10 things about 2013: part 2
Posted: December 30, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market, Labour market, Planning, Private renting, Wales | Tags: Budget George Osborne, David Cameron Leave a commentHere’s the second part of my look back at the key themes I’ve been blogging about this year.
6) Help to Buy
If the bedroom tax was the subject I blogged about most in 2013 (see Part 1 of this blog), Help to Buy was certainly the best (or worst) of the rest.
The first hints of the scheme came in January as the coalition published its Mid-Term Review. Perhaps conscious of the gap between rhetoric and reality when it came to the government’s record on housing, David Cameron promised more help for people who cannot raise a deposit for a mortgage, with details to come in the Budget. By March Cameron and Clegg were promising what sounded to me like the coalition’s fourth housing strategy in three years. And in the Budget George Osborne duly announced what I called a huge gamble, loosening the targeting of previous schemes at first-time buyers and new homes and extending the help available much further up the income scale.
Taking the pledge
Posted: December 17, 2013 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: Conservative Party, Ed Miliband Leave a commentThe optimist in me hopes that Ed Miliband’s launch of Labour’s independent housing commission marks the start of a political arms race on housing ahead of the next election.
In this scenario, his target of 200,000 homes a year by 2020 and eye-catching policies to achieve it will strengthen the hand of the pro-development wing of the Conservative Party and mean that whoever wins the next election will have a serious crack at tackling the supply crisis.
The pessimist in me worries that I’ve seen little so far that suggests the target is achievable (see Colin Wiles on this last week) and that the two policies that have made the headlines won’t work except in the sense of strengthening the hand of the Tory nimbys.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
City limits
Posted: November 26, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning 1 CommentToday’s Draft London Housing Strategy is the boldest attempt yet seen from a Conservative administration to get to grips with the housing crisis. It still does not go remotely far enough.
In his foreword, mayor Boris Johnson says London is facing an ‘epic challenge’ of building more than 42,000 new homes a year, every year, for 25 years. Of these, 15,000 would be affordable and 5,000 for market rent.
That is no exaggeration. As he goes on to say, that is ‘a level of housebuilding unseen in our great city since the 1930s’. To put it in perspective, the average over the last 20 years, at a time when the population was growing rapidly, was 18,000 per year. London has not come close to 42,000 completions a year since the war, even at the peak of the council housing boom in the late 1960s.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Blaming the planners
Posted: November 11, 2013 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Mortgages, Planning 1 CommentFix planning and you fix supply, fix supply and you fix the housing crisis. That’s the seductive argument that seems to be gaining ground.
My problem with it is not that it’s wrong. There is a dire shortage of new homes: completions are running at around half what’s needed to meet demand. Problems with the planning system can make supply too slow to respond to demand, constrain growth and make the crisis worse. It would be ridiculous to say otherwise.
It’s more that it’s too simple. It takes a kernel of truth and claims that it is the only truth. In its crudest form the argument is that all we have to do is sweep away ‘socialist’ planning and leave it to the market: in the 1930s there was no planning, private housebuilders were building over 250,000 homes a year and homes were affordable; the post-war Labour government required planning permission for new homes and prices have risen steadily higher ever since because the private sector has been unable to build enough homes.
David Cameron and the £720,000 ‘affordable’ home
Posted: November 1, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Planning, Shared ownership Leave a commentA comment on my blog a couple of weeks ago alerted me to a contradiction in terms: a £720,000 ‘affordable’ home.
The two-bedroom flat in Pear Tree Street, Islington appears on the Share to Buy website, the official home of the Mayor of London’s FirstSteps scheme that comes complete with the strapline ‘making housing affordable’. It’s available under a shared ownership, part-rent, part-buy scheme. As Tracy Dover commented: ‘I’d love to know who is eligible for shared ownership and can afford this!’
It can be yours for a £9,000 deposit plus monthly payments of £2,444 for rent, service charge and mortgage. By my calculations that represents around half the take-home pay of a household with the maximum eligible income of £80,000.
Bonus culture
Posted: October 31, 2013 Filed under: Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentSo has what started out as ‘a Rolls Royce idea’ ended up ‘a Reliant Robin policy in practice’?
That’s not me describing the New Homes Bonus but Conservative MP Stewart Jackson. Now a member of the public accounts committee (PAC), he was speaking at an evidence session in June ahead of its report published this morning. He was also a shadow communities minister at the time the bonus became a Conservative flagship policy.
With scepticism like that on the Conservative side it’s little wonder that the PAC has more scathing criticism of the handling of the policy. It follows an embarrassing verdict (for the DLCG) delivered by the National Audit Office (NAO) in March.
2020 vision
Posted: September 24, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentEd Miliband’s conference speech was much vaguer about housing than the advance briefing but it still sounds like good news.
The Labour leader said that ‘we’ll have an aim that at the end of the parliament Britain will be building 200,000 homes a year, more than at any time in a generation’.
He said that in 2010 there were a million too few homes in Britain but that the shortfall would rise to two million – the equivalent of five cities the size of Birmingham – by 2020 if we carry on as we are.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Export market
Posted: September 21, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, Tax Leave a commentWhat price homes for Londoners when new developments are marketed first to overseas investors with a promise that there will be ‘no social housing’?
As The Standard reported yesterday, the ‘fully private’ flats at Capital Towers near the Olympic Park go on sale in Malaysia this weekend in what it dubs a ‘no riff raff row’.
That example comes from a report out today by Darren Johnson, a Green Party London Assembly member, who claims that a third of all buyers of new homes are from overseas and that two-thirds go to investors rather than occupiers.
He accuses mayor Boris Johnson of actively encouraging a process that leads to increasing concentration of housing wealth, a severe social housing shortage and the unnecessary demolition of existing stock and a lifetime of insecure renting for most Londoners.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 