Housing’s brief appearance in the election spotlight
Posted: June 20, 2024 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, New towns, Planning, Private renting, Right to buy Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The focus of the election finally turned to housing today (Thursday) but blink and you may have missed it.
The issue described as ‘the dog that hasn’t barked’ by Nick Ferrari on LBC was briefly across the airwaves with housing secretary Michael Gove leading for the Conservatives and shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook representing Labour in the wake of plans for renter reform launched overnight.
However, an anonymous quote in Politico Playbook did cause some howling, with a Labour official supposedly saying that ‘I don’t care if we flatten the whole green belt, we just need more houses in this country’.
Rishi Sunak took time off from preparing for tonight’s Question Time to tweet that it was ‘good to finally get Labour’s real views on Britain’s green belt’ while Keir Starmer flatly denied the whole thing on a visit to a housing development on the edge of York. ‘No, that wasn’t Labour party officials,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t Labour party policy.’
So what did we learn from election housing day? I dipped into the morning media round in a bid to find out.
Read the rest of this entry »Labour’s cautious manifesto offers hints of real ‘change’
Posted: June 13, 2024 Filed under: Affordable housing, Fire safety, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Given a backdrop of grim economic times and successive election defeats, this was always going to be a cautious Labour manifesto.
So the good news is that housing features much more prominently than it did in the plans that the party has laid out in the last few months. It had only a walk on part in Labour’s five missions, six first steps and 10 ‘policies to change Britain’ –
The tone was set by one of the four speakers who introduced Keir Starmer. Daniel rents a one-bedroom flat in east London with his partner and two children and said he was backing Labour because of its plans to build more homes and support first-time buyers.
The manifesto itself contains few new policies and no new money but there are some interesting hints about what Labour might do in office.
The promise of 1.5 million new homes in the next parliament forms a key part of the section on kickstarting economic growth, with the party arguing that: ‘Britain is hampered by a planning regime that means we struggle to build either the infrastructure or housing the country needs.
And Labour directly challenges the Conservatives by arguing that ‘the dream of homeownership is now out of reach for too many young people’.
However, the manifesto does not mention the target of 70 per cent home ownership that Starmer set in his party conference speech only 18 months ago.
Read the rest of this entry »A sheepish Conservative manifesto that misses the target
Posted: June 11, 2024 Filed under: Fire safety, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Stamp duty | Tags: Conservatives Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing
Wounded by the D Day furore and badly behind in the polls, the Conservatives have retreated to their home ownership comfort zone in their election manifesto.
Rishi Sunak replayed their greatest hits in a Telegraph op-ed overnight and boasted in his speech at the launch that: ‘From Macmillan to Thatcher to today, it is we Conservatives who are the party of the property-owning democracy in this country.’
But he is well aware that the old tunes will be not be enough to fix the multiple housing crises that have developed over the last 14 years. Especially as his government has fallen badly short of the promises it made at the last election in 2019.
Read the rest of this entry »The Housing Question: What would Labour do?
Posted: June 7, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentWith all the polls pointing to a Labour victory on July 4, my Substack newsletter this week asks whether Labour can deliver the transformative change that housing needs. You can read it here.
The Housing Question: What have the Conservatives achieved since 2019?
Posted: May 29, 2024 Filed under: The Housing Question Leave a commentMy Substack newsletter this week is a wash-up on the last parliament. As the election campaign gathers pace, I ask how the government’s performance measures up against what it promised in its manifesto. Plus, which of the record number of MPs standing down, including many former housing secretaries and ministers, deserves the fondest farewell. You can read and subscribe to The Housing Question here.
Did the election kill off housing bills?
Posted: May 23, 2024 Filed under: Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act, Renters (Reform) Bill Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
And they’re off – but as the election campaign begins it’s easy to lose sight of what could get left at the starting gate.
An immediate consequence of Rishi Sunak’s decision to go for July 4 rather than an Autumn election is that two of the most important pieces of housing legislation in years look like they will run out of parliamentary time.
The Renters (Reform) Bill and Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill have passed all their stages in the Commons and most of them in the Lords.
In theory they could still be passed in stripped-down form as part of the wash-up process before parliament is dissolved on Friday provided both parties agree. However, as I’m writing this neither is currently listed in Lords business for today or tomorrow so the signs are not good.
Read the rest of this entry »What does ‘good’ look like?
Posted: April 25, 2024 Filed under: Affordable housing Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
What should we be aiming for in housing policy? Read just about any government’s green or white paper published over the last 30 years and the answer will be something like ‘decent homes for everyone at a price they can afford’.
If that sounds straightforward, achieving it has proved to be anything but. For every lofty pronouncement like that made over the decades, the housing options available have become less decent, more insecure and more unaffordable.
So what should ‘good’ look like – and how can we get there? Homes for All, a report out this week from the Church of England and Nationwide Foundation sets out to provide some of the answers.
Most of these are not rocket science. The objectives of building more homes, especially more for social rent, making existing homes more energy efficient, increasing the options available for an ageing population and reducing homelessness to a bare minimum would appear in most of our lists of desired outcomes.
But considering them all together as part of one housing system throws up some hard choices that are too often ducked by policy makers.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 