Posted: March 23, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Coronavirus, Homelessness, Local housing allowance, Private renting |
Originally posted on March 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.
It was only last week but already it seems a lifetime ago since BC – Before Coronavirus
With schools closing, London facing lockdown and, who knows, troops on the streets by the weekend, the impact on housing may seem minor by comparison.
But beyond parochial organisational concerns, the situation is critical for millions of people faced with losing their income or their job and wondering if they will lose their home too – and a matter of life and death for those living and working in care homes, extra care and sheltered housing and those who already have no home.
With the government twisting the arms of mortgage lenders to offer payment holidays, help arrived for home owners first. Now it is promising help for renters with emergency legislation to ban private and social landlords from evicting anyone for three months and no new possession proceedings to be allowed during the crisis.
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Posted: February 20, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Home ownership, Homelessness, Planning, Social housing |
The dust has settled on the reshuffle with yet another new housing minister but more significant developments elsewhere.
The replacement of Esther McVey with Chris Pincher, the 10th housing minister to take their turn since 2010, need only detain us long enough to note the reward reaped by the former for resigning in principle from a proper Cabinet job over Brexit and the fact that the latter has lost the ‘attending Cabinet’ status that previously went with being a minister of state.
As Pete Apps noted on Thursday, the resignation of Sajid Javid is much bigger news because it dials down faint hopes that housing will gain in the Budget and Spending Review.
There was no direct evidence that this would actually happen but as a former housing secretary Javid is at least aware of the issues that need to be addressed. Rishi Sunak, the former Treasury chief secretary who steps into his shoes, is an unknown quantity.
More clues can perhaps be gleaned from the appointment of Jack Airey as Boris Johnson’s special advisor on housing and planning. As a former head of housing at Policy Exchange, we can probably expect more on the ‘building beautiful’ agenda and more support for the argument that housing problems all come back to planning.
And, at least in the short term, the most significant appointment in the reshuffle is the re-appointment of Robert Jenrick as housing secretary.
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Posted: February 13, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning, Rough sleeping, Social housing | Tags: Boris Johnson |
Originally published on February 11 on my blog for Inside Housing.
For the moment at least all things seem possible when it comes to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives and housing.
Arguments apparently continue between those who want to shift further towards home ownership and those who see council housing as the focus for blue collar Conservatism.
The party seems to be facing in two opposite directions on new development, with some arguing for planning restrictions to be swept away while others see ‘beauty first’ as the key to winning local consent.
And these are just part of a wider battle between those who see Brexit as a chance to complete the Thatcherite revolution and those who think they must reverse some of it.
As an indication of the breadth of the possibilities, the Sunday Telegraph even reported that Johnson and chancellor Sajid Javid are considering imposing a mansion tax in the Budget.
The symbolism of taxing the well-housed in the South to spend more in the North could not be denied but would they really steal a policy from Ed Miliband’s Labour to screw their own supporters?
The first forks in the road are coming up soon with choices to be made about who will hold key ministerial positions in the reshuffle this week and what will be prioritised in the Spring Budget and in the Spending Review to follow.
In the meantime, though, what might a Boris Johnson housing policy look like?
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Posted: February 6, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Permitted development, Poverty, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Panorama |
Monday night’s Panorama provided a shocking window on the world of temporary accommodation and permitted development – but it also made me think back to an influential think-tank report from a decade ago.
The programme centred on Templefields House, a converted office block in Harlow run by property company Caridon. It provides temporary accommodation for local authorities across the South East but, according to the programme, also has a contract with an ex-offender re-housing charity.
There is no public transport and it’s 40 minutes’ walk from the town centre and, according to residents, the building is also rife with crime, anti-social behaviour and drugs and the police have been called out 600 times in three years.
The building, the company and another converted block it runs in Harlow, Terminus House, have featured in several previous media investigations of temporary accommodation and permitted development. See here, here and here for more details.
What was new in last night’s Panorama was the level of detail from residents and revelations from an undercover reporter.
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Posted: January 10, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Devolution, Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing, Tenants, Tenure change |
Originally published in Inside Housing on January 10.
It was a decade of four elections, four prime ministers and three referenda. It began in the midst of a Global Financial Crisis and ended with the political crisis of Brexit. It was scarred by the disaster at Grenfell Tower.
All but 15 of the 520 weeks in the 2010s had a Conservative prime minister but four different governments brought four different approaches. David Cameron was all about cuts in coalition followed by radical (but mostly failed) marketising reforms once he had elbowed Nick Clegg aside. Theresa May brought a profound change in rhetoric and some significant changes of substance. Boris Johnson shifted the emphasis back to home ownership.
Here is the decade summed up in 10 headings: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 31, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Decarbonisation, Housebuilding, Permitted development, Temporary accommodation, Welfare reform |
Originally published on December 27 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The second part of my look back at 2019 runs from welfare homelessness to decarbonisation via housebuilding and permitted development.
5) ‘The systematic immiseration of millions’
The election result means that universal credit, the benefit cap, the bedroom tax and all the other welfare ‘reforms’ of the last decade are set to continue into the 2020s.
Chancellor Sajid Javid told us in the September spending round that austerity is over but the only hard evidence of this was an extra £40m for discretionary housing payments and previous cuts are still baked in to the system.
The election had delayed a full spending review until 2020 but better news came in November as the Conservative manifesto confirmed an end to the four-year freeze in most working age benefits, including the local housing allowance.
It remains to be seen, though, whether the government will restore the broken link with rents. It’s also worth noting that Esther McVey, the self-styled architect of Blue Collar Conservatism, called for part of housing benefit to be diverted into Help to Buy during her brief tilt at the Tory leadership.
I blogged about the deeper impacts on the housing system in a post from the Housing Studies Association conference in May that highlighted research on the ‘housing trilemma’ facing social landlords between their social mission, business imperatives and the impacts on tenants.
And the same month brought a damning external review from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty that warned of ‘the systematic immiseration of millions’.
Professor Philip Alston noted ‘a striking and complete disconnect’ between the picture painted by ministers and what he had heard and seen from people across the UK.
As for the chief architect of it all, the year finished with the decade summed up in four words: Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
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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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