The parties start to set out their general election stall
Posted: May 4, 2023 Filed under: Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If this week was a preview of what the main parties will be offering on housing at the next general election then it is probably best to look away now.
Perhaps the best that can be said is that, just as Thursday’s local elections only offer clues as to the outcome of next year’s big event, so the policies announced in the run-up to them may only be a taster of what’s still to come.
But that is being optimistic: otherwise we got some standard tropes from Labour about
home ownership and signals that the Conservatives could be about to reach back into their collection of greatest misses.
In a series of interviews on Sunday, Keir Starmer set out his ambition for Labour to be ‘the party of home ownership’:
This standard appeal to aspirational voters begs some obvious questions about how and what else.
Restoring targets for housebuilding recently scrapped by the Conservatives would be a good start and would come alongside existing Labour policies of ‘first dibs’ for local first-time buyers and a block on overseas buyers.
But whether that will be enough to generate 300,000 new homes a year (the targets hadn’t done that before they were scrapped) and whether even that will make homes more affordable must both be doubtful.
The following day (coincidence?) The Times reported that Rishi Sunak is putting Help to Buy ‘back on the table’ as a key plank in the campaign for a potential Conservative fifth term.
Government sources told the paper that the move could come in the Autumn Statement or the Spring Budget. ‘We cannot go into the next election without an offer for first-time buyers,’ said a minister. ‘We all know that homeowners are more likely to vote Conservative and we cannot cede this ground to Labour.’
Read the rest of this entry »Gove’s admission begs more questions
Posted: January 30, 2023 Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Michael Gove’s admission that ‘faulty and ambiguous’ building regulations set by central government were partly to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken even passing notice of the evidence at the public inquiry.
That a statement so blindingly obvious should be enough to prompt a worried look from one of the levelling up secretary’s media minders speaks volumes about the government’s stance up to now. It also begs significant questions about the administration’s approach to housing going forward.
The admission (and the look) came in an interview with the Sunday Times trailing the announcement on Monday that developers have six weeks to sign legally binding contracts to repair unsafe buildings or, in effect, lose the ability to build anything else.
As the levelling up secretary told Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News: ‘The people who were responsible for erecting buildings which we now know are unsafe have to pay the costs of making sure those buildings are safe.’
Except that making UK-registered developers liable for fixing the blocks they built themselves via the contracts but for paying to fix other buildings via the Building Safety Levy does not really capture all of those responsible.
As the inquiry has revealed, that list includes just about every part of the construction industry, and especially product manufacturers. Mr Gove’s written statement on Monday does say that contractors and manufacturers are among those whose conduct is being investigated by his department’s Recovery Strategy Unit.
The list now also includes a government that Mr Gove says ‘collectively has to take some responsibility’ (meaning current and previous governments).
Read the rest of this entry »Taxing questions
Posted: November 10, 2022 Filed under: Home ownership, Land, Stamp duty, Tax Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Around £50 billion worth of austerity looks inevitable in next week’s Autumn Statement but it remains to be seen how chancellor Jeremy Hunt will strike the balance between spending cuts and tax rises.
Even if recent reports that suggest he will increase benefits and pensions in line with prices prove to be correct, there are still big questions over local housing allowance (still frozen despite rising rents) and the benefit cap (which will catch thousands more tenants if the thresholds stay frozen) and housing budgets already eroded by inflation look vulnerable to cuts in capital spending.
On tax, the stamp duty cut was one of the few measures proposed in the mini-Budget in September that has survived the demise of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. So far at least.
But there has been very little debate about where the tax burden should really fall, and in particular about the balance between taxes on income and taxes on wealth.
Read the rest of this entry »Johnson’s lame cover version
Posted: June 10, 2022 Filed under: Home ownership, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Mortgages, Right to buy 1 CommentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
How exactly should we take Boris Johnson’s plans to ‘bring back Right to Buy’ and ‘turn Generation Rent into Generation Own’?
Many housing association tenants will welcome the chance to own their own home and private renters may welcome official recognition that they are stuck paying more in rent than for the mortgage they can’t get.
Equally, most social landlords will feel that they have no choice but to take very seriously a major change for housing associations and what could be yet another threat to council housing.
