Posted: July 3, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing associations, Housing market |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Kylie Minogue is riding high in the charts, Frankie Dettori wins the Ascot Gold Cup and the housing market looks to be in deep trouble.
In 1992, as in 2023, the more some things change, the more they stay the same.
Part 1 of this column looked at the similarities and the differences between the situation now and 30 years ago. This second part looks at the potential consequences for the housing system as a whole and what the government can do about it.
Arrears and repossessions: This is the issue burnt into the collective memory from the crash of the early 1990s, with repossessions peaking at 75,000 in 1992 and more than 400,000 owners losing their home in the decade as a whole.
The political impact was huge: the economic doom and gloom may well have contributed to the surprise Conservative victory at the general election in April 1992 but Black Wednesday that September ruined the party’s reputation for economic competence for years to come.
Partly thanks to that experience, and the losses made by lenders then, we are going into this downturn with arrears around half and repossessions about a quarter of the level at the equivalent stage in the 1990s cycle when prices were just beginning to fall.
A repeat currently looks unlikely unless we see second-round effects of sustained rate rises including a recession and large-scale job losses – but the odds on those are shortening.
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Posted: June 13, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Cost of living, Council housing, Housing associations, Housing finance, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For as long as I can remember the social housing business model seems to have been at a turning point.
From private finance to stock transfer, from affordable rent to welfare reform and from austerity to the rent cut, the policy changes have kept coming against a wider backdrop of financial crisis, Grenfell, Covid, Rochdale and the cost of living crisis.
For years it’s seemed that something has to give – until it does and landlords have to do more with less and tenants get less for more and apparent turning points become spinning in ever-decreasing circles.
This time around, though, you really get the sense that things can’t simply continue as they are and as they have been.
That was what came across quite powerfully both from this week’s first hearing of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee’s inquiry into the finances and sustainability if the social housing sector and from the written evidence submitted in advance. The inquiry continues with a new set of witnesses on Monday.
This is not just about the impossibility of squaring the circle between competing priorities, of continuing to deliver new homes at the same time as fixing unsafe buildings, regenerating ageing estates and decarbonising existing homes.
And it’s no longer just about doing more with less either. The return of inflation, and even larger increases in construction prices, mean delivering the same with much less.
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Posted: April 12, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Planning, Regulation, Social housing, Tenants |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If it’s broken, who broke it? If there were mistakes and errors, who made them?
It was quite an Easter week for Michael Gove as he moved into confessional mode first in a think tank report and then in a Today programme interview.
‘That the current housing model– from supply to standards and the mortgage market – is broken, we can all agree,’ the housing secretary wrote in an introduction to the report from Bright Blue and Shelter. ‘That change is necessary is undeniable. We are bringing about change – and we are determined to see it through.’
And, asked on the Today programme on Thursday (listen from 08:12), if he had gone through ‘an awakening’ on housing, he said that: ‘The thing that affected me most was the Grenfell fire. What the Grenfell inquiry, in particular, has subsequently brought to light were a chain of errors. I’m very happy to reiterate that there were some mistakes and errors that were made not just by the coalition government but by governments before which contributed to social tenants not getting the support that they deserve, not having their voices heard. And so change had to come and we are delivering that change.’
Note that Mr Gove leaves us with the same key message: others made the mistakes that broke the housing model and now he is here to fix things.
Some of what he’s saying is quite true – he has reversed much of the deregulation of the past – but the interview still begged more questions.
What exactly was he admitting to – and how much of the blame was he really taking for himself and his Conservative colleagues?
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Posted: December 13, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Regulation, Social housing | Tags: Better Social Housing Review |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
At first glance there is nothing especially radical about the Better Social Housing Review – as the independent panel says, ‘there is nothing revelatory in our findings’ and ‘it may seem to housing associations that our recommendations are already central to their approach’.
And indeed much of what the review commissioned by the National Housing Federation and Chartered Institute of Housing says about engaging tenants, improving repairs services, handling complaints better and tackling stigma and discrimination are things that landlords could, and should, already be doing.
But take a second look and the key messages about organisations focussing on their core purpose and about it being ‘time to get back to basics’ are profoundly radical. They represent a challenge to the way that the sector has developed in the three decades since housing associations became the alternative to what the Conservative government called the ‘municipal monopoly’.
Because that same government was also making associations the vehicle for private finance and stock transfer and steadily squeezing the grant rate for new development to encourage them to ‘sweat their assets’.
That drive for ever greater efficiency and value for money worked in the sense that it delivered more new homes for less public money but it also created a remorseless logic for merger and the creation of landlords that became even bigger than the giant council housing departments of the past.
