Posted: July 4, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Homelessness, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A year into the Labour government how should we assess its record on housing?
It’s not hard to find reasons to celebrate, from the spending review announcement of £39 billion for the Affordable Homes Programme to the creation of a National Housing Bank within Homes England armed with an extra £16 billion in financial transactions capital.
Social rent is the priority after years when it was under threat of extinction and will account for 60 per cent of the renamed Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP).
Social landlords have got what they asked for on rents and the long-term plan for social and affordable housing sets out how they must improve their existing homes, professionalise their staff and give tenants more access to information.
The prospect of new financial flexibilities for local authorities and restrictions on the Right to Buy offer council housing its best opportunity in years to escape the straitjacket imposed by central government.
But there are still many gaps to be filled when Labour sets out its wider plans in a long-term housing strategy and publishes its homelessness strategy.
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Posted: June 12, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Rents, Social housing | Tags: spending review |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
This spending review represents a good start on housing – but it must only be a start.
Highlights of the package delivered by chancellor Rachael Reeves on Wednesday included £39 billion over 10 years for the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) and a 10-year rent settlement of CPI plus 1 per cent for social landlords.
Then add a consultation on the return of rent convergence, £1 billon extra for cladding remediation and equal access to government funds, £2.5 billon in low-interest loans plus for social landlords.
Stir and combine with £950 million for councils to increase the supply of temporary accommodation, £10 billion in financial transactions to boost private investment and more to come for infrastructure and land remediation in Cambridge and the new towns, and this looks like great work by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
But does the spending review really justify the headlines and is it really as ‘transformative’ as some in the sector are making out?
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Posted: November 5, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Social housing | Tags: National Audit Office |
A forensic examination of the government’s building safety programme lays bare the scale of the task facing ministers when they set out further steps on remediation of unsafe homes shortly.
Open the report published by the National Audit Office (NAO) today virtually anywhere and a number will leap out at you:
- It could take until 2037 – a full 20 years after Grenfell and two years longer than implied by current government modelling– for all homes with dangerous cladding over 11m to be fixed.
- Some 4,771 residential mid- and high-rise buildings (with 258,000 homes) are in a remediation programme but work has only been completed on a third of them and is yet to start on half.
- Those 4,771 buildings represent less than half of the number of buildings (9,000 to 12,000) that the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) estimates will need remediating. The others have not been identified – and there is a risk that some may never be.
- £16.6 billion is MHCLG’s best estimate of the total cost (within a range of £12.6 billion to £22.4 billion).
Putting those numbers together gives some idea of the scale of a crisis in buildings over 11m that has consistently grown faster than the government’s attempts to resolve it.
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Posted: October 31, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Budget, Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents, Right to buy, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A final verdict will have to wait for the spending review in the Spring but how should we assess the first Labour Budget for 14 years?
The answer of course depends on what you take as your starting point. Compared with the disastrous first Conservative Budget in 2010 or even the first Labour one in 1997, this one takes some definite steps in the right direction.
But does this Budget live up to Labour rhetoric about greater investment and long-term solutions. To what extent will it really ‘fix the foundations’ and deliver ‘the biggest boost to affordable and social housing for a generation’?
Here are 10 key areas that I was looking out for:
1) New social homes: The £500 million top-up to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) briefed in advanceis welcome news but it must only be a down-payment on a far bigger increase for the next AHP after 2026.
It is at the lower end of expectations of up to £1 billion extra and it will not be enough to make up for a shortfall in delivery caused by construction cost inflation and other pressures on social landlords. The current AHP is on course to deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 affordable homes over five years rather than the 180,000 originally expected while need is estimated at 90,000 social homes a year.
All of which puts the 5,000 the government says will be generated by the top-up into perspective.
Details of ‘future grant investment’ in the next AHP will be set out in the spending review and will support a mix of tenures ‘with a focus on delivering homes for social rent’.
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Posted: September 11, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A week after the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry it’s time to focus on the responses so far and what happens next.
Sir Keir Starmer made a dignified statement in the Commons in which he spoke directly to the Grenfell community: ‘I want to start with an apology on behalf of the British state to each and every one of you, and indeed to all the families affected by this tragedy. It should never have happened. The country failed to discharge its most fundamental duty to protect you and your loved ones—the people we are here to serve—and I am deeply sorry.’
We’ve heard prime ministers say things like this many times over the decades, sometimes after disasters, sometimes after scandals. The difference is that Grenfell was both.
For Grenfell United, publication of the report is ‘a significant chapter in the journey to truth, justice and change. But justice has not been delivered. The inquiry report reveals that whenever there’s a clash between corporate interest and public safety, governments have done everything they can to avoid their responsibilities to keep people safe. The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.’
