Posted: January 15, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Fire safety, Home ownership, Land, Leasehold, Permitted development, Right to buy |
Originally published on January 15 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Robert Jenrick and Esther McVey faced their first parliamentary questions as housing secretary and housing minister on Monday – almost six months after they took up their posts.
The reasons for the remarkable delay to their despatch box debuts – the summer recess, Brexit and the December election – are not hard to guess and are also why housing has slipped down the political agenda in the meantime.
But, give or take the odd appearance in parliamentary debates and in front of select committees, the delay also means that we still have only a fuzzy picture of what they really think about the key issues stacking up in their in-trays.
And it came in the wake of a report in the Daily Mail over the weekend about an apparent clash between the two over where the government should spend its housing cash and which voters they should be targeting.
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Posted: January 10, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Devolution, Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing, Tenants, Tenure change |
Originally published in Inside Housing on January 10.
It was a decade of four elections, four prime ministers and three referenda. It began in the midst of a Global Financial Crisis and ended with the political crisis of Brexit. It was scarred by the disaster at Grenfell Tower.
All but 15 of the 520 weeks in the 2010s had a Conservative prime minister but four different governments brought four different approaches. David Cameron was all about cuts in coalition followed by radical (but mostly failed) marketising reforms once he had elbowed Nick Clegg aside. Theresa May brought a profound change in rhetoric and some significant changes of substance. Boris Johnson shifted the emphasis back to home ownership.
Here is the decade summed up in 10 headings: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 5, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Fire safety, Social housing, Uncategorized | Tags: Election 2019 |
Originally published on December 5 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The most illuminating answer in Wednesday night’s housing hustings came with the final question.
Politicians at the event organised by a coalition of different housing organisations were asked: ‘How much of your income do you think it’s reasonable and right to spend on housing?’
They were asked for a quickfire answer to an affordability question that covers lots of complicated issues. What counts as income and what as housing costs? Do you include housing benefit? Do you account for differences in incomes and tenures?
The standard answer is a maximum of a third – and that was the one given by John Healey for Labour, Sian Berry for the Greens and Tom Brake (who said 30%) for the Lib Dems.
But Luke Hall, junior housing minister in the last Conservative government, went first and went out on a limb with 50%.
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Posted: July 24, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Land, Public land, Uncategorized | Tags: Public accounts committee |
Originally published on July 24 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The government has wasted a ‘once-in-a generation opportunity’ to tackle the housing crisis by failing to develop a strategy for disposing of public land.
That’s the damning verdict on the much-vaunted Public Land for Housing Programme from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) this morning (Wednesday).
The MPs find that by 2020 the government will have sold land for just 69,000 of the 160,000 homes it promised in England between 2015 and 2020 – and even that estimate relies on some heroic assumptions about progress over the next 12 months.
A second target to deliver £5 billion of receipts from the sale of surplus public land over the same period will be met – but only because of the £1.5 bn sale of Network Rail’s railway arches in February that was not part of the original programme.
When you consider that is happening in the middle of a housing crisis and in the wake of an austerity drive that has been closing public services around the country, that is an abject failure.
And those headline figures only tell part of a story that has an ever bigger failure to deliver affordable housing at the heart of it.
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Posted: March 13, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Climate change, Housebuilding, Land, Permitted development | Tags: Spring Statement |
Originally published on March 13 as a blog for Inside Housing.
With Brexit dominating everything, the Spring Statement seems at first glance to be just as underwhelming as the chancellor hoped when he moved the main Budget event of the year to the Autumn.
The most eye-catching details from usual array of announcements and re-announcements on housing includes are £3bn Affordable Housing Guarantee Scheme to support 30,000 homes and a proposal to ban fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025.
But to add to the sense of Brexit drift, the first re-introduces a coalition scheme that lowered borrowing costs for housing associations but was abolished in 2015 while the second does something to address climate change but will be arriving nine years later than the zero carbon homes that were scrapped by the coalition.
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Posted: December 4, 2018 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Benefit cap, Social housing |
Originally posted on December 4 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Go back to the days when the government’s confidence in its marketising agenda for social housing was at its greatest and one consistent justification was made by ministers for their policies.
The introduction of affordable rent would mean more new homes for the same money, fixed-term tenancies in the Localism Act would ‘end the lazy consensus’ and free up more lettings for people on the waiting list and Welfare Reform Act measures to remove the spare room subsidy would free up larger properties for overcrowded families.
Figures released last week show the combined impact of the policies and the results are not pretty. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 25, 2018 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Planning, Social housing | Tags: Green paper, NPPF 2 |
Originally published on July 25 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Pick your moment: the appointment of a new housing minister only two weeks ago; the non-appearance of advance trails in the Sunday papers; or the failure of housing secretary James Brokenshire to rise to Labour’s bait in the Commons on Monday.
They were all strong signals that the social housing green paper, first promised early this year, then in the Spring and then before the recess, would fail to make its appearance by the time MPs went on their summer break on Tuesday.
Challenged over the decision by the BBC’s Mark Easton, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said that: ‘Providing high quality and well managed social housing is a top priority for this government. Shortly we will publish a Green Paper that sets out a new deal for social housing tenants.’
‘Shortly’ in this context might mean over the recess or (more likely) when MPs return in September (though there is some speculation that tensions over Brexit could see this delayed until October).
Either way, social housing seems to be just as much of a ‘top priority’ as it was when Kit Malthouse became the third different housing minister this year, leaving none of the politicians in place who personally assured tenants that they were ‘listening’ to their concerns.
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