A right to own?
Posted: June 13, 2016 Filed under: Buy to let, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Private renting | Tags: Civitas, Peter Saunders Leave a commentOriginally posted on June 13 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
What should we do if we really want to reverse the decline in home ownership?
That’s the question posed in a new book published by centre right think tank Civitas (downloadable here). The answers are interesting and surprising, not just because of where it sits on the political spectrum, but also because the author is a longstanding evangelist for the home owning society and opponent of ‘Marxist’ housing advocates.
Peter Saunders wrote a seminal book called A Nation of Home Owners in 1990 that made a passionate argument for the expansion of home ownership as the choice of most people and as a force for good in promoting community cohesion and civic participation.
As such, you might have thought he’d be completely in tune with David Cameron, George Osborne and Brandon Lewis and their policies to satisfy the 86 per cent of us who want to be home owners.
Book review: The Rent Trap
Posted: March 27, 2016 Filed under: Buy to let, Private renting, Regulation, Tenants Leave a commentHow did we end up with a housing system dependent on at least 1.5 million small-scale private landlords offering millions of tenants little or no security and costing billions in housing benefit?
You couldn’t do much better if you set out to design the worst possible way of housing the nation in general and young people in particular. But the changes that now seem set in stone – a private rented sector that’s grown so fast it is now bigger than the social sector and home ownership shrinking back to the levels last seen in the 1980s – have happened in the space of one generation.
The Rent Trap, a new book by Samir Jeraj and Rosie Walker, is the best attempt I’ve yet read to explain how and why this has happened to a general audience. The subtitle – How We Fell Into It And How We Get Out Of It – reflects an even more ambitious aim.
Keep your friends close – Part 2
Posted: November 30, 2015 Filed under: Affordable housing, Buy to let, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Second homes, Section 106 | Tags: George Osborne, spending review Leave a commentOriginally posted on November 30 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Part 1 of this blog looked at the apparent winners and the big losers from George Osborne’s announcements last week. But there is one more group lurking on the edges of the playground, ostracised by virtually everyone. What happened to George’s well-heeled former chums should be a warning to everyone else.
Buy-to-let landlords and second home owners thought they had worked hard, done the right thing, bought a house and then another (and another). Contrary to what everyone said about them driving up house prices and destroying local communities, they thought they were providing desperately needed homes and helping pay for local services. They thought the Conservatives were on their side after they blocked a Labour tax rise on second homes in 2010 and kept buy to let out of European mortgage regulation in 2013.
They thought George was ‘one of us’. After all, he made £450,000 profit on his taxpayer-funded second home and rents out his main home for £10,000 a month while he lives in Downing Street. And they voted Conservative in May when those horrible Labour oiks planned rent regulation and a mansion tax.
Their thanks for all this? Sand kicked in their faces with cuts in tax relief in July and the Chinese Burn of hikes in stamp duty and capital gains tax in November. The fate of these entrepreneurs and investors turned enemies of aspiration should be a warning for all those who are currently part of the Osborne in-crowd.
Death of the Ideal Home
Posted: June 1, 2015 Filed under: Buy to let, Home ownership Leave a commentWas this the week when the dream of home ownership in Britain was finally killed off by the greed of buy to let?
All this week the Daily Mail is telling its readers ‘How to Join the Buy to Let Boom’ and offering them a chance to ‘secure your family’s future’ by winning a ‘£260k buy to let house’. Here’s the top half of Monday’s front page (courtesy of @DawnHFoster):
Winners and losers
Posted: January 12, 2015 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting | Tags: Financial Times 2 CommentsSo buy to let landlords made £177 billion from rising house prices over the last five years – and that does not include rental income.
A series of linked stories in the Financial Times this morning make clear who the beneficiaries of booming property market have been since 2009, when interest rates fell to a record low. In addition to buy to letters, they are home owners in London (prices up by £563 billion in the last five years) and in Conservative constituencies outside the capital (prices up eight times faster than in Labour seats). Even social landlords get in on the act, with a 20 per cent increase in the value of their stock since 2009.
Yet all the research by Savills and impressive FT data visualisation beg some far bigger questions about what it calls the politics of British housing. Why has this happened? If those are the winners, who are the losers?
Passing the buck
Posted: June 26, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Help to Buy, Housing market, Mortgages | Tags: George Osborne, Mark Carney Leave a commentGeorge Osborne has spent so long outsourcing responsibility for the housing market to Mark Carney that it’s easy to forget the Bank of England’s actual brief.
Far from controlling house prices, or tackling affordability or making the market less dysfunctional, the Bank’s Financial Policy Committee (FPC) ‘is charged with a primary objective of identifying, monitoring and taking action to remove or reduce systemic risks with a view to protecting and enhancing the resilience of the UK financial system’ and a secondary objective ‘to support the economic policy of the government’.
So the measures the FPC announced today on high loan to income (LTI) mortgages and a slightly strengthened stress test on lending are about preventing future house prices from increasing household debt to a level that poses risks to the financial system rather than tackling current price levels and affordability.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Eric’s ladder
Posted: May 15, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Mortgages | Tags: Eric Pickles, Kris Hopkins 1 CommentThe boast from ministers is that Help to Buy really is getting Britain building – but is it enough?
The narrative according to Eric Pickles is that the coalition ‘inherited a situation where builders couldn’t build, buyers couldn’t buy and lenders wouldn’t lend’. Now, thanks to Help to Buy and the reinvigorated Right to Buy, ‘we’re ensuring that anyone who works hard and wants to get on the property ladder will be able to do so’.
Not to be outdone, housing minister Kris Hopkins said the housebuilding figures for the March quarter of 2014 were the result of a ‘massive government effort’ and even took credit for a 23-year high in council house building. And the DCLG press release comes complete with a statement from Stewart Baseley of the Home Builders Federation that the extension of Help to Buy 1 ‘is allowing the industry to plan ahead, rebuild capacity lost in the downturn and deliver the homes the country needs’.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
New regime
Posted: April 28, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Mortgages, Regulation | Tags: MMR Leave a commentWill the new mortgage rules tilt the playing field even further in favour or the housing haves and against the have-nots?
On the face of it’s hard to argue with the idea that lenders should check whether borrowers can actually afford their mortgage before they make the loan. But is it quite that simple?
After a long consultation, the new Mortgage Market Review (MMR) regime finally came into force on Saturday. The aim is to prevent a repeat of the irresponsible surge in lending seen before 2007. The lax rules then were symbolised by the self-certified mortgage, or liar loan, which is now banned.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Five years on
Posted: March 5, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Private renting | Tags: Interest rates, QE Leave a commentOn today’s fifth anniversary of record low interest rates all the talk is about how savers have lost out to borrowers. It should also be about renters and owners.
On 5 March, 2009 the Bank of England cut its main interest rate to 0.5 per cent, the lowest in history, and began its associated policy of quantitative easing in a successful attempt to prevent economic collapse.
But the effects continue to be controversial. The campaign group Save Our Savers estimates that savers have lost £117 billion in lost interest over the last five years plus another £209 billion from the way inflation has reduced the spending power of their money.
In contrast, borrowers have gained billions from lower interest rates. SOS’s message resonates because of the perceived unfairness that prudent savers and are paying to extricate us from a crisis caused by excess borrowing.
But what about the housing impact? In a CIH policy essay a few months ago, I did a rough calculation that mortgage borrowers have saved around £30 billion a year as a result of lower mortgage rates, QE and politcies such as Funding for Lending. Those with larger mortgages and with enough equity to remortgage to lower rates will have gained proportionately the most. The impact has also varied considerably between different regions.
Jules Birch 