And that was only reinforced by regulatory changes in 2010 that overwhelmingly prioritised financial concerns over consumer ones and encouraged landlords to focus accordingly.
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Posted: September 5, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Energy efficiency, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Private renting, Rents, Social housing, Tenants |
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.
The rent cap proposed for social housing may not have come as a huge surprise but the consequences will play out in very different ways for different parties.
It says it all about the cost of living crisis that whether rents are capped or not could be well down social tenants’ list of worries over the next few months.
The energy price cap has already almost doubled in the last 12 months to £1,971 a year. Next month that will rise to £3,549 and the worst forecasts suggest that could double again by next April unless the new government takes radical action.
Effectively, therefore, tenants in social housing could be paying double rent next year unless they take drastic steps to cut their bills.
But many are already doing this and finding that even turning the boiler off does not go far enough – they may be asking why the consultation does not include an option to freeze rents.
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Posted: June 10, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Home ownership, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Mortgages, Right to buy |
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.
How exactly should we take Boris Johnson’s plans to ‘bring back Right to Buy’ and ‘turn Generation Rent into Generation Own’?
Many housing association tenants will welcome the chance to own their own home and private renters may welcome official recognition that they are stuck paying more in rent than for the mortgage they can’t get.
Equally, most social landlords will feel that they have no choice but to take very seriously a major change for housing associations and what could be yet another threat to council housing.
And anyone with even the vaguest interest in seeing more genuinely affordable homes will greet the latest guff about one for one replacements with a groan.
But it’s also very hard not to be cynical about this latest cover version of Margaret Thatcher’s number one from the 1980s. The suspicion is that this is all about a lame duck prime minister having something catchy to announce regardless of how – or even if – it will work out in practice.
Even so it’s impossible not to wonder about the practicalities of a plan to finance mortgages from housing benefit in the middle of a cost of living crisis, with interest rates about to rise at the peak of a housing market bubble that could be about to burst.
And it’s hard not to contrast Boris Johnson’s tired old rhetoric about social tenants on housing benefit being ‘dependent on the state’ with the plans announced just 24 hours earlier for a Social Housing Regulation Bill that will ‘mean more people living in decent, well looked-after homes enjoying the quality of life they deserve’.
Calling the plan ‘benefits to bricks’ looks like trolling of those who have genuinely attempted to find ways to shift subsidy to new homes.
And all of these reactions are subject to the politics of a wounded prime minister desperate to send the right signals to his party after 41 per cent of his own MPs said they have no confidence in him.
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Posted: May 3, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Housing benefit, Right to buy |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It is the idea that is so superficially attractive that Conservatives cannot help forgetting all the other times it proved to be hopelessly impractical.
In a story helpfully briefed to the Telegraph a few days before the local elections, Boris Johnson is planning to ‘bring back Right to Buy’.
The prime minister has reportedly ordered officials to draw up plans to give the Right to Buy to housing association tenants ‘in a major shake-up inspired by Margaret Thatcher’.
Coming just over a week after levelling up secretary Michael Gove appealed to ‘Thatcher worshipping’ Tories to want more homes for social rent, the timing does not look like a total coincidence.
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Posted: March 11, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Leasehold | Tags: Building Safety Bill |
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.
Who is guilty, who is innocent and who is merely collateral damage? The answers, when it comes to building safety, are not as simple as it first seems.
Guilt in a legal sense remains to be seen but just about everyone involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower seems to bear some responsibility, starting with the governments that set the building regulations and reaching down via organisations involved in product testing and certification and building control to the companies that supplied the cladding and insulation, the contractor, designers, subcontractors and client.
All of the above plus developers are seen as ‘guilty’ when it comes to the wider building safety crisis while leaseholders are the innocent parties that the government has finally accepted should be protected from the costs.
And yet scratch a little deeper in the debates over the Building Safety Bill and the new approach initiated by Michael Gove and the dividing line between innocent and guilty is not remotely as clear cut as that.
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Posted: June 15, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Financialisation, Housing associations, Social housing |
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on June 15.
The borderline between the social and the private has been blurring for decades for housing associations.
Ever since private finance was introduced in 1988, they have been free (or forced) to match grant with borrowing in the knowledge that higher rents would mostly be covered by housing benefit.
If it’s always been something of a Faustian pact with governments intent on reducing public spending and lenders focussed on the bottom line, there have been undoubted benefits not just in terms of homes delivered in the short term but also surpluses reinvested and major social businesses developed for the long term.
But the question has always been whether and when the housing Dr Faustus would have to deliver on the price of the pact.
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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 »
Jules Birch 