Plus points

Posted: July 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Private renting | Leave a comment

This blog has a tendency to be negative at times so I’ve been trying to accentuate the positive ahead of the announcement on housebuilding expected later this week.

The good news is that the government is definitely taking housing seriously. Peter Schofield, director-general of the DCLG, confessed at the CIH conference last month that the Treasury had barely considered housing when it drew up its original plan for growth last year. In the run-up to the growth plan mark 2 and publication of the Montague report on the private rented sector, I’m told that David Cameron has been making the point that ‘all roads lead back to housing’ while Nick Clegg was using housing to rally his party faithful over the weekend at the Social Liberal Forum.

Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.

QED

Posted: July 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Housebuilding | 2 Comments

As the Bank of England unleashes another £50 billion into the economy is it time at last to use quantitative easing in a way that will boost the economy and tackle the housing crisis at the same time?

I’ve made the case for QE for housing for several months now (see here, here and here) and it’s been made in much more detail by my fellow blogger Brian Green of Brickonomics here, here and here.

In essence, the idea is that the government should set up a not-for-profit public interest company with a remit to fund house building. The Bank of England would use £50 billion of housing QE to buy bonds in the company to fund the construction of homes and associated infrastructure and the bonds would be repaid from the rental and eventual sale of the homes.

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Big ideas

Posted: June 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Planning, Private renting, Social housing | Leave a comment

A radical new report out today challenges almost 40 years of orthodoxy about how we subsidise housing – and much more besides.

The think-tank Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says it’s time to reverse the shift from bricks and mortar to personal subsidies that began in the 1970s and get back to building homes rather than subsidising rents.

It’s far from the only big idea in the report, which is part of the IPPR’s fundamental review of housing policy, but it is the most eye-catching. In the current spending review period we are spending £94 billon on housing benefit but only £4.5 billion on building new affordable homes. Is there a better way?

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Mind the gap

Posted: June 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Poverty, Social housing | Leave a comment

Everywhere I’ve been in Manchester this week it’s hard to avoid falling into the gap between good intentions and cold reality.

It’s there in the underlying theme of the CIH conference (a decade of sector-led solutions) and attempts to find ways forward under continuing austerity as outside the conference chamber the underlying problems just keep getting worse.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.

Easing does it?

Posted: May 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing finance | Leave a comment

There’s been a real change in the way the government is talking about housing investment over the last week. Is it just talk or more than that?

Several days out of news and twitter contact have left me catching up with what seems a noticeable change in tone from the Lib Dem side of the government.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Starter’s orders

Posted: May 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding | 2 Comments

Grant Shapps has predictably had a go but it’s hard to see the housebuilding figures out today as anything other than awful.

The housing minister tweeted that housing starts in 2011 were up 29 per cent on 2009. Curiously, though, he did not mention the figures that had just been published for the first quarter of 2012.

Read the rest of this post on my blog for Inside Housing.

Going Dutch

Posted: May 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Self-build, Social housing | Leave a comment

Here’s hoping that Grant Shapps found a bit more to do in the Netherlands on Monday than enthuse about self-build and get Kevin McCloud’s autograph.

The housing minister and the Grand Designs presenter were part of a UK housing delegation visiting Europe’s largest self-build project at Almere. There was also an event at the British Embassy aimed at boosting trade and business links.

They were clearly impressed by what’s happening and with good reason. There are more than 800 homes at Almere that people have built for around €50,000 less than the same property would cost in the commercial sector. Imagine something similar in Britain backed with planning reforms and help with finance and what Shapps is saying about the sector doubling in size starts to make sense (even if I wish he wouldn’t keep repeating the same announcements). If, as the minister told us two weeks ago, the future’s bright, it seems the future is orange too.

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Beyond our Ken

Posted: May 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Housing market | 5 Comments

In the wake of the local election results it would be easy to conclude that housing does not count as a political issue. Easy but wrong.

Londoners elected the one candidate for mayor (Boris Johnson) who was promising to do least with new powers on housing (though he did at least pledge to create Homes for London). Voters in cities other than Bristol rejected the chance to have an elected mayor who could be in a position to demand the same and to take a strategic view of housing in their area.

And one of the gurus of opinion polling, Ben Page of Ipsos Mori, had this to say in a blog for Shelter last week:

‘Sadly this is one of those issues where there does not appear to be any happy ending anytime soon – and certainly not due to any election outcome in the UK. For organisations like Shelter, the challenge is to re-frame and re-articulate housing as the kind of mass issue that gets high profile coverage in an election campaign. And that is no mean feat.’

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Vampire diaries

Posted: May 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing finance, Private renting, Social housing | Leave a comment

The maths involved in the CLG committee’s new report on the financing of new housing supply is depressingly simple.

Add newly arising need to cope with population growth (232,000 homes a year on the latest estimate) to the backlog of existing need (1.99 million households in 2009), then take away the completions in 2011 (109,000) and you are left with a huge gap in provision. Even if private housebuilders succeed in increasing their output from last year’s miserable 82,000 to the maximum they managed over the last 20 years of 150,000 (a very big if) the gap will still be huge and the backlog will still be growing.

Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.

Stat attack

Posted: May 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Private renting | Leave a comment

It’s Communities and Local Government questions – so it must time for a barrage of contradictory statistics.

I’ve grown used to the trading of numerical insults every few weeks between coalition and opposition over the last year or so. But would a week in which politics has been dominated by a stat (the 0.2 per cent fall in GDP that means the UK is in a double dip recession) make any difference?

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.

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