Home front
Posted: September 10, 2014 Filed under: Garden cities, Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentWith eight months to go until the general election the battle to influence the manifestos has begun in earnest.
Party conference season begins with Labour on September 21 but organisations from across the housing spectrum have been publishing manifestos of their own in a bid to reach the politicians.
Conservative Home (see my blog here) was early out of the blocks but the influential Tory website has been followed by the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) and Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in the last week. The Fabian Society has just published a report last week on the ‘silent majority’ in favour of more social housing. The National Housing Federation (NHF) is set to reveal its election plans at its conference next week.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Falling short
Posted: August 21, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding Leave a commentToday’s housebuilding figures show welcome progress but four years after taking power the coalition is still many miles away from matching its bold promises.
The good news is that starts in the second quarter (April to June) of 2014 were up 18 per cent on a year ago. Completions are up 7 per cent on the same basis. The UK as a whole is also identified as the housing market with the fastest growth in starts in 2013 in a report by Deloitte Real Estate.
But as everyone is pointing out today the 114,590 homes completed over the last 12 months is still less than half the benchmark of 250,000 that we need to meet demand. Even when the 137,620 starts over the last year feed through into completions we will still be well short.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Crisis? Quelle crise?
Posted: August 20, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Private renting, Regulation Leave a commentThe French housing market is ‘in meltdown’ after housing starts plunged to the crisis level of double what we are managing on this side of the Channel.
President Francois Hollande reconvenes his Cabinet today after returning from holiday with ministers working on a recovery package topped by measures to stimulate the construction industry.
Syria rather than housebuilding may be the reason why David Cameron cut short his holiday in Cornwall but the economic mood here could hardly be more different. House prices are up 10.2 per cent in the last year and ministers claim that their ‘long-term economic plan is getting Britain building again’.
There are no prizes for guessing which of the two countries saw 306,654 housing starts in the year to June and which will be lucky to manage 160,000 over the same period.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Going the extra mile
Posted: August 4, 2014 Filed under: Garden cities, Housebuilding Leave a commentHow far should the government go to buy off local opposition to new garden cities?
Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said over the weekend that ministers would consider options including council tax reductions and house price guarantees to ensure that local communities do not lose out. He told the BBC’s Countryfile programme (watch from about eight minutes in): ‘What I’m saying is we’re actively looking at things like that to show that we will go the extra mile to allay those concerns of people who feel that their property, or the price of their home, might be affected. We don’t want people to lose out.’
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Welcome shift
Posted: July 29, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentPeople seem to be getting the ‘Yes to Homes’ message at last but have the nimbys really had their day?
A survey of public attitudes to new housebuilding published by the DCLG on Saturday reveals a welcome shift when people are asked whether they support or oppose more homes being built in their local area.
New housing and planning minister Brandon Lewis welcomed the results as evidence that nimbyism is on the wane.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Closed doors
Posted: July 28, 2014 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, London, Planning | Tags: New York City Leave a commentWhat is it about a ‘poor door’ that causes so much outrage?
The term has captured something on both sides of the Atlantic: first on an exclusive development in New York City last year and then applied to agrowing trend in London reported in Saturday’s Guardian.
The London building at the centre of that story – One Commerical Street on the eastern fringes of the City – was the same one that I blogged about last year when it was chosen by chancellor George Osborne as the venue for his speech arguing that the economy was ‘turning the corner’.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Shuffling the deck
Posted: July 16, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Civil service, Housebuilding, Planning, Universal credit | Tags: Brandon Lewis, Eric Pickles, Iain Duncan Smith Leave a commentSo housing seems to have kept the politicians who should have gone and lost the one who was making a difference.
Speculation ahead of the reshuffle suggested that Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith would leave their posts as part of the cull of middle aged men in the Cabinet. True, some of the stories seemed a bit thin (a woman with a posh accent overheard talking on the phone didn’t seem like much to go on) but I lived in hope. I also looked forward to the DWP press release arguing that it proved that universal credit is ‘on track and on schedule’.
Instead it’s business as usual at the top of their two departments with a shake-up lower down the ministerial scale. After just over nine months in the job, Kris Hopkins is now the former housing minister and is shunted sideways into local government. Brandon Lewis moves from that job and gets a promotion to minister of state for housing and planning. Penny Mordaunt comes in as junior minister responsible for coastal communities.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Dead air
Posted: June 12, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Private renting 1 CommentThere was a telling moment at the end of last night’s Radio 4 debate on housing: the sound of complete silence from the audience.
The dead air came in response to a question from presenter Mark Easton asking people at the debate at the London School of Economics (LSE) how many of them think our political leaders are doing their best to solve the housing crisis.
But I am not sure if what sounded like mostly a young audience was tremendously impressed by the answers from the panel either and that may have been down to the way the question was framed in Housing: Where Will We All Live?
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Gardeners’ question time
Posted: June 10, 2014 Filed under: Garden cities, Housebuilding, Planning, Transport | Tags: garden cities, Wolfson Economics Prize Leave a commentJust about everyone agrees that we need to build new garden cities – but that’s the easy bit. What comes next?
I’ve just been looking at the five entries shortlisted last week for the Wolfson Economics Prize. There were 274 other entries, which may be a product of the £250,000 on offer to the winner but also reflects an idea whose time has come (again). There now seems to be a remarkable acceptance right across the political spectrum that garden cities are an important part of the solution to the housing crisis (even though the prize itself is put up by a Conservative peer and administered by Policy Exchange).
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But what is a garden city? Should we build new Letchworths or Welwyns in a 21st century fulfilment of Ebenezer Howard’s vision pictured above? Is it a vaguer commitment to sustainable development? Or it is more of a marketing term and a signal of what it is not for Conservatives (a new town or, even worse, an eco-town)?
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Zero sums
Posted: June 4, 2014 Filed under: Energy efficiency, Environment, Housebuilding | Tags: zero carbon 1 CommentMinisters once promised that Britain would lead the world on zero carbon homes. Do we now just lead the world in hot air?
The 2016 target for all new homes to be zero carbon seemed genuinely revolutionary when Gordon Brown and housing minister Yvette Cooper first announced it in 2006. Questions about practicalities and costs were brushed aside as they argued that the target would spark the mass adoption of new technologies, drive down costs and even open up vast new export markets for British firms. As Cooper put it at the time:
‘In 10 years, all new homes should be built at a zero carbon rating. No other country has set that sort of timetable or ambition but I believe that we need to do it to drive the environmental technologies of the future and ensure that we are building the homes of the future.’
Eight years, and six housing ministers, later and today’s Queen’s Speech promises that ‘legislation will allow for the creation of an allowable solutions scheme to enable all new homes to be built to a zero carbon standard’. So far, so good. The Liberal Democrats even reached back to the days of Brown and Cooper with their claim on Monday of ‘Britain to lead world on zero carbon homes’. Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 