Posted: December 13, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: Election 2019 |
Originally published as a blog for Inside Housing on December 13.
It would be very easy for the Conservatives to conclude after this election that they do not need to bother about housing.
The striking thing about their biggest victory since 1987 is that most of the places where various forms of the housing crisis are most acute voted for other parties. And it did not matter.
That’s most obviously true in London where Labour retained most of the seats with the highest levels of homelessness and families in temporary accommodation.
In London and other major cities where house prices have risen most and Generation Rent has grown fastest, gains for Labour from 2017 were consolidated in 2019, albeit with reduced majorities.
Labour’s only real victory last night was in Putney, which the Tories captured in the 1980s on the back of the right to buy, control of Wandsworth council and an influx of well-heeled professionals.
If there was a backlash against Tory inaction from leaseholders in thousands of apartment buildings around the country, most of them (a sweeping generalisation, I know) are in metropolitan, remain-voting constituencies that for the most part did not change hands last night.
As for housing supply as a whole, voters in affluent seats in the South East may not much like Brexit but they will probably have been reassured by the Tories’ downgrading of their ambitions on new homes and promises to protect the green belt. Ex-housing minister Dominic Raab fended off the Lib Dem challenge in Esher and Walton.
So maybe the Conservatives were right to conclude, as I argued in my blog on their performance at the pre-election housing hustings, that there were no votes in housing.
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Posted: December 5, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Fire safety, Social housing, Uncategorized | Tags: Election 2019 |
Originally published on December 5 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The most illuminating answer in Wednesday night’s housing hustings came with the final question.
Politicians at the event organised by a coalition of different housing organisations were asked: ‘How much of your income do you think it’s reasonable and right to spend on housing?’
They were asked for a quickfire answer to an affordability question that covers lots of complicated issues. What counts as income and what as housing costs? Do you include housing benefit? Do you account for differences in incomes and tenures?
The standard answer is a maximum of a third – and that was the one given by John Healey for Labour, Sian Berry for the Greens and Tom Brake (who said 30%) for the Lib Dems.
But Luke Hall, junior housing minister in the last Conservative government, went first and went out on a limb with 50%.
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Posted: November 25, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Housing market, Local housing allowance, Private renting, Social housing |
Originally posted on November 25 on my blog for Inside Housing.
A Conservative election manifesto with little new to offer signals that housing has moved a long way down the party’s list of priorities.
The contrast between the Labour manifesto plan for 150,000 council and housing association homes a year and the Lib Dem manifesto promise of 100,000 homes for social rent a year could hardly be starker.
The Tory document launched by Boris Johnson does have three pages on housing but the only new policies in it had already been launched in separate announcements earlier in the campaign.
These include encouraging a new market for long-term fixed-rate mortgages to slash the costs of deposits, a First Home scheme of homes at a 30% discount in perpetuity for local families and a stamp duty surcharge on overseas buyers to fund more help for rough sleepers.
Even these are not strictly speaking new: long-term fixed rates were encouraged by Gordon Brown but never took off; David Cameron promised 200,000 starter homes at a discount but none were ever built and the new scheme seems to involve only 19,000 homes by the mid-2020s; and Theresa May proposed exactly the same levy on overseas buyers last year before it was watered down.
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Posted: November 14, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Housebuilding, Temporary accommodation, Uncategorized | Tags: John Healey, Robert Jenrick |
Originally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on November 14.
There was good news and bad news for the government in a new housing statistics out this week that illustrate the scale of the issues it still needs to address.
The good news is that housebuilding in England is up again: there were 241,000 net additional dwellings in 2018/19, an increase of 9% in the last 12 months and 93% in the last six years.
Net additional dwellings make up the government’s preferred measure of housing output and add together new build completions, conversions and change of use less demolitions.
That total is not just higher than at the previous peak of output before the financial crisis and credit crunch – it is also the highest total recorded since the government started collecting the data in this way in 1991/92.
Significantly, for the first time total net additions are higher than the 240,000 a year target that the last Labour government set in the wake of Kate Barker’s landmark review of housing supply in 2004
True, the big increase over the last six years also reflects just how low output had sunk in the wake of the credit crunch, and true a housing market downturn and recession in the building industry could yet derail progress.
