Posted: November 28, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Another quarter, another new record in the number of homeless people and children living in temporary accommodation.
Take any measure you like and the homelessness statistics published today are beyond grim.
There are now 123,100 households in temporary accommodation including 78,420 families with 159,380 children.
All of these numbers are moving in the wrong direction, up around 5 per cent in the last three months and 15 per cent on a year ago – and all of them are the highest ever recorded in statistics that go back 20 years or more.
Within those numbers, there are 5,910 homeless families with children living in bed and breakfasts and – most shameful of all – 3,770 of them have been there beyond the six-week legal limit.
When local authorities are starting to shrug their shoulders as they break the law, pointing out plausibly that they have no other option, it must be a time for this government to act.
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Posted: November 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Social housing, Temporary accommodation, Tenants |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
Few readers of Inside Housing will find the new podcast series The Trapped a comfortable listen but it is a necessary one.
You’d hope that politicians will find it an essential listen: surely few could hear its harrowing accounts of the conditions facing tenants in social housing, private renting and temporary accommodation and turn a deaf ear.
Trapped is based on the reporting of Daniel Hewitt of ITV News that began in 2021 with a story about tenants living in appalling and dangerous conditions in a tower block owned by Croydon Council.
That led to a flood of messages from tenants across the country complaining about disrepair and squalor and being ignored by their social landlord.
Among them were Kwajo Tweneboa, the ‘teenager with a Twitter account’ who held Clarion to account for appalling conditions on the Earlsfield estate in south London and became a national campaigner.
Most of the individual stories will be familiar from his TV news reports but they feel all the more powerful for being grouped together in the eight-part podcast.
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Posted: November 5, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Social housing | Tags: National Audit Office |
A forensic examination of the government’s building safety programme lays bare the scale of the task facing ministers when they set out further steps on remediation of unsafe homes shortly.
Open the report published by the National Audit Office (NAO) today virtually anywhere and a number will leap out at you:
- It could take until 2037 – a full 20 years after Grenfell and two years longer than implied by current government modelling– for all homes with dangerous cladding over 11m to be fixed.
- Some 4,771 residential mid- and high-rise buildings (with 258,000 homes) are in a remediation programme but work has only been completed on a third of them and is yet to start on half.
- Those 4,771 buildings represent less than half of the number of buildings (9,000 to 12,000) that the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) estimates will need remediating. The others have not been identified – and there is a risk that some may never be.
- £16.6 billion is MHCLG’s best estimate of the total cost (within a range of £12.6 billion to £22.4 billion).
Putting those numbers together gives some idea of the scale of a crisis in buildings over 11m that has consistently grown faster than the government’s attempts to resolve it.
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Posted: October 31, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Budget, Housebuilding, Right to buy, Social housing, Homelessness, Fire safety, Rents |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A final verdict will have to wait for the spending review in the Spring but how should we assess the first Labour Budget for 14 years?
The answer of course depends on what you take as your starting point. Compared with the disastrous first Conservative Budget in 2010 or even the first Labour one in 1997, this one takes some definite steps in the right direction.
But does this Budget live up to Labour rhetoric about greater investment and long-term solutions. To what extent will it really ‘fix the foundations’ and deliver ‘the biggest boost to affordable and social housing for a generation’?
Here are 10 key areas that I was looking out for:
1) New social homes: The £500 million top-up to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) briefed in advanceis welcome news but it must only be a down-payment on a far bigger increase for the next AHP after 2026.
It is at the lower end of expectations of up to £1 billion extra and it will not be enough to make up for a shortfall in delivery caused by construction cost inflation and other pressures on social landlords. The current AHP is on course to deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 affordable homes over five years rather than the 180,000 originally expected while need is estimated at 90,000 social homes a year.
All of which puts the 5,000 the government says will be generated by the top-up into perspective.
Details of ‘future grant investment’ in the next AHP will be set out in the spending review and will support a mix of tenures ‘with a focus on delivering homes for social rent’.
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Posted: October 21, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
With the days counting down to the Budget and all eyes on the tax increases to come, you’d have to be quite an optimist to expect an immediate boost for housing.
There may be scope for redistribution of some existing budgets but the first fiscal event of the new government is taking place against a gloomy short-term backdrop, with cabinet ministers for unprotected departments reportedly protesting about the cuts they are being expected to take.
The real question for October 30 – and for the Spring spending review to come – is a more long-term one: a shift in thinking about the value of housing investment.
There have already been some hopeful signs on this, with chancellor Rachel Reeves said to be considering a shift in the measure of debt to take account of the value of the assets created by investment as well as the costs. This could create room for billions in extra public investment, but housing would have to join the queue alongside health, education, transport, prisons and all the other government priorities.
