Budget leaves housing frozen out
Posted: March 15, 2023 Filed under: Budget, Devolution, Energy efficiency, Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Feeble progress on decarbonisation
Posted: June 30, 2022 Filed under: Decarbonisation, Energy efficiency Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The prospect of underspent decarbonisation funding for social housing being sent back to the Treasury is worrying enough in itself – and that’s before you consider the bigger picture.
The warning from a senior civil servant at the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy was delivered at the Housing 2022 conference this week as he urged landlords to bid for the upcoming second wave of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF).
In the wake of alarming lack of progress by councils who received funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund Demonstrator, the fact that the money is being released in one-year tranches may be part of the problem. There are also still major concerns about skills and capacity to carry out the work.
However, at least the fund is there. The really alarming thing is that this is just about the only part of plan to decarbonise housing as a whole that is even close to on track to achieving the progress needed to achieve net zero.
A sobering report from the Climate Change Committee (CCC) published on Wednesday reveals the scale of the challenge and the lack of progress so far.
Absurdly, as CCC chair Lord Deben says in his introduction, we are still building new homes that will not meet minimum standards of energy efficiency and will require significant and expensive retrofitting. This is six years and counting after the original target for all new homes to be zero carbon.
The Future Homes Standard will not apply to new homes in England until 2025 and the CCC is ‘not confident’ that interim measures will drive sufficient change before then since they will still add to the stock of gas boilers that will need to be retrofitted.
But progress is even slower on existing homes and the vast majority of the housing stock that will exist in 2050 has already been built.
Read the rest of this entry »Action for now, solutions not yet
Posted: May 26, 2022 Filed under: Benefit cap, Cost of living, Energy efficiency, Local housing allowance Leave a commentThe £15 billion energy cost support package announced by Rishi Sunak rightly benefits the poorest households most but it remains to be seen what it will do about the cost of living in general and the cost of housing in particular.
Under the package announced by the chancellor on Thursday, 8 million households on benefits will get a one-off payment of £650 paid in two lump sums in July and the Autumn. Add that to the £400 energy support payment (rather than a loan) that will go to everyone and the £150 payment already made (at least in theory) to those in Bands A-D for the council tax, and the Treasury says this amounts to £1,200 help towards the cost of living for the most vulnerable.
Background documents confirm the one-off payment will not count towards the benefit cap, unlike the £20 a week uplift to universal credit during the pandemic. That should avoid many more households seeing the help disappear as fast as it arrives.
Sunak had been under pressure to do more on benefits not just because of energy costs but also because of the large gap between the 3.1 per cent uprating of benefits in April (based on last September’s inflation rate) and the current 9 per cent rate of CPI inflation.
He said his one-off payment would be worth more than bringing forward next year’s uprating of benefits, as some had suggested.
And he also confirmed that the April 2023 uprating will be based on next September’s inflation rate, which could easily be more than 10 per cent, rather than retaining the option of declaring it to be unaffordable.
So far, so good, then and this is probably the package that the chancellor should have delivered in a Spring Statementthat looked inadequate at the time and has seemed even weeker with each passing week. This package looks to be both more generous and more redistributive than many people were expecting.
However, that also reflects the scale of the cost of living crisis. Add the £800 increase in the energy price cap expected in October to the £700 increase already seen in April and that is already more than the chancellor’s £1,200 for the most vulnerable and that is before you get to large increases in the price of food, fuel and other essentials.
And there was one major cost that was as absent from Sunak’s statement this week as it was from the one he made in March and the Queen’s Speech earlier this month. No prizes for guessing it must be housing.
Read the rest of this entry »Mind the gaps in the net zero strategy
Posted: October 21, 2021 Filed under: Climate change, Decarbonisation, Environment, Zero carbon homes Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
In so far as it can be called a strategy, the government’s plan for heat and buildings largely relies on the private sector plus regulation to deliver its ambitious targets for net zero in housing.
What ‘new’ money there is – £800m for the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, £950m for Home Upgrade Grants – seems mostly to consist of allocations from sums already promised in the Conservative manifesto.
The exception seems to be £450m for a Boiler Upgrade Scheme that will fund 90,000 replacement heat pumps over the next three years, with the government arguing that this will prime the market for its ‘ambition’ of 600,000 a year for the next three years.
But that mismatch only highlights the contrast with Labour’s pledge of £60bn investment over the next 10 years and the Climate Change Committee’s estimate that it will cost a total of £250bn to decarbonise housing by 2050.
There is an even bigger gap between the strategy’s rhetoric about net zero and the reality that bringing as many homes as possible up to EPC band C by 2035 will involve costly retrofits. Around 60 per cent of existing homes are below EPC C.
And there are still big questions about whether new technologies will work, how decarbonisation will be delivered and how the targets and standards will be enforced.
Read the rest of this entry »More housing questions than answers
Posted: December 11, 2018 Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Land, Leasehold, Zero carbon homes | Tags: James Brokenshire Leave a commentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on December 11.
As Westminster grinds to a halt over Brexit at least some progress is still being made on housing – or is it?
In the year of the social housing green paper and the end of the borrowing cap, some things have undoubtedly moved but the signs at Housing Communities and Local Government questions on Monday were that others are grinding to a halt.
First up was the land question and specifically the way that MHCLG dashed hopes of radical reform of land value capture in its response to a Housing Communities and Local Government Committee report recommending big changes to a system that sees planning permission for housing increase the value of agricultural land by 100 times.
If at first you don’t succeed
Posted: July 13, 2015 Filed under: Affordable housing, Budget, Energy efficiency, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning, Shared ownership, Starter homes, Zero carbon homes | Tags: David Cameron, George Osborne Leave a commentOriginally posted on July 13 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
It may have important new provisions on housing and planning but the name of the government’s new productivity strategy rather gives the game away.
Described as ‘the second half of the Budget’, Fixing the Foundations was published by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills but includes chapters on housing and planning and welfare that amplify decisions taken in the first half.
But does the name remind you of anything? Go back four years and David Cameron himself was launching a ‘radical and unashamedly ambitious’ housing strategy. The title? Laying the Foundations.
Once they’ve stopped sucking air through their teeth, any builder will tell you that once you’ve laid the foundations and built on top of them, it’s enormously expensive to start to fix them. It’s also a pretty good indication that the foundations were pretty rocky to begin with.
Jules Birch 