The pandemic and wealth inequality
Posted: July 15, 2021 Filed under: Coronavirus, Home ownership, Inequality 1 CommentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
Three numbers from a report published this week sum up the financial impact of the pandemic on households – and housing is at the heart of it.
First, £50,000. That’s the average increase in the wealth per adult of the richest 10 per cent of households, says the report by the Resolution Foundation think tank.
Second, £7,800. The increase in the wealth per adult of households in the fifth decile, those right in the middle of the wealth distribution.
Third, £86. That’s the average gain per adult in the poorest 30 per cent of the population.
In part, these numbers reflect the pattern established in the 1980s and then accelerated after the financial crisis whereby wealth begets wealth.
But they also represent something new: the Resolution Foundation estimates that total household wealth has increased by £900 billion since the start of the pandemic, making the period we have just lived through the first recession since the end of the Second World War in which we have got richer.
Some of that is down to spending less (£125 billion) and getting into less consumer debt (£10 billion) but over 80 per cent of it is due to rising asset prices (£750 billion).
Some of that is driven by rising share values but most of it is due to increases in house prices, which are now up by more than 10 per cent since the start of the pandemic, fuelled in part by the stamp duty holiday.
Read the rest of this entry »Four years of broken promises
Posted: June 16, 2021 Filed under: Construction industry, Fire safety, Housebuilding, Leasehold Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
Four years on from Grenfell and a solution to the fire safety crisis looks further away than ever.
The litany of broken ministerial promises highlighted by Pete Apps in his analysis this week only adds to the impression of abject government failure and of a crisis that continues to escalate faster than its fumbling attempts to tackle it.
From James Brokenshire’s ‘expectation’ of ACM remediation by June 2020 to Lord Greenhalgh’s ‘ambition’ that it should be completed this year, even the programme most directly related to Grenfell keeps slipping into the future.
And despite Theresa May’s pledge that ‘we cannot and will not ask people to live in unsafe homes’ to Boris Johnson’s promise that ‘no leaseholder should have to pay’, thousands are doing and facing exactly that.
In mitigation they could plead that in June 2017 hardly anyone expected things to escalate to the stage where it seems that virtually any residential block built in the last 25 years has come under suspicion.
The public inquiry has rightly concentrated on the causes of the fire and the run-up to that night in June 2017 but it was clear even at the time that the problems went well beyond the refurbishment of one tower block and the actions of one landlord and council.
Evidence revealed at the public inquiry has amplified those wider concerns many times over – but so far the government has not even kept its promises to implement the inquiry’s initial recommendations.
Read the rest of this entry »A not so humble address
Posted: May 27, 2021 Filed under: Fire safety, Home ownership, Planning, Private renting, Section 21 Leave a commentOriginally a column for Inside Housing.
Affordable and safe housing for all’. Who could argue with that?
Pretty much everyone, funnily enough, because this was the title of the housing part of the House of Commons debate on the humble address following the Queen’s Speech.
Catching up with last week’s debate, two things struck me really powerfully: first, just how much politics has been turned on its head; and second just how riddled with contradictions the government’s position on housing really is.
In the post-Brexit and (hopefully) post-Covid world, the more that the blanks in the empty slogan of levelling up are filled up, the clearer the first becomes.
Read the rest of this entry »Facing up to the cladding crisis
Posted: September 7, 2020 Filed under: Construction industry, Fire safety, Leasehold Leave a commentOriginally published on September 7 as a column for Inside Housing.
All through the cladding saga, the government has dragged its feet and resisted spending money before finally being forced to act.
Think back to the way ministers resisted any kind of fund for replacement of Grenfell-style ACM cladding, then insisted private building owners should pay, then denied the need for any help for non-ACM cladding and you see a pattern repeating itself.
It took the government almost a year after Grenfell to announce a £400m fund for the removal of ACM on social housing blocks, almost two years to find £200m for private blocks and almost three years to announce the £1bn Building Safety Fund for the removal of non-ACM cladding.
All this while the cladding scandal continued to escalate, dragging in more and more blocks and more and more residents and eventually wrecking the whole market in recently built flats.
Read the rest of this entry »What help for housing?
Posted: April 23, 2020 Filed under: Coronavirus, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housing market, Private renting, Stamp duty 1 CommentOriginally posted on insidehousing.co.uk on April 23.
An extension of Help to Buy looks likely, a stamp duty holiday probable, but what else should the government do when the housing market eventually emerges from its Coronavirus freeze?
Vested interests are already out in force making their case and can cite the effect of a downturn on housebuilding numbers, the economy and tax receipts in their support.
And if anyone is feeling a sense of déjà vu this is of course pretty much where we were in 2008, when the housing market slumped in the wake of the credit crunch.
Signals from long-delayed debuts for Jenrick and McVey
Posted: January 15, 2020 Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Fire safety, Home ownership, Land, Leasehold, Permitted development, Right to buy 1 CommentOriginally published on January 15 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Robert Jenrick and Esther McVey faced their first parliamentary questions as housing secretary and housing minister on Monday – almost six months after they took up their posts.
The reasons for the remarkable delay to their despatch box debuts – the summer recess, Brexit and the December election – are not hard to guess and are also why housing has slipped down the political agenda in the meantime.
But, give or take the odd appearance in parliamentary debates and in front of select committees, the delay also means that we still have only a fuzzy picture of what they really think about the key issues stacking up in their in-trays.
And it came in the wake of a report in the Daily Mail over the weekend about an apparent clash between the two over where the government should spend its housing cash and which voters they should be targeting.
Jules Birch 