If you’re looking for reasons to invest in housing specifically, there is plenty of timely evidence in the new UK Housing Review Autumn briefing paper published this week.
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Posted: October 10, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: USA |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Housing has gained a rare salience in the US presidential election as Americans battle with rising rents and mortgage costs.
The contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is a chance for British observers to go through the looking glass of how housing is done across the Atlantic.
The emphasis on the ‘American dream’ of home ownership will be familiar and a broad alignment is discernible between the Democrats and Labour and the Republicans and Conservatives.
But this is also a very different world in which finance is dominated by tax credits and housing vouchers rather than grant and housing benefit. And it is also one in which race and immigration form a much clearer political dividing line.
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Posted: September 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Energy efficiency, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: Angela Rayner, Labour, Rachel Reeves |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For the most part, this was a Labour conference of nudges and winks rather than major announcements.
That is no coincidence because major decisions across government are being left to the Budget and one-year spending review next month and the multi-year spending review to follow in the Spring.
So for all the debate at what looked like an unprecedented number of fringe meetings on housing in Liverpool, for all the promises from the conference podium of brownfield passports and help for homeless veterans and care leavers, there was comparatively little that signalled the direction the new government intends to take.
The one exception was not a surprise: the reinstatement by net zero secretary Ed Miliband of the 2030 target to bring all rented homes up to a minimum level of Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C by 2030.
The announcement reinstates an earlier target for Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards that was scrapped by Rishi Sunak and extends it to social and private rented homes
That will have major implications given that the costs of retrofitting social housing alone far exceed Labour’s scaled-back plans for green grants and loans.
Without a boost, that could accelerate the sell-off of older private rented stock and encourage social landlords to consolidate theirs, at the same time as it focusses their attention even more on improving their existing homes rather than building new ones.
On new homes, the big question for me is the relationship between Labour’s target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament and its manifesto promise on affordable and social housing.’
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Posted: September 20, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Section 106, Social housing, Wales |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The trouble with targets
Housing targets concentrate minds in government and drive delivery but they also come with trade-offs attached.
As Labour gears up for its first party conference since gaining power, much of the attention will be on announcements that fill in the blanks in how it is going to achieve its manifesto target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament.
Superficially unambitious – it’s no more than the 2019 Tory manifesto promise 300,000 of 300,000 new homes by the mid-2020s – it is actually a huge stretch, with ministers expecting no more than 200,000 net additional dwellings in this financial year as a starting point.
That will leave a growing shortfall to be made up in the later years of the parliament and could require more like 400,000 new homes a year to be built by the late 2020s.
Having a target in place is important because it drives activity within government, especially when it is backed by the rise of Labour yimbyism.
But a target does not guarantee delivery in itself, even with the magic added ingredient of planning reform.
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Posted: September 11, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A week after the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry it’s time to focus on the responses so far and what happens next.
Sir Keir Starmer made a dignified statement in the Commons in which he spoke directly to the Grenfell community: ‘I want to start with an apology on behalf of the British state to each and every one of you, and indeed to all the families affected by this tragedy. It should never have happened. The country failed to discharge its most fundamental duty to protect you and your loved ones—the people we are here to serve—and I am deeply sorry.’
We’ve heard prime ministers say things like this many times over the decades, sometimes after disasters, sometimes after scandals. The difference is that Grenfell was both.
For Grenfell United, publication of the report is ‘a significant chapter in the journey to truth, justice and change. But justice has not been delivered. The inquiry report reveals that whenever there’s a clash between corporate interest and public safety, governments have done everything they can to avoid their responsibilities to keep people safe. The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.’
All disasters have an element of scandal about them too. There were basic operational failures that led to them, often compounded by a cavalier attitude to health and safety and establishment resistance to justice for the victims.
Similarly, scandals like the Post Office and infected blood were systemic failures but also disasters that cost victims their livelihoods and their lives.
Grenfell combines the two: not an accident but an entirely preventable disaster; and a scandal that does not just implicate local and central government and the entire construction industry but also raises fundamental questions about societal attitudes towards social housing and the safety of most of the blocks of flats built during this century.
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Posted: August 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If anyone needed a reminder, Monday morning’s major fire at an apartment block in Dagenham can only increase the urgency of finding a solution to the building safety crisis.
Thankfully all residents are accounted for following a significant search and rescue operation but the pictures of the flames engulfing the building and the stories of residents fleeing their homes were only too familiar.
Coming nine days before publication of the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry, it will have revived some awful memories for the bereaved, survivors and families even as it underlines the scale of the wider crisis that the report will not directly address.
And it will add to pressure on the government for more action, both to hold those responsible to account and to accelerate the pace of remediation work to make other buildings safe.
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Jules Birch 