Gove’s admission begs more questions
Posted: January 30, 2023 Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Michael Gove’s admission that ‘faulty and ambiguous’ building regulations set by central government were partly to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken even passing notice of the evidence at the public inquiry.
That a statement so blindingly obvious should be enough to prompt a worried look from one of the levelling up secretary’s media minders speaks volumes about the government’s stance up to now. It also begs significant questions about the administration’s approach to housing going forward.
The admission (and the look) came in an interview with the Sunday Times trailing the announcement on Monday that developers have six weeks to sign legally binding contracts to repair unsafe buildings or, in effect, lose the ability to build anything else.
As the levelling up secretary told Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News: ‘The people who were responsible for erecting buildings which we now know are unsafe have to pay the costs of making sure those buildings are safe.’
Except that making UK-registered developers liable for fixing the blocks they built themselves via the contracts but for paying to fix other buildings via the Building Safety Levy does not really capture all of those responsible.
As the inquiry has revealed, that list includes just about every part of the construction industry, and especially product manufacturers. Mr Gove’s written statement on Monday does say that contractors and manufacturers are among those whose conduct is being investigated by his department’s Recovery Strategy Unit.
The list now also includes a government that Mr Gove says ‘collectively has to take some responsibility’ (meaning current and previous governments).
Read the rest of this entry »Four decades of failure
Posted: January 19, 2023 Filed under: Housing benefit, Rent control, Social housing Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Why has housing become so unaffordable over the last 40 years?
The answer, according to new report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), is cuts in housing subsidy that represent ‘a massive shift in who pays market housing costs, from government and landlords onto tenant’ since 1979.
It’s the scale of the shift, rather than the shift itself, that is striking.
Back at the start of Margaret Thatcher’s first term, social and private renters alike were paying around 10 per cent of their incomes on rent. By 2020 that had risen to 25 per cent for social renters and 30 per cent for private renters.
The shift is represented in a graph that Ian Mulheirn, who co-authored the report with colleagues James Browne and Christos Tsoukalis from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, calls ‘one of the most striking’ in public policy:
They calculate that if housing subsidies had been maintained at 1979 levels as a share of total housing costs they would have been worth £45 billion 2019/20 rather than the actual £31 billion.
This ‘generational housing costs squeeze’ is the result of massive change in three elements of housing subsidy: social housing; housing benefit; and rent controls.
That is the result of the accumulation of many different policies over time: cuts in investment in council housing and higher council rents; private finance and higher housing association rents; the deregulation of the private rented sector; and rapid increases in housing benefit to ‘take the strain’ of all that followed by the cuts imposed under austerity.
Read the rest of this entry »Building a better future or surrendering to the past?
Posted: January 10, 2023 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
So now we know what the ‘people’s priorities’ are – and housing is not one of them.
The fact that housing did not feature in the speech from Rishi Sunak setting out his agenda for the new year is not a surprise in itself – his five pledges all covered issues with far greater political saliency.
But it is still surprising that in a speech on ‘building a better future’ he did not mention housing at all and that, apart from a boast about stabilising mortgage rates, the speech steered clear of traditional Tory territory on home ownership.
He did talk about community (‘a better future also means reinforcing people’s pride in the places they call home’) and making places better (‘I love my local community and it’s not right that too many for far too long have not felt that same sense of meaning and belonging’).
But he is talking here about people who already have places they can call home and avoids any mention of those who do not have a home or need a new or more affordable one.
And that is no coincidence because he was speaking in the wake of the government’s surrender late last year to its own backbenchers on planning and housebuilding.
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Jules Birch 