Sidelining of tenants is part of a wider pattern
Posted: April 25, 2019 Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Leasehold, Private renting, Tenants Leave a commentWhether you put it down to carelessness or couldn’t care less-ness, the inaction inside government inaction that has sparked open letter from A Voice for Tenants (AV4T) is symptomatic of a wider political paralysis.
As the group themselves point out, they are not representative of the eight million people living in social housing in England but they are the best we have until the government keeps the prime minister’s promise to bring tenants into the political process.
The letter is all the more effective for the contrast between its moderate language and its stark message that working behind the scenes has not produced results.
The only option left seems to be to embarrass the politicians into living up to what they have said over the last two years – accepting Inside Housing’s open invitation to a meeting seems the bare minimum they should do.
And there is a strikingly similar message in the Times this morning from Grenfell United, as it attacks ‘indifferent and incompetent’ ministers who took their ‘kindness as weakness’.
Two years of meetings have produced too little action, they say, with no progress on their call for a new model of housing regulator and thousands of people still living in ‘death traps’ with combustible cladding.
Grenfell and tenants were top of the agenda for the ministers in post at the time of the fire – the work of Alok Sharma and his civil servants is praised in the AVT letter – but have slipped down it as the months and now years have passed.
Where next for renting after Section 21?
Posted: April 15, 2019 Filed under: Private renting, Scotland, Tenants, Wales 5 CommentsBlimey. If it plays out as billed, the government’s consultation on ending no-fault evictions and introducing open-ended tenancies for private renters represents the quickest change in housing policy that I can remember.
I say ‘if’ because this is still only a consultation, because ministers have form for claiming rather more in press releases than turns out to be the case when the detail is published and because Theresa May could be succeeded within weeks by a new, more right-wing prime minister who could dump the whole thing.
One more caveat is that I am only talking about England. The first minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, pledged to end no-fault evictions on Saturday and so narrowly avoided the embarrassment of Welsh Labour lagging behind the English Tories on tenants’ rights.
Scotland has already abolished Section 33 (its version of 21) and introduced a new tenancy system in December 2017 that could become the model for the other UK nations.
In England, and taking it at face value, this announcement is a stunning victory for campaigners that takes May’s Conservatives to the left not just of where Ed Miliband was at the 2015 general election but also of what Jeremy Corbyn argued at the 2017 election. It was only later that year that the Labour leader committed to ending Section 21.
Last year the government consulted on its own plan for three-year tenancies but did not commit to making them mandatory – this was only one of three options alongside education and financial incentives for landlords.
The rise and rise of short-term letting
Posted: April 4, 2019 Filed under: Permitted development, Private renting, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Airbnb Leave a commentOriginally published on April 4 as a blog for Inside Housing.
What do you think have been the two fastest-growing forms of housing over the last decade?
The trends since the financial crisis of falling home ownership, declining social renting and surging private renting have only recently shown signs of going into reverse and we’ve also seen the blurring of social and ‘affordable’ housing.
But you would struggle to fit two of the biggest changes highlighted in the 2019 edition of the UK Housing Review (launched on Thursday) into those three traditional categories.
First up is temporary accommodation. The latest stats show there that 82,000 homeless families were living in it in England in the year to June 2018, an increase of 71 per cent since 2011. Of these, 57,000 were in London.
Second is short-term lets through sites like Airbnb. There are no reliable stats on this but the latest data suggests there are now over 77,000 Airbnb listings in London, of which 43,000 are entire homes and 34,000 rooms or shared rooms.
It’s tempting to join the dots between those numbers and see a direct connection between these two forms of short-term letting, especially in London – the more permanent homes that are converted into short-term holiday lets on Airbnb the more temporary accommodation is likely to be needed. Neither of them is necessarily that short term or temporary.
Jules Birch 