Posted: January 27, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Social housing | Tags: Ed Balls, Labour |
The weekend’s big speech by Ed Balls looks like significant news for housing under a future Labour government – and not just for the obvious reasons.
The national headlines from the shadow chancellor’s speech to the Fabian conference were taken by his pledge to restore the 50p rate of tax and subsequent accusations that Labour is therefore anti-business. The undoubtedly good news for housing was that it will be ‘a central priority’ if Labour wins power in 2015.
But it was Balls’s message about ‘fiscal discipline’ that was more interesting to me:
‘We won’t be able to reverse all the spending cuts and tax rises that the Tories have pushed through. We will have to govern with less money, which means the next Labour government will have to make cuts too. No responsible Opposition can make detailed commitments and difficult judgments about what will happen in two or three years time without knowing the state of the economy and public finances that we will inherit.
‘But we know we will face difficult choices. The government’s day-to-day spending totals for 2015/16 will be our starting point. There will be no more borrowing for day-to-day spending. Any changes to the current spending plans for that year will be fully-funded and set out in advance in our manifesto.’
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Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: January 2, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Housing market, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: David Cameron, government guidance, House of Commons, housing market, housing supply, James Meek |
Not everything stops for Christmas and New Year. I’ve just written a post for Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing, on what’s happened in housing over the break.
The post features government guidance on housing allocations for local people, a House of Commons Library note on housing supply, an FT report on David Cameron’s fading interest in garden cities, a 5 Live programme on the housing market in 2014, James Meek’s London Review of Books essay on housing plus the latest on the bedroom tax.
Read more here.
Posted: November 26, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning |
Today’s Draft London Housing Strategy is the boldest attempt yet seen from a Conservative administration to get to grips with the housing crisis. It still does not go remotely far enough.
In his foreword, mayor Boris Johnson says London is facing an ‘epic challenge’ of building more than 42,000 new homes a year, every year, for 25 years. Of these, 15,000 would be affordable and 5,000 for market rent.
That is no exaggeration. As he goes on to say, that is ‘a level of housebuilding unseen in our great city since the 1930s’. To put it in perspective, the average over the last 20 years, at a time when the population was growing rapidly, was 18,000 per year. London has not come close to 42,000 completions a year since the war, even at the peak of the council housing boom in the late 1960s.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 1, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Planning, Shared ownership |
A comment on my blog a couple of weeks ago alerted me to a contradiction in terms: a £720,000 ‘affordable’ home.
The two-bedroom flat in Pear Tree Street, Islington appears on the Share to Buy website, the official home of the Mayor of London’s FirstSteps scheme that comes complete with the strapline ‘making housing affordable’. It’s available under a shared ownership, part-rent, part-buy scheme. As Tracy Dover commented: ‘I’d love to know who is eligible for shared ownership and can afford this!’
It can be yours for a £9,000 deposit plus monthly payments of £2,444 for rent, service charge and mortgage. By my calculations that represents around half the take-home pay of a household with the maximum eligible income of £80,000.
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Posted: October 30, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Shared ownership, Social housing, Squatting | Tags: asset management, council house, social cleansing |
Where does sensible asset management stop and social cleansing begin?
That’s the issue highlighted for me by the sale of ‘Britain’s most expensive council house’ and the protest that followed.
I put that in inverted commas because I’m not sure the building near Borough Market in Southwark was actually being used as a house but what is clear that it was sold at auction for £2.96 million, 30 per cent more than was expected last week.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: September 21, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, Tax |
What price homes for Londoners when new developments are marketed first to overseas investors with a promise that there will be ‘no social housing’?
As The Standard reported yesterday, the ‘fully private’ flats at Capital Towers near the Olympic Park go on sale in Malaysia this weekend in what it dubs a ‘no riff raff row’.
That example comes from a report out today by Darren Johnson, a Green Party London Assembly member, who claims that a third of all buyers of new homes are from overseas and that two-thirds go to investors rather than occupiers.
He accuses mayor Boris Johnson of actively encouraging a process that leads to increasing concentration of housing wealth, a severe social housing shortage and the unnecessary demolition of existing stock and a lifetime of insecure renting for most Londoners.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: September 9, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Economics, Help to Buy, Housing market |
The venue for George Osborne’s speech claiming that the economy is ‘turning a corner’ may turn out to be a symbol of rather more than the economic recovery he had in mind.
The Chancellor was speaking at One Commercial Street, a half-finished 21-storey development of shops, offices and homes on the edge of the City of London and his choice of venue was no accident:
‘You’re probably thinking that a construction site is a strange place to make a speech. But I’ve invited you here for a reason. This development – 1 Commercial Street – began in 2007. The plan was to turn this building into 21 floors of office space, private apartments and affordable housing. Construction began; and continued at a pace. Until in 2008 the work simply stopped. Investors pulled out. Jobs were lost. And the site lay silent for three years.
‘But last year, something exciting happened. Construction began again. Today, 230 people are working here at 1 Commercial Street to complete the development – and it will open its doors next year. I’ve brought you here because this building is a physical reminder of what our economy has been through in the last six years.’
Work on the development did indeed stop in October 2008, when the concrete frame had been built as far as the 11th floor. It took three and a half years and a change of owner before housebuilder Redrow restarted work on the tower in May 2012.
So far, so good for the Osborne narrative. Work stalled by the credit crunch is finally underway but work on what? What does 1 Commercial Street really say about the nature of the recovery he was proclaiming?
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Posted: June 28, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
So now we know: 10 years of certainty on rents, five years on grant and who knows how many more years of welfare ‘reform’.
The future has come into much clearer focus this week following the spending round on Wednesday and the investment announcement on Thursday. And, as luck would have it, all of this coincided with the biggest housing conference of the year.
Read the rest of my thoughts on the implications of the spending round for housing on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: June 24, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Energy efficiency, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
A stark warning of the consequences of market failure in the housing system comes from an independent commission today.
The broad-based group set up by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors(RICS) is chaired by Michael Newey, RICS president elect and chief executive of Broadland Housing Group, and also includes Mark Clare of Barratt, Nick Jopling of Grainger, James Pargeter of Deloitte Real Estate, Paul Tennant of Orbit and Duncan Maclennan of University of St Andrews.
They argue that: ‘High house prices, complemented with high levels of housing unaffordability are the greatest signs of market failure. This in turn has an adverse effect on labour mobility, commuting, productivity and job creation. This commission recognises the negative impact that a poor housing system has on the wider economy and hopes to see it elevated still higher on government agendas.
In other words, what the commission argues are ‘clear signs of market failure’ include negative externalities that go far beyond housing and require a switch away from the ‘short-termism’ that has characterised policy for the last 50 years.
However, in an illustration of just how difficult it is to break away from a short-term approach, the commission seems to face both ways on current government policies.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: June 3, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Social housing |
So, George Osborne, what about some Help to Build to go with all that Help to Buy?
The chancellor’s multi-billion flagship housing policy is under fire from virtually everyone because they can see what the result will be of stoking up demand while doing nothing about supply.
Now the CIH, NHF and g15 are all calling on Osborne to fund an expansion of affordable housing in the spending review for 2015/16 that will be published later this month. That is what they always do ahead of spending reviews of course, but they are deploying some powerful arguments.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 