Sidelining of tenants is part of a wider pattern
Posted: April 25, 2019 Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Leasehold, Private renting, Tenants Leave a commentWhether you put it down to carelessness or couldn’t care less-ness, the inaction inside government inaction that has sparked open letter from A Voice for Tenants (AV4T) is symptomatic of a wider political paralysis.
As the group themselves point out, they are not representative of the eight million people living in social housing in England but they are the best we have until the government keeps the prime minister’s promise to bring tenants into the political process.
The letter is all the more effective for the contrast between its moderate language and its stark message that working behind the scenes has not produced results.
The only option left seems to be to embarrass the politicians into living up to what they have said over the last two years – accepting Inside Housing’s open invitation to a meeting seems the bare minimum they should do.
And there is a strikingly similar message in the Times this morning from Grenfell United, as it attacks ‘indifferent and incompetent’ ministers who took their ‘kindness as weakness’.
Two years of meetings have produced too little action, they say, with no progress on their call for a new model of housing regulator and thousands of people still living in ‘death traps’ with combustible cladding.
Grenfell and tenants were top of the agenda for the ministers in post at the time of the fire – the work of Alok Sharma and his civil servants is praised in the AVT letter – but have slipped down it as the months and now years have passed.
The implications of the leasehold scandal
Posted: March 19, 2019 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing associations, Leasehold | Tags: HCLG committee Leave a commentOriginally published on March 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.
The leasehold scandal will have far-reaching implications for housing that will be felt well beyond the major housebuilders with whom it began.
A report published by the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on Tuesday takes as its starting point the doubling ground rents and onerous contract terms faced by buyers of new homes who it says were treated ‘not as homeowners or customers but as a source of steady profit’.
And it also highlights the issue of leaseholders facing huge bills to remove and replace combustible cladding raised in its work on fire safety.
But this report goes well beyond those recent high-profile problems with leasehold and poses some fundamental questions about a tenure that only exists in England and Wales – and they are ones that will require answers by social landlords as well as private sector housebuilders and freeholders.
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.
Where the money really goes in housing
Posted: March 21, 2018 Filed under: Affordable housing, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: UK Housing Review Leave a commentThree comparisons leap out from the latest edition of the indispensable UK Housing Review published on Wednesday.
The first two are not new in themselves and the third is only a crude estimate but all three need repeating again and again for a real appreciation of where spending on housing goes and exactly who is subsidising who.
First comes the main one highlighted by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH): the shift from bricks and mortar to personal subsidies, or from grants for new homes and repairs to old ones to housing benefit.
This series of pie charts from the Review shows the change over the last 40 years and the total amount of housing subsidies in real terms:
Note first that supply subsidies have sunk to just 4.3 per cent of the total pie – this despite all the cuts in housing benefit seen since 2010 and the fact that the figures to not include continuing tax reliefs for home owners (see below for more on that).
Second, note that this does not save money. Total subsidies are now 48 per cent higher in real terms than at the turn of the century (when admittedly social housing investment was very low) but they are also approaching the levels of 30 years ago (when investment was significantly higher and the unemployment rate was three times what it is now).
Steps in the right direction that don’t go far enough
Posted: March 5, 2018 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning 1 CommentOriginally published on my blog for Inside Housing on March 5.
Theresa May is a politician with a gift for saying the right things but somehow in the wrong way.
I’m thinking here not just of the obvious examples such as the ‘nothing had changed during the election campaign’ and the collapsing lettering of ‘Building a Britain that Works for Everyone’ during her Conservative conference speech last year. She does it even when she is most in control of what she is saying.
She did it in her first speech as prime minister when she dedicated herself to tackling ‘burning injustices’ but only succeeded in drawing attention to the fact they were the legacy of the previous six years of Conservative rule.
She did it on Friday when her big speech on Brexit rightly pointed out that ‘we can’t have everything’ only to prompt a German journalist to ask ‘is it all worth it?’.
And she did it again in her speech on Monday launching the new version of the National Planning Policy Framework.