All disasters have an element of scandal about them too. There were basic operational failures that led to them, often compounded by a cavalier attitude to health and safety and establishment resistance to justice for the victims.
Similarly, scandals like the Post Office and infected blood were systemic failures but also disasters that cost victims their livelihoods and their lives.
Grenfell combines the two: not an accident but an entirely preventable disaster; and a scandal that does not just implicate local and central government and the entire construction industry but also raises fundamental questions about societal attitudes towards social housing and the safety of most of the blocks of flats built during this century.
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Posted: August 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If anyone needed a reminder, Monday morning’s major fire at an apartment block in Dagenham can only increase the urgency of finding a solution to the building safety crisis.
Thankfully all residents are accounted for following a significant search and rescue operation but the pictures of the flames engulfing the building and the stories of residents fleeing their homes were only too familiar.
Coming nine days before publication of the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry, it will have revived some awful memories for the bereaved, survivors and families even as it underlines the scale of the wider crisis that the report will not directly address.
And it will add to pressure on the government for more action, both to hold those responsible to account and to accelerate the pace of remediation work to make other buildings safe.
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Posted: June 13, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Fire safety, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Given a backdrop of grim economic times and successive election defeats, this was always going to be a cautious Labour manifesto.
So the good news is that housing features much more prominently than it did in the plans that the party has laid out in the last few months. It had only a walk on part in Labour’s five missions, six first steps and 10 ‘policies to change Britain’ –
The tone was set by one of the four speakers who introduced Keir Starmer. Daniel rents a one-bedroom flat in east London with his partner and two children and said he was backing Labour because of its plans to build more homes and support first-time buyers.
The manifesto itself contains few new policies and no new money but there are some interesting hints about what Labour might do in office.
The promise of 1.5 million new homes in the next parliament forms a key part of the section on kickstarting economic growth, with the party arguing that: ‘Britain is hampered by a planning regime that means we struggle to build either the infrastructure or housing the country needs.
And Labour directly challenges the Conservatives by arguing that ‘the dream of homeownership is now out of reach for too many young people’.
However, the manifesto does not mention the target of 70 per cent home ownership that Starmer set in his party conference speech only 18 months ago.
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Posted: June 11, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Stamp duty | Tags: Conservatives |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
Wounded by the D Day furore and badly behind in the polls, the Conservatives have retreated to their home ownership comfort zone in their election manifesto.
Rishi Sunak replayed their greatest hits in a Telegraph op-ed overnight and boasted in his speech at the launch that: ‘From Macmillan to Thatcher to today, it is we Conservatives who are the party of the property-owning democracy in this country.’
But he is well aware that the old tunes will be not be enough to fix the multiple housing crises that have developed over the last 14 years. Especially as his government has fallen badly short of the promises it made at the last election in 2019.
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Posted: May 27, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: Michael Gove |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Following his surprise decision to stand down as MP, Michael Gove leaves Westminster as probably the most important politician for housing in the last 14 years of Conservative rule.
As housing secretary since September 2021 (with a brief break for Liz Truss) he was in charge for some of the most consequential legislation of the whole period: the Building Safety Act 2022; Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023; and Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.
He also changed the terms of the debate on many issues, issuing public calls for more social housing in a way that would have been unthinkable for earlier Conservative ministers and speaking up for the rights of leaseholders, renters and tenants.
Yet for all that he remains something of an enigma. On a personal level, he was an able minister, open about Conservative failures and willing to engage with questions others would dodge, but he also bequeathed us Brexit chaos and never achieved one of the great offices of state.
The sense of two Goves carried on till the end: speaking to Rishi Sunak in the final Cabinet meeting before the election was called his message was ‘who dares wins’ but two days later it was ‘actually, not me’ as he stood down from his Surrey Heath constituency.
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Posted: May 8, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Decarbonisation, Fire safety, Housing associations, Housing finance, Rents, Social housing |
Originally written as a blog for Inside Housing.
How long can you keep juggling before it all goes horribly wrong?
That’s the question for social landlords posed by a new report from the all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee on the finances and sustainability of the social housing sector.
Juggling a couple of balls is simple. Three gets easier with practice. Four needs intense focus. Add more balls and external distractions and you risk dropping the lot.
The issues that need to be juggled are familiar ones: how do you continue to build new homes, decarbonise existing ones, fix fire safety problems and regenerate older stock when there is not enough grant to go around, construction, energy and insurance costs have soared and supposedly long-term rent settlements keep being revisited?
As the report points out, we are already seeing the results. Fiona Fletcher-Smith of L&Q told the committee that under the affordable housing programme that ended in 2021 it built 10,000 new homes in London but ‘this year in this programme we are bidding for 1,000. It is a dramatic drop.’
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Jules Birch 