The state of the housing nation 2023

Posted: December 18, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Energy efficiency, Private renting, Tenants, Tenure change | Tags: | Leave a comment

As 2023 draws to a close, what is the state of the housing nation?

As always, the best place to start is the English Housing Survey, which has just published headline results for 2022/23. Here are five things that caught my attention.

1 The tenure and wealth gap

The results of the survey need to be treated with more caution than usual when comparing the results this year thanks to the impact of the pandemic, but the general trend on housing tenure is pretty clear.

Thanks in part to Help to Buy and other government schemes, the proportion of households who own their own home (64 per cent) has stabilised while the relentless growth of the private rented sector (18 per cent) has slowed. The social housing sector is still in slow decline but there is a significant difference between London (where it is home to 21 per cent of households) and England as a whole (16 per cent). 

There were 874,000 recent first-time buyers in 2022/23 and they had an average (mean) deposit of just over £50,000.

Given that, it’s not surprising that family wealth has become increasingly important to people’s chances of buying. A growing proportion received help from family or friends (36 per cent, up from 27% in 2021/22 and 22 per cent in 2003/04) while 9 per cent used an inheritance for a deposit.

They were also higher earners: the majority of successful first-time buyers (58 per cent) came from the top two income quintiles and only a small minority (16 per cent) came from the bottom two.

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Why housing fits the bill for Labour investment

Posted: December 8, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Energy efficiency, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

The prospects for housing investment look bleak whoever wins the election – and that is looking on the bright side – but there was an interesting comment this week from the frontrunner to be the next prime minister.

The Autumn Statement found money for tax cuts from an implausible sounding freeze in future capital investment and squeeze on departmental budgets after 2025. This seems designed both as a pre-election bribe and as a trap for Labour.

Labour leader Keir Starmer duly refused to fall into it in a speech at the Resolution Foundation think tank in which he said that anyone who expects the party ‘to quickly turn on the spending taps’ if it wins power will come away disappointed.

That will trigger bad memories for anyone who can remember the early years of the last Labour government, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pledged to match Conservative spending plans in its first two years.

That was disastrous for the social housing budget since those plans included deep cuts that seemed unrealistic even to the outgoing Tories.

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Temporary accommodation, permanent shame

Posted: December 1, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Everywhere you look in the latest homelessness statistics, the scale of the crisis facing homeless families and local councils alike stares back at you.

The total number of homeless households in temporary accommodation (which can mean anything but) went past the record highs of the mid-2000s earlier this year and rose to another record of 105,750 in the 12 months to the end of June.

That’s up 1.2 per cent on the previous three months ago and 10.5 per cent on last year. The total included 68,070 families with 138,930 children (another record).

These figures are stark enough at a national level but in the worst-affected local authority, Newham, 50.2 out of every 1,000 households in Newham were in temporary accommodation.

But drill down further and the really shocking increases are in the numbers stuck at the most miserable end of the TA crisis in bed and breakfast hotels.

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