Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Can social landlords improve their existing homes at the same time as they deliver ‘the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’?
The answer is that they will have to but a select committee report published on Monday lays bare the scale of the task ahead and the trade-offs that will have to be made.
As landlords are only too aware, the next ten years will see implementation of Awaab’s Law (phased introduction between 2025 and 2027), Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (by 2030) and the revised Decent Homes Standard (by 2035).
Add continuing work on building safety and they face a massive programme of work on existing homes that will have to be balanced against bids to build new ones under the Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP).
The all-party committee concludes that: ‘Even with the government’s investment in social homes and changes to the rent settlement, we are concerned that the sector will not have sufficient resources to effectively meet the government’s new social homes target while also raising standards.’
This could also lead to landlords selling off stock that has reached the end of its intended lifespan, say the MPs, ‘at a time when social housing is desperately needed’.
All of which leaves a series of trade-offs balancing three different interests: of existing tenants who rightly want improvements as quickly as possible; of social landlords acutely aware of their finances who say they need time and flexibility; and of families stuck in temporary accommodation or on waiting lists who are desperate for a social home.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
After weeks and even months of significant announcements delayed and promised ‘in due course’ it feels as though, like buses, they have all arrived at once.
On social and affordable housing, the announcements are summarised in an update to last July’s plan for ‘a decade of renewal’.
The flurry of activity seems intended to clear the decks for the opening of bids for the Social and Affordable Homes Programme in February by giving providers increased certainty about their finances.
On housing in general, the common factors seem to be removing obstacles in the way of development and giving owners and tenants more control over their lives and better conditions.
In most of these decisions, the government has faced a choice between two or more competing views or interests. It has usually gone for the middle ground.
On rent convergence, for example, last year’s consultation asked whether below-formula social rents should increase by an extra £1 or £2 a week but social landlords were pressing for £3.
In deciding on this, ministers had to weigh the costs to tenants and the Department for Work and Pensions against the positive impact on landlord investment in improvements and new homes and balance the interests of existing tenants against people waiting for a social home.
The decision to allow an extra £1 a week from April 2027 and £2 from April 2028 splits the difference but the delay means the extra income will be slow to arrive and in any case it will probably not be enough to make up for the rent cuts imposed in the 2010s.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For the most part, this was a Labour conference of nudges and winks rather than major announcements.
That is no coincidence because major decisions across government are being left to the Budget and one-year spending review next month and the multi-year spending review to follow in the Spring.
So for all the debate at what looked like an unprecedented number of fringe meetings on housing in Liverpool, for all the promises from the conference podium of brownfield passports and help for homeless veterans and care leavers, there was comparatively little that signalled the direction the new government intends to take.
The one exception was not a surprise: the reinstatement by net zero secretary Ed Miliband of the 2030 target to bring all rented homes up to a minimum level of Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C by 2030.
The announcement reinstates an earlier target for Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards that was scrapped by Rishi Sunak and extends it to social and private rented homes
Without a boost, that could accelerate the sell-off of older private rented stock and encourage social landlords to consolidate theirs, at the same time as it focusses their attention even more on improving their existing homes rather than building new ones.
On new homes, the big question for me is the relationship between Labour’s target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament and its manifesto promise on affordable and social housing.’
As 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.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The prospects for housing investment look bleak whoever wins the election – and that is looking on the bright side – but there was an interesting comment this week from the frontrunner to be the next prime minister.
The Autumn Statement found money for tax cuts from an implausible sounding freeze in future capital investment and squeeze on departmental budgets after 2025. This seems designed both as a pre-election bribe and as a trap for Labour.
Labour leader Keir Starmer duly refused to fall into it in a speech at the Resolution Foundation think tank in which he said that anyone who expects the party ‘to quickly turn on the spending taps’ if it wins power will come away disappointed.
That will trigger bad memories for anyone who can remember the early years of the last Labour government, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pledged to match Conservative spending plans in its first two years.