However, with more recent council tax data indicating that annual output may now be over 250,000, the government’s target of 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s no longer looks completely outlandish.
Indeed, a separate report from the Home Builders Federation (HBF) estimates that planning permissions were issued for 380,000 new homes in England in the year to June.
Housing secretary Robert Jenrick was quick to welcome the figures and make a campaigning point for the general election:
One more bit of good news is that the bulk of the net additions came from new build completions (213,660) rather than conversions of questionable quality (14,107 were delivered via permitted development, which was only a slight increase on 2017/18).
However, focussing purely on how many new homes were delivered does not tell us much about how the government is doing on other housing issues.
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Posted: November 1, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Construction industry, Fire safety, Grenfell Tower |
Originally posted on November 1 on my blog for Inside Housing.
For all the admirable clarity in Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s phase one report from the Grenfell Tower inquiry, 28 months on from the fire the official response is still running to catch up.
This week’s leaks and row about the role of the London Fire Brigade (LFB) only serve as reminders of how much else remains to be done.
The other major event of the week ensured that the building safety legislation promised in the Queen’s Speech to implement the Hackitt review will have to wait until after the election.
The same goes for the social housing white paper. It has now at least been promised by the prime minister and housing secretary but the clock is still ticking on regulation, fighting stigma and all the other fine words in the green paper published 14 months ago.
That too will have to wait until after December 12, probably with yet more new ministers who will need to get up to speed with the issues.
Sir Martin’s phase one report found that the cladding was the ‘primary cause of fire spread’ and the judge ruled that it breached the building regulations.
He had not intended to rule on this point in the first part of the inquiry focussing on what happened on the night of 14 June, 2017. But he says there is ‘compelling evidence’ that the external walls did not meet the requirement in the regulations to ‘adequately resist the spread of fire’ and adds that ‘on the contrary they promoted it’.
This may seem self-evident to anyone who has followed events since the fire but the fact that he has made the judgement clears the way for phase two and moves the inquiry closer to deciding on who was responsible for the actions and inactions that led to it.
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Posted: October 15, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Section 21, Social housing | Tags: Queen's Speech |
Originally posted on October 15 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Granted, the Queen’s Speech was more pre-election political broadcast than genuine legislative programme for the year to come but it still sends some worrying signals about where the government’s priorities lie.
Given Boris Johnson’s Commons majority of -45, Her Majesty’s utterances could be voted down for the first time since 1924 and even if the government somehow stumbles through its own desire for an election only the most uncontroversial bits of it are likely to make any progress.
it’s still good news that the Queen’s Speech proposes building safety standards legislation that would implement the Hackitt review by establishing a new safety framework for high-rise residential buildings.
Although, as Jeremy Corbyn pointed out in his response, progress on blocks with Grenfell-style cladding has been so slow that ‘not a single private block has been made safe under this prime minister’.
While the details of the new system will be debated, few would doubt the central purpose of developing a new system to oversee the whole built environment or the principles of clearer accountability for building owners, designers and constructors, a stronger voice for residents in the system, stronger enforcement and sanctions and a clearer framework for national oversight of construction products.
And if many will doubt that a New Homes Ombudsman will be enough to bring developers into line, the fact that the proposal is tacked on to the new Bill means it can still be improved.
However, with one other small exception, housing was otherwise entirely missing from the Queen’s Speech.
That absence was felt not just in a lack of action on housing and homelessness in general but also in missing specific measures that had been anticipated across different parts of the housing system.
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Posted: June 10, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Construction industry, Fire safety, Grenfell Tower | Tags: Barking |
Originally published as a blog for Inside Housing on June 10.
Almost two years on from Grenfell, Sunday’s huge fire at a block of flats in Barking is a horrifying reminder of how much there is still to do to keep residents safe.
Thankfully, everyone seems to have got out but the parallels are all too clear in the terrifying speed at which the fire spread and previous safety concerns raised by residents of the mixed-tenure block that appear to have been brushed aside.
Attention will inevitably focus on the safety of timber balconies and the apparent failure of fire retardant treatment of the materials used as well as the actions of those responsible for the block.
More broadly it underlines a whole series of questions about regulation and the construction industry and relationships between developers, freeholders and leaseholders that have still not had adequate answers.
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Jules Birch 