Cladding questions have not gone away
Posted: April 30, 2020 Filed under: Construction industry, Fire safety 1 CommentOriginally published on April 30 as a column for Inside Housing.
The first parliamentary questions on housing since the Coronavirus lockdown saw pleas for construction and housebuilding sites to get back to work.
But this was anything but a return to normal as a socially distanced and virtual House of Commons saw scrutiny of ministers truncated by the parliamentary timetable and technical gremlins.
Though questions about the costs of Covid-19 for local government took top billing, Tuesday afternoon’s Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) questions only underlined the fact that the top housing issue before the outbreak has not gone away.
Six short weeks ago there was some good news for victims of the cladding scandal as the Budget extended government help beyond Grenfell-style ACM cladding to cover other materials such as High Pressure Laminate (HPL).
Full details of the £1 billion fund are expected in May but there are still big questions about how it will operate.
And in the meantime the plight of residents has got worse as bills escalate for insurance premiums and for waking watches in blocks where work to replace the cladding has been halted by the lockdown. These interim measures are not covered by the fund.
What help for housing?
Posted: April 23, 2020 Filed under: Coronavirus, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housing market, Private renting, Stamp duty 1 CommentOriginally posted on insidehousing.co.uk on April 23.
An extension of Help to Buy looks likely, a stamp duty holiday probable, but what else should the government do when the housing market eventually emerges from its Coronavirus freeze?
Vested interests are already out in force making their case and can cite the effect of a downturn on housebuilding numbers, the economy and tax receipts in their support.
And if anyone is feeling a sense of déjà vu this is of course pretty much where we were in 2008, when the housing market slumped in the wake of the credit crunch.
Seeing what’s essential
Posted: April 16, 2020 Filed under: Coronavirus 2 CommentsOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on April 16.
Week four of the Coronavirus crisis and the world is still being turned upside down.
Is it really less than a month ago that ending rough sleeping by the end of this parliament – rather in a weekend – seemed a big ask?
Or that it felt like it would take months, possibly years, of campaigning to get the government to restore Local Housing Allowance (LHA) to something like the level of rents?
Or even that it was possible to buy a flat or a house?
Long-held assumptions about the way we run our housing system have been turned on their head by the crisis.
Jules Birch 