The Housing Question No 11: Disasters happen and they walk away
Posted: January 19, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentThe Housing Question, my newsletter over on Substack, is the other place to find my writing on everything to do with housing.
The latest edition considers the parallels between the Post Office and building safety scandals and asks what it takes to break into the public consciousness and hold people to account. It also looks at government action and inaction on poor housing and why longer-term mortgages are not a quick fix. You can subscribe here (it’s free for now).
The Housing Question No 10: A big offering on housing
Posted: January 5, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentIf you haven’t yet caught up with The Housing Question, my Substack newsletter featuring all things housing, it’s available here.
The latest issue features a Damascene conversion for Brandon Lewis on housebuilding and planning, auguries of austerity from Wales and Scotland, some intriguing hints from Labour and the Conservatives ahead of an election year and Louise Casey’s Radio 4 Series Fixing Britain. It’s free to read for now.
The state of the housing nation 2023
Posted: December 18, 2023 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Energy efficiency, Private renting, Tenants, Tenure change | Tags: English Housing Survey Leave a commentAs 2023 draws to a close, what is the state of the housing nation?
As always, the best place to start is the English Housing Survey, which has just published headline results for 2022/23. Here are five things that caught my attention.
1 The tenure and wealth gap
The results of the survey need to be treated with more caution than usual when comparing the results this year thanks to the impact of the pandemic, but the general trend on housing tenure is pretty clear.
Thanks in part to Help to Buy and other government schemes, the proportion of households who own their own home (64 per cent) has stabilised while the relentless growth of the private rented sector (18 per cent) has slowed. The social housing sector is still in slow decline but there is a significant difference between London (where it is home to 21 per cent of households) and England as a whole (16 per cent).
There were 874,000 recent first-time buyers in 2022/23 and they had an average (mean) deposit of just over £50,000.
Given that, it’s not surprising that family wealth has become increasingly important to people’s chances of buying. A growing proportion received help from family or friends (36 per cent, up from 27% in 2021/22 and 22 per cent in 2003/04) while 9 per cent used an inheritance for a deposit.
They were also higher earners: the majority of successful first-time buyers (58 per cent) came from the top two income quintiles and only a small minority (16 per cent) came from the bottom two.
Temporary accommodation, permanent shame
Posted: December 1, 2023 Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Everywhere you look in the latest homelessness statistics, the scale of the crisis facing homeless families and local councils alike stares back at you.
The total number of homeless households in temporary accommodation (which can mean anything but) went past the record highs of the mid-2000s earlier this year and rose to another record of 105,750 in the 12 months to the end of June.
That’s up 1.2 per cent on the previous three months ago and 10.5 per cent on last year. The total included 68,070 families with 138,930 children (another record).
These figures are stark enough at a national level but in the worst-affected local authority, Newham, 50.2 out of every 1,000 households in Newham were in temporary accommodation.
But drill down further and the really shocking increases are in the numbers stuck at the most miserable end of the TA crisis in bed and breakfast hotels.
Read the rest of this entry »Autumn Statement brings good news (for now) on LHA
Posted: November 23, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing, Local housing allowance, Permitted development, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Autumn Statement Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The good news in Jeremy Hunt’s speech is that the government has finally listened to all the arguments about soaring rents, evictions and homelessness and Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates will be linked to private rents again from next April.
The bad news buried in the background documents to his Autumn Statement is that rates will be frozen again for the four years after that, recreating the shortfalls between housing benefit and rents for tenants and generating all the costs of homelessness that led to the lifting of the freeze in the first place.
It’s not much of a way to run a benefits system or a housing system but it is entirely in keeping with an Autumn Statement characterised by even more smoke and mirrors than a usual Budget.
That’s amply demonstrated by the most headline-grabbing measure: the cut in National Insurance will not actually mean a tax cut for households hit by a continued freeze in the thresholds for income tax, although it does at least benefit workers (who pay NI and income tax) rather than landlords and shareholders (who only pay income tax).
And the cuts in NI and business tax are made possible in the first place by more sleight of hand: as the accompanying report from the Office for Budget Responsibility reveals, they only add up thanks to unfeasibly large cuts in public services and a freeze (aka significant real terms cut) in capital spending after the next election.
Needless to say that leaves next to no room for investment in new social homes or the decarbonisation of the existing stock even though the real value of both continues to be squeezed by inflation.
Instead, beneath the surface of the statement, there are signs of a desperate search for policies that are not affected by the squeeze on public spending.
