Labour sets out its stall on affordable housing
Posted: April 20, 2018 Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Housing associations | Tags: Labour Leave a commentThe green paper published by Labour on Thursday represents the most comprehensive plan for affordable housing put forward by a major party in England in 40 years.
The document launched by Jeremy Corbyn and John Healey does not just reject the market-based and Conservative-led polices of the last eight years, it also goes significantly further than the policies adopted by the last Labour government and in some ways even beyond what the party proposed at the last election.
In broad outline, it is an attempt to reclaim the word ‘affordable’ and spell out what housing ‘for the many’ would mean. And it explicitly rejects the current government’s claim that the only way to make housing affordable is to build as many new homes as possible:
‘Conservative housing policy is the wrong answer, to the wrong question. It is not just how many new homes we build, but what we build and who for that counts. We have to build more affordable homes to make homes more affordable.’
Where the money really goes in housing
Posted: March 21, 2018 Filed under: Affordable housing, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: UK Housing Review Leave a commentThree comparisons leap out from the latest edition of the indispensable UK Housing Review published on Wednesday.
The first two are not new in themselves and the third is only a crude estimate but all three need repeating again and again for a real appreciation of where spending on housing goes and exactly who is subsidising who.
First comes the main one highlighted by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH): the shift from bricks and mortar to personal subsidies, or from grants for new homes and repairs to old ones to housing benefit.
This series of pie charts from the Review shows the change over the last 40 years and the total amount of housing subsidies in real terms:
Note first that supply subsidies have sunk to just 4.3 per cent of the total pie – this despite all the cuts in housing benefit seen since 2010 and the fact that the figures to not include continuing tax reliefs for home owners (see below for more on that).
Second, note that this does not save money. Total subsidies are now 48 per cent higher in real terms than at the turn of the century (when admittedly social housing investment was very low) but they are also approaching the levels of 30 years ago (when investment was significantly higher and the unemployment rate was three times what it is now).
Will Letwin be worth the wait?
Posted: March 13, 2018 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Land | Tags: Letwin review Leave a commentOriginally published on March 13 on my blog for Inside Housing.
So, with unintentional irony, the inquiry into why it takes so long to get new homes built is itself taking longer than expected.
For all the advance speculation and ministerial statements in the last few days, the Letwin Review of build-out rates was not published alongside today’s Spring Statement.
Instead the former Conservative Cabinet minister published a four-page letter offering housing secretary Sajid Javid an interim update on the work of the inquiry focusing on what is happening on large sites operated by large housebuilders.
A ‘draft analysis’ will follow by the end of June offering a description of the problem and its causes but final recommendations will only be made in time for the Budget in November.
In truth, expectations that Letwin would be able to offer instant solutions within a few months were always likely to be dashed – not that this stopped ministers from pre-empting it with warnings to housebuilders to ‘do their duty’ in the planning announcements last week.
Perhaps significantly, the draft update has only one mention of the supposedly crucial issue of ‘land banks’, the nefarious practice by which housebuilders allegedly hoard land with planning permission until they can make the most money.
However, Letwin rejects most of their usual excuses too – everything from shortages of labour, materials and capital to problems with transport infrastructure, utility connections and constrained logistics on site.
He argues instead that the ‘fundamental driver of build out rates once detailed planning permission is granted for large sites appears to be the “absorption rate”.’
This is ‘the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price’.
The real Budget agenda is clear
Posted: November 22, 2017 Filed under: Affordable housing, Budget, Council housing, Land, Local housing allowance, Universal credit | Tags: Philip Hammond Leave a commentPhilip Hammond’s Budget contains some big numbers and ambitious promises on housing but you don’t have to delve very far to find the real priorities.
Contrast, for example, what’s happening with housing, tax and welfare, two different measures that were heavily predicted and one that was desperately needed.
Stamp duty is being cut, but the chancellor has gone further than the expected holiday by abolishing it completely for first-time buyers of homes worth up to £300,000 or the first £300,000 of homes worth up to £500,000. The cut applies from now and will cost £3bn by the end of 2022/23.
Problems with universal credit are being addressed with measures including the scrapping of the seven-day waiting period, making advances easier to get and allowing continued payment of housing benefit for two weeks after a universal credit claim. The total cost is £1.5bn by 2022/23 and there is another delay to the rollout.
