces the sense of relief among social landlords that the government abandoned plans to cap housing benefit for social and supported housing at LHA rates, it means many social tenants face a freeze on the rest of their incomes despite rising prices.

But the freeze will give private landlords yet more reasons to think twice about letting homes to tenants on benefits.

And the move by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) comes at precisely the moment that ministers at the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) give their backing to a campaign by Shelter on ‘No DSS’ adverts.

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