Posted: July 27, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Social housing | Tags: Michael Gove, Rishi Sunak |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Where to start with the government’s new ‘long-term plan for housing’ presented by Rishi Sunak.
If the opinion polls and by-election results are anything like accurate, the long term will only be a maximum of 17 months, but let’s assume that Rishi Sunak returns in triumph as prime minister at the next general election with the faithful Michael Gove as his housing secretary.
Together, they trumpet their achievement of delivering a million new homes over the course of the last parliament and say they are still committed to their target of 300,000 new homes a year without specifying exactly when.
But then what? The politics of ‘the right homes in the right places’ (aka non-Tory constituencies in inner cities) has worked out nicely, with the Conservatives keeping a swathe of suburban and rural seats thanks in part to their attacks on Labour plans to ‘concrete over the countryside’.
The reality on the ground is rather different. The housebuilding industry has scaled back its output in the wake of the housing market downturn even if fears of a full-blown crash were not realised.
In any case, that million new homes in the previous parliament was not much more than in the one that came before. Help to Buy to deliver 387,000 of the completions between 2013 and 2023 but has finished.
Some are calling for the scheme to be revived but the Treasury will need some convincing after what looked like a one-way bet on rising house prices turned into losses on many of the most recent equity loans.
Negative press coverage about Help to Buyers who need more ‘help’ is becoming a major headache that is only accentuated by problems that continue to dog leaseholders despite Gove’s Building Safety Act.
So much for the (possible) future, but look a little closer in the present and it is hard to ignore the echoes from the past.
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Posted: July 12, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: Rachel Maclean |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Achievements may be thin on the ground but, six months into her job as housing and planning minister, Rachel Maclean does at least seem to have grasped one of the fundamentals of the role.
The manipulation of numbers by ministers is part of a proud tradition that dates back years but makes me remember fondly the days when Grant Shapps would routinely obfuscate between ‘social’ and ‘affordable’ housing and Iain Duncan Smith would use ‘statrickstics’ to back up his bogus claims about welfare cuts.
In her speech to Housing 2023 earlier this month, Maclean harked back to the glory days of the social/affordable shuffle with a claim that ‘we’ve got record numbers of social rent homes that have been built’.
Asked by Inside Housing how she squared that with the fall in social rent completions from almost 39,562 a year in 2010 to 7,644 last year, she went full Nelson to claim ‘that’s not a figure I recognise’. And she doubled down to boast that ‘we’ve delivered more social rented homes than under the last Labour government’. The actual number is, of course, less than half – and most of them were funded by the investment programme the coalition inherited from Labour.
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Posted: July 3, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing associations, Housing market |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Kylie Minogue is riding high in the charts, Frankie Dettori wins the Ascot Gold Cup and the housing market looks to be in deep trouble.
In 1992, as in 2023, the more some things change, the more they stay the same.
Part 1 of this column looked at the similarities and the differences between the situation now and 30 years ago. This second part looks at the potential consequences for the housing system as a whole and what the government can do about it.
Arrears and repossessions: This is the issue burnt into the collective memory from the crash of the early 1990s, with repossessions peaking at 75,000 in 1992 and more than 400,000 owners losing their home in the decade as a whole.
The political impact was huge: the economic doom and gloom may well have contributed to the surprise Conservative victory at the general election in April 1992 but Black Wednesday that September ruined the party’s reputation for economic competence for years to come.
Partly thanks to that experience, and the losses made by lenders then, we are going into this downturn with arrears around half and repossessions about a quarter of the level at the equivalent stage in the 1990s cycle when prices were just beginning to fall.
A repeat currently looks unlikely unless we see second-round effects of sustained rate rises including a recession and large-scale job losses – but the odds on those are shortening.
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Jules Birch 