And anyone with even the vaguest interest in seeing more genuinely affordable homes will greet the latest guff about one for one replacements with a groan.
But it’s also very hard not to be cynical about this latest cover version of Margaret Thatcher’s number one from the 1980s. The suspicion is that this is all about a lame duck prime minister having something catchy to announce regardless of how – or even if – it will work out in practice.
Even so it’s impossible not to wonder about the practicalities of a plan to finance mortgages from housing benefit in the middle of a cost of living crisis, with interest rates about to rise at the peak of a housing market bubble that could be about to burst.
And it’s hard not to contrast Boris Johnson’s tired old rhetoric about social tenants on housing benefit being ‘dependent on the state’ with the plans announced just 24 hours earlier for a Social Housing Regulation Bill that will ‘mean more people living in decent, well looked-after homes enjoying the quality of life they deserve’.
Calling the plan ‘benefits to bricks’ looks like trolling of those who have genuinely attempted to find ways to shift subsidy to new homes.
And all of these reactions are subject to the politics of a wounded prime minister desperate to send the right signals to his party after 41 per cent of his own MPs said they have no confidence in him.
Read the rest of this entry »Mind the gaps on building safety
Posted: March 11, 2022 Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Leasehold | Tags: Building Safety Bill Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
Who is guilty, who is innocent and who is merely collateral damage? The answers, when it comes to building safety, are not as simple as it first seems.
Guilt in a legal sense remains to be seen but just about everyone involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower seems to bear some responsibility, starting with the governments that set the building regulations and reaching down via organisations involved in product testing and certification and building control to the companies that supplied the cladding and insulation, the contractor, designers, subcontractors and client.
All of the above plus developers are seen as ‘guilty’ when it comes to the wider building safety crisis while leaseholders are the innocent parties that the government has finally accepted should be protected from the costs.
And yet scratch a little deeper in the debates over the Building Safety Bill and the new approach initiated by Michael Gove and the dividing line between innocent and guilty is not remotely as clear cut as that.
Read the rest of this entry »Johnson, Partygate and manifesto commitments
Posted: January 31, 2022 Filed under: First Homes, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Levelling up | Tags: Boris Johnson Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It’s been just over two years but thanks to Covid-19 it feels like a lifetime ago.
Leaving aside the question of whether he has really delivered on his headline promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ how much of Boris Johnson’s 2019 election manifesto has survived into the post-Coronavirus age?
The question was originally prompted by the outcome of the judicial review over Everyone In. The scheme launched at the start of the pandemic to get rough sleepers off the streets and into hotels within a few days was a great success.
It also signalled that the manifesto promise to ‘end the blight of rough sleeping by the end of the next parliament’ should be well within reach.
Except that, for all that rhetoric, Everyone In morphed from a policy into an initiative with an asterisk attached. From around May 2020, it was no longer a promise but branding for an initiative exhorting local authorities to act without giving them any extra resources.
And then I realised the wider context as we continue the seemingly interminable wait for Sue Gray’s report.
Read the rest of this entry »Parallel scandals
Posted: December 1, 2021 Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold | Tags: Michael Gove Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The building safety and leasehold scandals have run in tandem for some time but the parallels really hit home in parliament this week.
The parallels between the two issues go well beyond the fact that both concern leaseholders and the power imbalance between them and freeholders.
While the government is acting to change things for the future, progress on protecting existing leaseholders and residents of buildings with safety issues has been slow. Ministers have repeatedly promised action only to lament the complexities of the issues involved.
Building safety dominated the initial exchanges in Commons questions on Monday as MP after MP asked Michael Gove about the plight of leaseholders in their constituencies.
The levelling up secretary dropped yet more hints of a series of new measures to tackle the ‘invidious vice’ in which leaseholders are caught that will be announced ‘shortly’, ‘in due course’ and eventually ‘before Christmas’.
Adopting the more aggressive tone towards developers and the construction industry that has marked his approach to the issue since the reshuffle, he said that ‘my Department are looking at every available means to ensure that the burden is lifted from leaseholders’ shoulders and placed where it truly belongs’.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 