How ‘temporary’ became permanent
Posted: August 21, 2019 Filed under: Homelessness, Local government, Temporary accommodation, Welfare reform Leave a commentOriginally published on August 21 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Today’s report by the Children’s Commissioner on families in temporary accommodation is a shocking indictment of a system that has become institutionalised into permanence.
If you judge it by the types of building involved – the shipping containers and converted office blocks that make most of this morning’s press coverage – and you have the physical manifestation of what are almost the opposite of ‘homes’.
For all the effort put into finding ‘meanwhile’ sites for containers and despite the fact that some schemes are well designed and that many other forms of temporary accommodation are much worse, just look at the headlines for what the media makes of it.
Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield speaks of containers that are ‘blisteringly hot in summer and freezing in the winter months’ and of ‘homes’ in office blocks converted under permitted development that are barely bigger than a parking space.
The rise and rise of short-term letting
Posted: April 4, 2019 Filed under: Permitted development, Private renting, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Airbnb Leave a commentOriginally published on April 4 as a blog for Inside Housing.
What do you think have been the two fastest-growing forms of housing over the last decade?
The trends since the financial crisis of falling home ownership, declining social renting and surging private renting have only recently shown signs of going into reverse and we’ve also seen the blurring of social and ‘affordable’ housing.
But you would struggle to fit two of the biggest changes highlighted in the 2019 edition of the UK Housing Review (launched on Thursday) into those three traditional categories.
First up is temporary accommodation. The latest stats show there that 82,000 homeless families were living in it in England in the year to June 2018, an increase of 71 per cent since 2011. Of these, 57,000 were in London.
Second is short-term lets through sites like Airbnb. There are no reliable stats on this but the latest data suggests there are now over 77,000 Airbnb listings in London, of which 43,000 are entire homes and 34,000 rooms or shared rooms.
It’s tempting to join the dots between those numbers and see a direct connection between these two forms of short-term letting, especially in London – the more permanent homes that are converted into short-term holiday lets on Airbnb the more temporary accommodation is likely to be needed. Neither of them is necessarily that short term or temporary.
Meanwhile, in other news…
Posted: January 29, 2019 Filed under: Brexit, Homelessness | Tags: James Brokenshire, John Healey, Kit Malthouse Leave a commentOriginally posted on January 29 as a blog for Inside Housing.
In the brief lull between Brexit chaos, the politics of housing just about continues as normal at Westminster.
The first Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) questions of the year was dominated by two all-too-familiar issues (homelessness and fire safety) while the HCLG committee inquiry into reform of the building regulations heard from the main expert and the minister.
First up in the main chamber was what the government is doing to reduce death rates among homeless people, with housing secretary James Brokenshire saying that every death is ‘one too many’.
Given the 597 deaths recorded in 2017, an increase of 24% in five years, his script about £100m for the rough sleeping strategy and £1.2bn for homelessness prevention, let alone £5m for colder weather, did not exactly sound convincing.
Read the rest of this entry »10 things about 2018 – part one
Posted: December 21, 2018 Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Homelessness, Regulation, Rough sleeping, Temporary accommodation, Tenants, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Dominic Raab, James Brokenshire, Kit Malthouse, Philip Alston, Sajid Javid Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on December 21.
It was the year of three housing ministers and two secretaries of states (so far), the year that the department went back to being a ministry and a new government agency promised to ‘disrupt’ the housing market.
It was also the year of the social housing green paper and the end of the borrowing cap, of Sir Oliver Letwin and Lord Porter and of some significant anniversaries.
Above all, it was the year after Grenfell and the year before Brexit. Here is the first of my two-part review of what I was writing about in 2018.
1. New names, new ministers
January had barely begun when the Department for Communities and Local Government became the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government. The name harked back to the glory days when housing was ‘our first social service’ and housing secretary Sajid Javid became the first full member of the cabinet with housing in his title since 1970.
Time to end the freeze
Posted: August 29, 2018 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally published on August 29 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The freeze on the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) is a £1.2 billion question for which the answer seems obvious.
The problems detailed in analysis by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) published on Wednesday are severe and they are getting worse.
LHA rates are midway through a four-year freeze that is the culmination of seven years of austerity. The result is that they have completely lost touch with the rents they were meant to cover.
The CIH analysis shows that 90% of LHA rates now fail to cover the rent of the cheapest 30% of private rented homes (bear in mind that this was itself a cut from the 50th percentile and that LHA was originally designed to enable tenants to ‘shop around’ for cheaper rents).
That leaves tenants facing rent shortfalls that grow larger with each year of austerity: outside London, two out of every three LHA shared accommodation rates have a weekly shortfall of £4 or more and half of other LHA rates are short by £10 or more; in London, the shortfalls for shared accommodation are more than £10 a week in every LHA area and at least £30 for all other homes.
‘Housing week’ off to an uncertain start
Posted: August 13, 2018 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Rough sleeping, Social housing | Tags: James Brokenshire, Rough Sleeping Strategy 1 CommentFor once this is a silly season that has some substance. If you can tear yourself away from the sun lounger or the latest pronouncement by the Etonian Katie Hopkins, mid-August sees a trio of government announcements that are crucial for housing and homelessness.
Last week featured another big benefits u-turn: confirmation that housing benefit will continue for supported accommodation removes a cloud that has been hanging over projects including homeless hostels and women’s refuges.
Monday saw the launch of the strategy that the government says will enable it to meet its target of halving rough sleeping in England by 2022 and ending it by 2027.
And what is billed as ‘housing week’ is set to continue on Tuesday with the launch of the social housing green paper – originally promised in the Spring, then before the parliamentary recess last month, but now appearing while most MPs are on holiday.
The timing does at least ensure some media attention, including an uncertain performance by James Brokenshire in the TV and radio studios on Monday morning.
After a lively appearance on Good Morning Britain, the housing secretary struggled on the Today programme when asked whether government policies are to blame for the relentless rise in rough sleeping and floundered when asked how much of the promised ‘£100 million plan’ is new money. (Somewhere between none and not much was the eventual answer).