Read the rest of this entry »A reshuffle that beggars belief
Posted: November 14, 2023 Filed under: Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: DLUHC, Rachel Maclean Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
I’m not sure what Karl Marx would have made of the sixth housing minister in two years and the 16th in 13 years but it seems safe to say he would have run out of comparisons long ago.
The sacking of Rachel Maclean on Monday beggars belief not so much in itself – after nine months she was a relative veteran in the role – but in its timing.
Because the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has not just one but two important pieces of legislation on its immediate agenda.
As she tweeted herself, she was due to start piloting the first of these, the Renters (Reform) Bill, through its committee stage in the House of Commons today (Tuesday).
The Bill delivers on the 2019 Conservative manifesto pledge of scrapping Section 21 and represents a delicate balancing act between the interests of landlords and tenants.
You might have thought, then, that it would benefit from a minister who knows her brief and is sufficiently across the detail to debate it with the opposition, both on the Labour side and among her own backbenchers. You might – but not Rishi Sunak.
Read the rest of this entry »A King’s Speech fit for a government running out of time
Posted: November 7, 2023 Filed under: Energy efficiency, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Private renting, Rough sleeping Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The good news is that the King’s Speech does promise a Leasehold and Freehold Bill. The less good is that this is not yet the end, and maybe not the beginning of the end either, for the tenure that Michael Gove described as ‘indefensible in the 21st century’.
As first reported by the Sunday Times last month, leasehold reform will be part of the legislative programme for the next parliamentary session, confounding fears that it would be left in the pending tray until the next election.
But it will still be a race against time to get a complex piece of legislation through parliament in little over a year and its most far-reaching proposal is only a consultation for now.
The other major housing measure in the speech is confirmation that the government will continue with the Renters (Reform) Bill and abolition of Section 21 after introducing them in the last session.
There was no mention in the speech or the background documents of criminalising tents, despite home secretary Suella Braverman’s controversial comments about rough sleeping being a ‘lifestyle choice’.
Something like it could yet appear in the Criminal Justice Bill as the government looks to replace the Vagrancy Act but for the moment it looks as though the leak over the weekend was designed to kill the idea.
More surprisingly, neither the speech nor the background briefing document mention rules on nutrient neutrality that the government claims are blocking 100,000 new homes. An attempt to do this in the Levelling Up Act foundered in the House of Lords but ministers had vowed they would try again as soon as possible.
There is also a glaring contradiction between comments about the importance of energy efficiency in homes in the briefing on the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill and boasts about measures to support landlords by scrapping the requirement to bring their properties up to EPC C in the background to the Renters (Reform) Bill.
Read the rest of this entry »Review – Britain’s housing crisis: What went wrong?
Posted: October 24, 2023 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning, Television 1 CommentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Watch a few minutes of the new BBC housing documentary and you’ll get annoyed. Watch an episode and you’ll be full of righteous anger.
Over two hour-long episodes, Britain’s Housing Crisis: What Went Wrong?does a great job of revealing the key episodes along the way and the bad actors at the heart of them.
Interviews with leading politicians, special advisers, financiers and developers are intercut with archive news footage that neatly illustrates the way that things got steadily worse as national politics concentrated on the external crises like the credit crunch, Brexit, Covid and the rest. These are complemented well by interviews with activists who campaigned for action to put things right.
The programme does a great job of telling the story of, as the first episode puts it, ‘how a dream was destroyed by two decades of political and economic failure’ and of putting that in the wider context of house prices inflated by lax mortgage lending to the detriment of the rest of the economy.
It traces what’s gone wrong with the property-owning democracy promised by post-war politicians as house prices have soared to ever more unaffordable levels since New Labour won the election in 1997.
But why just two decades? And why start in 1997 when that edits out key parts of the social housing story: the Right to Buy, the strangulation of council housing and the rise of housing associations and private finance.
For home ownership, it starts after the zenith of the property-owning democracy under Margaret Thatcher. It also ignores the liberalisation of the financial system in the 1980s that led to the demutualisation of building societies, broke the link between savings and lending and opened the UK mortgage market up to international capital flows.
For private renting, it leaves out the ending of security of tenure in 1988 that would later underpin the rise of Buy to Let and landlords pricing out first-time buyers.
That also meant it did not put what’s happened to house prices since 1997 in the context of previous booms. Look back to 1989-1992 and you’ll see the key difference that it was followed by a crash that eventually made prices relatively affordable again. Starting in 1997 gives the slightly misleading impression that prices have almost inevitably gone in one direction.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 