The Housing Question: What have the Conservatives achieved since 2019?

Posted: May 29, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: The Housing Question | Leave a comment

My 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.

The mixed legacy of Michael Gove

Posted: May 27, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Following his surprise decision to stand down as MP, Michael Gove leaves Westminster as probably the most important politician for housing in the last 14 years of Conservative rule.

As housing secretary since September 2021 (with a brief break for Liz Truss) he was in charge for some of the most consequential legislation of the whole period: the Building Safety Act 2022; Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023; and Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.

He also changed the terms of the debate on many issues, issuing public calls for more social housing in a way that would have been unthinkable for earlier Conservative ministers and speaking up for the rights of leaseholders, renters and tenants.

Yet for all that he remains something of an enigma. On a personal level, he was an able minister, open about Conservative failures and willing to engage with questions others would dodge, but he also bequeathed us Brexit chaos and never achieved one of the great offices of state.

The sense of two Goves carried on till the end: speaking to Rishi Sunak in the final Cabinet meeting before the election was called his message was ‘who dares wins’ but two days later it was ‘actually, not me’ as he stood down from his Surrey Heath constituency.

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Did the election kill off housing bills?

Posted: May 23, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally 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. 

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Juggling without dropping the ball

Posted: May 8, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Council housing, Decarbonisation, Fire safety, Housing associations, Housing finance, Rents, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally written as a blog for Inside Housing.

How long can you keep juggling before it all goes horribly wrong?

That’s the question for social landlords posed by a new report from the all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee on the finances and sustainability of the social housing sector. 

Juggling a couple of balls is simple. Three gets easier with practice. Four needs intense focus. Add more balls and external distractions and you risk dropping the lot.

The issues that need to be juggled are familiar ones: how do you continue to build new homes, decarbonise existing ones, fix fire safety problems and regenerate older stock when there is not enough grant to go around, construction, energy and insurance costs have soared and supposedly long-term rent settlements keep being revisited?

As the report points out, we are already seeing the results. Fiona Fletcher-Smith of L&Q told the committee that under the affordable housing programme that ended in 2021 it built 10,000 new homes in London but ‘this year in this programme we are bidding for 1,000. It is a dramatic drop.’

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What does ‘good’ look like?

Posted: April 25, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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Making the most of Labour’s inheritance

Posted: April 18, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Housing need, Planning, Section 106, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing

The economic inheritance of the next government will be so dire that it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prospects for housing investment will be even worse.

Take an already inadequate Affordable Homes Programme, add higher costs for construction, building safety, decarbonisation and follow the freeze on capital investment implied in current spending plans and you seem to have a recipe for housing disaster.

However, an important chapter in the latest UK Housing Review challenges that view on two important levels.

Glen Bramley builds on his longstanding work on housing need by essentially looking through the other end of the telescope at different scenarios for total completions of new homes in 2031 (ie after market conditions have recovered from the cost of living crisis etc).

His ‘low’ scenario corresponds with actual performance recently while ‘very low’ takes account of the current economic climate and recent changes in government planning policy that will reduce supply still further.

As the graph shows, under the ‘low’ scenario, there would be just 211,000 completions per year by 2031, with around 66,000 affordable homes including 35,000 for social rent. ‘Very low’ cuts those numbers by more than 20 per cent to just 164,000 overall and 50,000 affordable including 24,000 for social rent.

Judged against those numbers, the other three scenarios look a long way off, especially the promised land of ‘High-medium’ and ‘High’, which correspond with Labour’s pledge of 1.5 million new homes over five years and longstanding calls for 90,000 social rent homes a year.

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The problems with shared ownership

Posted: April 11, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Section 106, Shared ownership | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Is shared ownership at a crossroads or a dead end?

The fact that the question has to be posed at all is an indications of the issues now facing the part-buy, part-rent product that has been a mainstay of the affordable home ownership market, Section 106 planning contributions and housing association development programmes over the last three decades.

But after a month that has seen a critical report published by an all-party committee of MPs and relentlessly negative media coverage based on the personal experiences of shared owners, it is also a question that needs answers urgently.

A front-page story in The Observer featured shared owners who have fallen victim to soaring service charges and increases of more than 40 per cent in a year.

With grim irony, they had bought homes at Elephant Park in south London, site of the controversial demolition of the Heygate estate that was meant to be a showpiece for market-led regeneration.

BBC London has reported on cases including a shared owner in King’s Cross in north London whose annual service charge for 2024 rose 274 per cent from £4,200 to £16,000.

There may be many shared owners out there who are happy with their home but these are far from the first horror stories and sadly they will not be the last about a tenure that is meant to offer buyers an affordable way to staircase their way up the housing ladder.

The all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee published a report just before Easter highlighting above-inflation rent increases, uncapped service charges, repairs and maintenance liabilities and complex leases that it said make shared ownership ‘an unbearable reality’ for people looking to become full owners.

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Budget misses its ‘housing moment’

Posted: March 7, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Home ownership, Social housing, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

It was meant to be a ‘housing moment’ that would make a home ownership-based pitch to younger voters.

That was the line briefed repeatedly to the Sunday papers in the run-up to a Budget that will probably be the last before the next election with the Conservatives 20 points behind in the opinion polls.

On new homes, chancellor Jeremy Hunt did have some minor funding announcements for specific schemes that seemed to stretch the definition of ‘levelling up’ to include Cambridge and Canary Wharf. He also boasted that ‘we are on track to deliver over one million homes in this parliament’ without mentioning the more ambitious manifesto target of 300,000 new homes a year.

The ‘moment’ was never going to be about social housing or homelessness. There was a small relaxation of the rules on using capital receipts by local authorities and a six-month extension of the Household Support Fund, but the Budget included none of the measures called for by Matt Downie of Crisis in his piece for Inside Housing last week.

Worse still, the Budget constrains the options for the spending review that will follow the election even further.

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The Housing Question No 13: Solving the housing challenge

Posted: February 16, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My Substack newsletter this week analyses a week of big housing announcements that fail even on their own terms, asks why the Conservatives have fallen into an electoral trap of their own making and examines some ominous news on affordable housing in London. To read the latest issue go here.

Gove enters the multiverse

Posted: February 16, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Everything everywhere all at once’ is how Michael Gove describes the welter of proposals on housing announced this week and under consideration for the Budget next month.

In one of the alternative realities that make up in the multiverse in the 2022 film, this is his Long-Term Plan for Housing producing results at last. In another, the Conservatives end their in-fighting and build on their victories in Thursday’s two by-elections.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, the housing secretary makes clear what he believes is at stake if young people feel they are excluded from home ownership: ‘If people think that markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get — and this is the worrying thing to me — an increasing number of young people saying, ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I don’t believe in markets.’

And he says he remains committed to a ban no-fault evictions via the Renters Reform Bill and determined to face down opposition from ‘vested interests’ to the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill.

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