The universal credit changes are welcome but will still leave claimants potentially facing destitution and people in work thousands of pounds a year worse off than they would have been under the previous system.
The Conservative manifesto plan for council housing
Posted: May 14, 2017 Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Right to buy | Tags: General Election 2017 Leave a commentThe Tory ‘council house revolution’ trailed in all today’s papers begs all sorts of questions that I’ll be blogging about soon (now up here).
In TV interviews today we’ve learned that there is no new money, just the £1.4bn for affordable housing promised in the 2016 Autumn Statement.
Conservative spokespeople refused to say how many homes were involved but the Autumn Statement said 40,000.
If that is welcome news it hardly qualifies as a ‘revolution’. However, the policy includes other details that could prove to be more significant in the longer term.
Given that all today’s reports are based on a Conservative Party press release that I can’t find anywhere online, here it is:
Has the White Paper fixed it?
Posted: February 7, 2017 Filed under: Affordable housing, Build to let, Starter homes | Tags: Housing White Paper Leave a commentOriginally published on February 7 on my blog for Inside Housing.
As the advance press coverage showed, this is a White Paper with few big ideas but maybe that is no bad thing when you consider the ones that emerged the last time the government presented us with a range of ‘bold’ and ‘radical’ reforms.
The extension of the Right to Buy to housing association tenants, forced sales of higher-value council homes and Starter Homes have cast such a dark shadow over affordable housing for the past two years that they make a bit of timidity seem almost welcome.
I’ll come back to the White Paper as a whole another time. You can argue it’s a flimsy response to the housing crisis and there are sections that make you wonder if they’ve been watered down, but it does make a series of subtle changes with the potential at least to change the balance of power in housebuilding.
And there are two new ideas that are definitely worth welcoming: publication of information on land ownership and options over land, and allowing local authorities to participate in German-style land pooling for new development.
For now, though, I want to concentrate on the affordable housing side of the equation and what happened to those three big ideas that have dominated so much of the debate (and my blogs) since 2015.
JAMs and NOMADs
Posted: November 23, 2016 Filed under: Affordable housing, Budget, Housing benefit, Universal credit | Tags: Autumn Statement Leave a commentOriginally published on November 23 on my blog for Inside Housing
Wednesday’s Autumn Statement by Philip Hammond is good news for housing on several different fronts.
First, at long last housing is being recognised as infrastructure. That’s important enough in itself but Mr Hammond went even further by pitching housing as part of the solution to the key economic problem of productivity.
Along with transport, digital communications and research and development, housing will be part of the chancellor’s £23bn National Productivity Investment Fund. In financial terms, accelerated construction, affordable housing and the new Housing Infrastructure Fund represent a third of the total cost.
Mr Hammond also named “the housing challenge” alongside the productivity gap and the imbalance in prosperity across the country as one of the economy’s long-term weaknesses.
Working for everyone
Posted: October 6, 2016 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market | Tags: Sajid Javid, Theresa May Leave a commentOriginally posted on October 6 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
What would ‘housing that works for everyone’ look like?
Housing was a constant theme running through the Conservative conference this week. Communities secretary Sajid Javid said it was his ‘number one priority’ and announced a new(ish) £2bn fund for accelerated construction on public land plus ‘further significant measures’ in a white paper in the Autumn.
Housing minister Gavin Barwell is said to have addressed 17 different fringe meetings on housing and continued his charm offensive with more sensible comments about the need to encourage all tenures and tone down the obsession with home ownership and starter homes.
And Theresa May herself singled out housing as one example of market failure that requires government intervention to create ‘a country that works for everyone’ and an economy where ‘everyone plays by the same rules’:
‘That’s why where markets are dysfunctional, we should be prepared to intervene. Where companies are exploiting the failures of the market in which they operate, where consumer choice is inhibited by deliberately complex pricing structures, we must set the market right.’
‘It’s just not right, for example, that half of people living in rural areas, and so many small businesses, can’t get a decent broadband connection.
‘It’s just not right that two thirds of energy customers are stuck on the most expensive tariffs.
‘And it’s just not right that the housing market continues to fail working people either.’
Jules Birch 