What’s in the Budget small print?
Posted: October 30, 2018 Filed under: Council housing, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Planning, Shared ownership, Uncategorized | Tags: Budget 2018, Letwin review Leave a commentOriginally published on November 30 on my blog for Inside Housing.
If you listened to the chancellor’s speech you may have thought this was a Budget that did not mean much for housing. As ever you may think again after reading the small print.
As I live blogged for Inside Housing yesterday, the big news in the speech was the extra money for universal credit that makes up for many of the cuts imposed in universal credit and delays the roll-out yet again and sounds like it will be enough to avoid a backbench Tory rebellion.
Elsewhere, Philip Hammond found £2.8 bn to bring forward cuts in income tax allowances by a year but he failed to find roughly half that to scrap the final year of the freeze in most working age benefits including the local housing allowance.
This was a clear political choice to go for tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the better-off over benefits that go to the poorest households.
Ahead of the next spending review, numbers crunched by the Resolution Foundation overnight suggest that the squeeze on everything apart from health will continue well into the 2020s.
However, the most interesting developments for housing came in the background documents published as Mr Hammond sat down.
Six things to look out for in the Budget
Posted: October 26, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally published on October 26 on my blog for Inside Housing.
What might have been the Budget’s headline announcements on housing were made by the prime minister last month at the National Housing Summit and Conservative Party conference.
But the chancellor’s big moment will still set the context for the end of the borrowing cap for council housing from next week that ‘extra’ £2 bn for housing associations in the 2020s.
And it will also reveal the total spending envelope for the 2019 Spending Review, teeing up a race to calculate whether austerity really is as ‘over’ as Theresa May promised.
With Brexit and the NHS to pay for and crises in local government and social care as well as in housing that could be a tall order.
In the meantime, here are six areas to look out for on Monday.
- The borrowing cap
When the prime minister made her surprise announcement, the concern was that it would come with strings attached when the detail was revealed in the Budget.
That could still happen but one big fear – a long delay before implementation – has already been allayed by last week’s announcement by housing secretary James Brokenshire that the cap will be lifted from Tuesday.
However, the impact of the rent cut, the Right to Buy and welfare reform still loom large and are seen as more important than the borrowing cap by some councils.
And the suspicion remains that the Treasury is not exactly enthusiastic about a move that will increase public borrowing under current rules.
In which case, as John Perry argues, why not bring the UK into line with other countries and give council housing the same financial independence as housing associations?
And why not, as the Local Government Association (LGA) argues in its Budget submission, allow councils to reinvest 100% of Right to Buy receipts and decide discounts locally?
To signal their intent, more than 60 council leaders have signed an open letter pledging an immediate drive to build more homes. Read the rest of this entry »
Squaring the circle of regeneration
Posted: October 22, 2018 Filed under: Council housing, Housing associations, London, Regeneration, Uncategorized | Tags: Kensington and Chelsea Leave a commentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on October 22.
When England’s most high-profile local authority calls the behaviour of the country’s largest housing association ‘morally wrong’ you sit up and take notice.
Clashes between the local priorities of a council and the organisational ones of an association are nothing new of course but this week’s statement by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) seems different.
Clarion is in its sights over rejected proposals for the regeneration of the Sutton Estate in Chelsea.
Council leader Kim Taylor-Smith told a council meeting last week:
‘HAs in the borough are, in some cases turning away from their core purpose and in some cases becoming all but private developers.
‘You will all know I am talking about Clarion Housing, the owners of my local and cherished Sutton Estate which they wish to knock down the estate with a loss of affordable homes We stand shoulder to shoulder with local residents in opposing this
‘I think we all in the chamber are untied. This is wrong.’
Turning tenants into owners
Posted: October 11, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally posted on October 11 on my blog for Inside Housing.
For all the government’s new-found enthusiasm for social housing and local authorities, the politics of the housing crisis are still fundamentally about home ownership.
Anyone pleasantly surprised by the change of tune in the green paper will still have found two particularly discordant notes: the convictions that welfare reform is ‘empowering tenants as consumers’ and that social housing should be a ‘springboard to home ownership’.
Housing may have been the dominant issue at fringe meetings at the Conservative party conference but two reports out this week highlight the fact that the frustrated aspirations of young private renters are still the dominant concern.
The new Tory think-tank Onward brought forward publication of a proposal for new tax incentives for landlords to sell to long-term tenants following reports over the weekend that the government is considering it as a new form of Help to Buy.
And a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies put the problem of frustrated ownership into perspective.
Over the last 20 years owner-occupation among the 25-34s has fallen from 55% to 35%. Their incomes are up by 19% in real terms but rents have risen 38% and house prices 173%.
Planning, profits and public land
Posted: September 27, 2018 Filed under: Land | Tags: Centre for Progressive Policy Leave a commentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on September 24.
While all eyes were on the prime minister’s speech at the National Housing Summit you may have missed news that landowners are now making an astonishing £13 bn a year pre-tax profit just from getting planning permission for housing.
That is the estimate in a new report from the Centre for Progressive Policy (CPP) and the National Housing Federation (NHF) published on the same day as Theresa May was telling housing associations what they wanted to hear.
The £13 bn profit made by landowners in England in 2016/17 is up £4 bn on 2014/15 thanks to a huge increase in residential land values in the last two years.
Seen from one end of the telescope, that was already more than the profits of the entire UK housebuilding industry and it is now more than the global profits of Amazon, Coca Cola and McDonald’s combined.
But the impact can also be seen from the other end of the telescope, with housing association after housing association quoting examples of where they have been outbid by private developers for land.
The sites are often public land but individual associations report examples of developers who bid a higher price than them only to do nothing with it or sell it on for a profit shortly afterwards.
