Posted: May 14, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Commonhold, Fire safety, Leasehold, Right to buy, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If it was possible to avoid the wall-to-wall coverage of personalities and politics, Wednesday’s King’s Speech signals some significant progress on policy.
As the background briefing document makes clear, the government is attempting to resolve problems that have dogged housing for years, decades and in one case more than a century.
Taking those problems in reverse order of intractability, the Social Housing Renewal Bill will finally kill off three zombie policies that were introduced by the Conservatives ten years ago but never implemented.
Measures requiring local authorities to introduce fixed-term tenancies, charge higher rents for higher-earning tenants and sell off high-value homes threatened the very existence of social housing but became untenable in the wake of Grenfell.
Now they will be repealed, with the government arguing this will give providers greater confidence to invest in new homes.
The same Bill will introduce significant, previously announced, changes to the Right to Buy: increasing the eligibility threshold from three to 10 years, reducing percentage discounts up to a maximum of 15 per cent and exempting new homes so that they cannot be sold for 35 years.
These measures should dramatically reduce demand for the Right to Buy, especially when accompanied by reductions in maximum cash discounts to pre-2012 levels and an extension of cash floor protection, but they will not kill the policy completely.
The government could have used its huge majority to follow Scotland and Wales by abolishing the Right to Buy, or allowed local authorities to apply for exemptions for areas of high housing stress, but has instead opted to curb it.
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Posted: May 1, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Rent control, Scotland, Wales |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Significant change could be on the way for housing in the wake of next week’s elections.
The obvious place to start is Welsh politics, which seems set for a major change that could end 100 years of Labour dominance and see another party running the Welsh Government for the first time since devolution.
Recent polls have Plaid Cymru and Reform running neck and neck and a victory for either would take housing in new but opposite directions.
With a new electoral system adding extra uncertainty, Plaid looks favourite to form a new government but would probably need formal or informal support from at least one other party.
That result would bring some continuity for social housing: the last Welsh Government started with a cooperation agreement between Labour and Plaid, the two parties have similar targets for new social homes and the change might be felt more in details such as the energy standards that apply to them.
But Plaid is also proposing two significant changes with the potential to rewire the wider housing system.
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Jules Birch 