Capital crisis
Posted: February 13, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Homelessness, Housing market Leave a commentThe scale of the housing crisis facing London is hitting home with both Londoners and their political leaders.
In an opinion poll in the Evening Standard published today, half of people in the city say they fear being driven out of their neighbourhood by the cost of housing and six out of ten say there is a crisis in their area.
At one end of the housing scale, soaring demand from global investors is threatening to push house prices even further out of reach of ordinary Londoners. According to a report yesterday from the Home Builders Federation, it now takes the average first-time buyer 24 years to raise a deposit in London.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
No hiding place
Posted: December 13, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Welfare reform Leave a commentA combination of the recession, welfare reform and localism is set to generate increases in almost all forms of homelessness in England, according to comprehensive new analysis.
Homelessness Monitor: England 2012 published yesterday by Crisis is the full version of an academic study from which headline findings were released last week (equivalents will also be published for Wales and Scotland). It draws together evidence not only on what we normally think of as homelessness – rough sleeping and homeless acceptances – but also more hidden forms too such as concealed households, sharing and overcrowding.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
End of her tether
Posted: November 18, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Welfare reform Leave a commentSarah Teather’s outburst over the benefit cap is one of the most remarkable attacks on a government by a former minister in years.
Yes, the coalition makes this an unusual situation and this is a Lib Dem attacking a policy that was originally announced at the Conservative conference. Yes, this is an MP with a marginal seat with 2,000 families who stand to lose at least £50 a week and she needs anti-Tory votes to keep it. Yes, she had already signalled her attitude to the cap when she infuriated the Conservatives by missing a key vote in parliament.
However, there are three other things that make this something more significant than just revenge by someone who was sacked.
The Spanish mortgage crisis as an Almodóvar film
Posted: November 13, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Mortgages Leave a commentI’ve just been reading about the horrific suicide of a 53-year-old woman in the Bilbao suburb of Barakaldo, who jumped to her death from her fourth floor flat as court officials arrived to evict her.
As UK newspapers are reporting this morning (see FT and Guardian), this is the second repossession-related suicide in Spain in the last two weeks. Prime minister Mariano Ragoy has pledged to support struggling families but is under attack from the opposition for rescuing the banks while imposing austerity on the people. The Association of Spanish Banks has said it will call for a freeze on evictions of ‘vulnerable homeowners’ for two years.
This piece about evictions by the Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar appears on the Spanish and French websites of the Huffington Post – but not so far on the UK site. Here is my rough translation of what begins as though we are seeing scenes from a film that juxtaposes what happened in Bilbao with what I think is the memorial service in Madrid for four teenagers killed in a stampede at a party at the Madrid Arena on November 1. That is followed by the first part of Almodóvar’s main piece.
Regime change
Posted: November 9, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Welfare reform Leave a commentAnyone applying to their local authority as homeless faces a new regime from today and there are real doubts about how it will work on the ground.
The new power for local authorities to discharge their duty to homeless people into the private rented sector represents a fundamental break with the system established in the Housng (Homeless Persons) Act in 1977.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Caps, cuts and moving home
Posted: November 8, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting 2 CommentsDonald Rumsfeld would call it an unknown unknown: how many people will be forced to move miles away from home as a result of the government’s housing and welfare reforms?
As a new law allowing local authorities to discharge their duty to homeless people into the private rented sector comes into force from this Friday (November 9) and the countdown continues to sweeping cuts in benefit from April 2013, it’s a question that will be asked over and over again.
April is the cruellest month
Posted: November 5, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Tags: council tax benefit, welfare changes Leave a commentEvery time you think you have got your head around the impact of the April 2013 welfare changes you realise you have forgotten something that makes it even worse.
I don’t need reminding that there are now just 147 days until the bedroom tax and overall benefit cap take affect. I know that increases in the local housing allowance will be restricted to CPI inflation from the same date. I realise that a range of other cuts in benefits and the localisation of council tax benefit and the social fund with reduced funding come in at the same time.
Jules Birch 