What’s at stake in the spending review?
Posted: June 3, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents | Tags: spending review Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
With a week to go until the most consequential spending review for ten years, the Treasury is facing desperate last-ditch lobbying from departments that have yet to agree their settlement.
Last week’s public intervention by chief constables warning that the government will fail to meet its pledges on crime unless they get more cash is sign enough of that.
So too the leaked memo from deputy prime minister Angela Rayner setting out options for higher taxes that was inevitably followed by more leaks about her spending priorities.
As of this week, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) was said to be one of the departments yet to agree a settlement, alongside the Home Office, with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero just finalising one..
By contrast with previous spending reviews, housing starts with the advantage of having a politically powerful secretary of state in charge – and Angela Rayner has repeatedly promised ‘the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’.
But the ‘biggest boost’ can mean many different things, some of them genuine, some of them not remotely up to the challenge of the moment.
Read the rest of this entry »Smart thinking on homelessness
Posted: May 20, 2025 Filed under: Homelessness, Wales Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Within the next few months the government will set out what it intends to do about homelessness and how it will pay for it.
A new report argues that the prospect of the homelessness strategy and spending review present it with ‘a vital opportunity to shift away from reactive measures towards a more proactive and preventative model’.
A smarter approach to homelessness, published by the Institute for Government and Centre for Homelessness Impact, makes clear that the current system is achieving the exact opposite.
Rather than providing permanent homes, the system keeps families with young children in temporary accommodation at a cost that can easily be £30,000 a year or more, with social costs even higher than that thanks to the knock-on effects on education and health.
But even as they try to book temporary accommodation, councils can find themselves out-bid by companies acting for other parts of government for accommodation for asylum seekers and prison leavers.
Despite evidence that prevention costs many times less, cash-strapped local authorities are forced to ‘retreat to short-term reactive responses in fulfilment of their immediate legal obligations, despite their often exorbitant cost’, often raiding prevention budgets to pay for it.
Structural barriers, most obviously a lack of social housing, block progress while the system creates ‘perverse incentives’ that ‘actively encourage inefficiencies and poor outcomes’.
As the latest homelessness statistics show, the number of homeless families and children in temporary accommodation was still rising in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The numbers of bed and breakfast did at least show a second consecutive monthly fall, but the numbers in nightly-paid accommodation are still rising along and there are eight times as many out of area placements as when Labour was last in government.
Read the rest of this entry »Short-term fixes and long-term solutions to the temporary accommodation crisis
Posted: April 3, 2025 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Temporary accommodation | Tags: HCLG committee Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If anyone needs any reminding, two new reports reveal the depth and breadth of the crisis in temporary accommodation in England.
On Thursday the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee published the results of its inquiry into the ‘utterly shameful’ situation in a report that spells out the consequences for 164,000 children’s health, wellbeing, safety and education.
The report reveals safeguarding risks including families with children ending up in the same temporary accommodation as strangers with a history of domestic violence or recently released prisoners.
It highlights the huge costs of temporary accommodation (£2.3 billion and rising) and the consequences for local authorities but also raises serious questions about whether the legal framework and code of guidance are fit for purpose.
And it raises issues ranging from the increasingly theoretical six-week legal limit families with children to be placed in bed and breakfasts(B&Bs) to use of multi-occupancy hostels that have the same shared kitchens and bathrooms but do not count as B&Bs to inadequate procedures for out-of-area placements.
To focus on just one of the knock-on effects, last week the Children’s Commissioner published research revealing a direct link between lack of a permanent home and a child’s performance at school. The more times a child moves home while at school the worse they do in their GCSEs.
Read the rest of this entry »Spring Statement glow could soon fade
Posted: March 27, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Welfare reform | Tags: Spring Statement Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Just for a change, housing looks like one of the winners from the Spring Statement – but is everything quite what it seems?
On housebuilding overall, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) gave Rachel Reeves a big boost as it delivered a positive verdict on the planning reforms introduced by the government in the Autumn.
The chancellor boasted in her speech that measures such as the new National Planning Policy Framework, the release of ‘grey belt’ land and the restoration of mandatory housing targets would permanently boost GDP by 0.2 per cent by 2029/30 and 0.4 per cent within ten years.
She said: ‘That is the biggest positive growth impact that the OBR have ever reflected in their forecast, for a policy with no fiscal cost.’
Just as good for the chancellor was the watchdog’s forecast on housing numbers: ‘The OBR have concluded that our reforms will lead to housebuilding reaching a 40-year high of 305,000 a year by the end of the forecast period,’ she said. ‘And changes to the National Planning Policy Framework alone will help build over 1.3 million homes in the UK over the next five years, taking us within touching distance of delivering our manifesto promise to build 1.5 million homes in England in this parliament.’
The chancellor phrased that carefully but the Treasury press release was more gung-ho as it boasted that this would be ‘bringing the UK one step closer to its Plan for Change mission to build 1.5 million homes’.
That really would be good news, since almost nobody believes the target can be met, but read that paragraph again and you may spot a problem with it.
Read the rest of this entry »A big moment for commonhold
Posted: March 6, 2025 Filed under: Commonhold, Leasehold Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
England and Wales have a long history of trying and failing to introduce commonhold and an even longer one of trying and failing to reform leasehold.
So this week’s white paper is a big moment, coming 60 years after Labour first pledged commonhold and 23 years after it botched its implementation.
After decades of frustration and failed attempts at reform, leaseholders will have to be patient for a little bit longer and take the housing minister at his word that this is ‘the beginning of the end for leasehold’.
While some have criticised Labour for going too slowly, the white paper highlights the flaws in previous legislation and the importance of getting things right.
So there will be both a draft Bill setting out how the existing commonhold framework will be amended and a further consultation on banning leasehold for new-build flats before all the pieces can be put into place.
Commonhold was first introduced in England and Wales in 2002 to bring them into line with what has been the default for at least 50 years in much of the rest of the developed world.
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Jules Birch 