That was disastrous for the social housing budget since those plans included deep cuts that seemed unrealistic even to the outgoing Tories.
Originally 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.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The clue is in Rishi Sunak’s language. This is about more than just his claim to be putting ‘the long-term interests of our country before the short-term political needs of the moment’ when he is doing the opposite.
Nor even his pledge to scrap a range of ‘worrying proposals’ on bins, flights and car-sharing that have never actually been proposed.
‘Under current plans, some property owners would’ve been forced to make expensive upgrades in just two years’ time,’ he said.
Some property owners? Who could he mean? The prime minister cannot bring himself to say private landlords because they simply do not fit in with his narrative of Westminster imposing ‘significant costs on working people especially those who are already struggling to make ends meet’.
Because his announcement actually does the complete opposite. The plan to tighten Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES) for private rented homes would have saved millions of tenants £220 a year on average according to the government’s own impact assessment.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
In a Budget where everything had to begin with E there was little hope for housing.
Neither Rishi Sunak’s economic priorities nor Jeremy Hunt’s e-list (enterprise, employment, education and everywhere) left much room for an issue on which the Conservatives appear to have given up.
On energy, there was good news for tenants on pre-payment meters and for everyone with the extension of the price guarantee.
However, there was no more support for a policy that would do more than anything else to reduce dependence on unreliable overseas energy supplies and Vladimir Putin.
Investment in the decarbonisation of existing homes would cut energy demand at the same time as it cut carbon emissions and bills for tenants and home owners and delivered on the government’s new priority of energy security.
Energy efficiency even begins with the right letters but that either counts as a double negative or was quietly forgotten.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Eight weeks after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng shrank the economy with their growth plan, chancellor Jeremy Hunt completed his reversal of almost all of their plans in his Autumn Statement.
He was speaking against a backdrop of dire forecasts of recession, unemployment, falling living standards and rising taxes that spoke of bad news to come for housing and tenants and landlords alike.
The complete rewrite of the Autumn Statement leaves a long list of tax increases and spending cuts in its wake, even if many of them will not take effect until after the next election and so may not happen. However, there was still a little hope amidst the gloom.
Here are five points I picked up from the statement itself and the background documents.
The cap and the freeze
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the statement – with a nod to expectations management by the Treasury – is that there is also some good news. The announcement that the government will stick to previous pledges to increase benefits (and pensions and the minimum wage) in line with prices was not completely unexpected but will still come as a relief to tenants and landlords alike.
But Jeremy Hunt’s decision to increase the overall benefit caps by the same amount is much more of a surprise. Without this, thousands more households faced being capped as their benefits rose to hit thresholds that have been frozen since they were cut in 2016. The main thresholds for families will now increase to £22,020 a year outside London and £25,323 in the capital. The cost is estimated at £315 million in 2023/24 and almost £2 billion over the next five years.
And yet… these are still far below the average earnings figures that were misleadingly used to justify the cap in the first place. And they leave people who are already capped facing rent increases with no extra income to pay for them.
Finally, buried deep in the background documents is more gloom: the assumption that Local Housing Allowance rates for private renters will remain at 2022/23 levels, which have themselves been frozen since April 2020. This despite rapidly rising rents. If confirmed, the result will inevitably be rising rent arrears and homelessness.
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.
The rent cap proposed for social housing may not have come as a huge surprise but the consequences will play out in very different ways for different parties.
It says it all about the cost of living crisis that whether rents are capped or not could be well down social tenants’ list of worries over the next few months.
The energy price cap has already almost doubled in the last 12 months to £1,971 a year. Next month that will rise to £3,549 and the worst forecasts suggest that could double again by next April unless the new government takes radical action.
Effectively, therefore, tenants in social housing could be paying double rent next year unless they take drastic steps to cut their bills.
But many are already doing this and finding that even turning the boiler off does not go far enough – they may be asking why the consultation does not include an option to freeze rents.
Jules Birch 