Budget leaves big gaps to be filled
Posted: November 27, 2025 Filed under: Benefit cap, Budget, Housebuilding, Local housing allowance, Rents Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Even if it had not been leaked in advance, this Budget could have been defined as much by what was not in it as what was.
The astonishing mistake made by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in uploading a report containing all the key measures before chancellor Rachel Reeves had started speaking came after weeks of well-sourced stories about them.
We already knew the headline measures: the abolition of the two-child limit; a council tax surcharge on high-value homes; and freezing income tax thresholds.
They were joined on the day by a private landlord tax (higher rates of income tax on income from property), confirmation of more money for the Warm Homes Plan and a welcome move to tackle the ‘benefit trap’ facing tenants in supported and temporary accommodation.
But the Budget delayed one of the decisions most eagerly awaited by social landlords: they will now have to wait until January for the government’s final decision on rent convergence, in effect how quickly they can increase their lowest rents above the CPI plus 1 per cent limit.
Three months on from the consultation closing, the Budget background document explains that: ‘While the government remains committed to implementing social rent convergence, it is important to take the time to get the precise details right, taking account of the benefits to the supply and quality of social and affordable housing, the impact on rent payers and affordability.’
And there was no mention at all of the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) freeze, perhaps the housing issue raised by more organisations than anything else in the run-up to the Budget.
Read the rest of this entry »Autumn Statement brings good news (for now) on LHA
Posted: November 23, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing, Local housing allowance, Permitted development, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Autumn Statement Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The good news in Jeremy Hunt’s speech is that the government has finally listened to all the arguments about soaring rents, evictions and homelessness and Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates will be linked to private rents again from next April.
The bad news buried in the background documents to his Autumn Statement is that rates will be frozen again for the four years after that, recreating the shortfalls between housing benefit and rents for tenants and generating all the costs of homelessness that led to the lifting of the freeze in the first place.
It’s not much of a way to run a benefits system or a housing system but it is entirely in keeping with an Autumn Statement characterised by even more smoke and mirrors than a usual Budget.
That’s amply demonstrated by the most headline-grabbing measure: the cut in National Insurance will not actually mean a tax cut for households hit by a continued freeze in the thresholds for income tax, although it does at least benefit workers (who pay NI and income tax) rather than landlords and shareholders (who only pay income tax).
And the cuts in NI and business tax are made possible in the first place by more sleight of hand: as the accompanying report from the Office for Budget Responsibility reveals, they only add up thanks to unfeasibly large cuts in public services and a freeze (aka significant real terms cut) in capital spending after the next election.
Needless to say that leaves next to no room for investment in new social homes or the decarbonisation of the existing stock even though the real value of both continues to be squeezed by inflation.
Instead, beneath the surface of the statement, there are signs of a desperate search for policies that are not affected by the squeeze on public spending.
Read the rest of this entry »State of the housing nation
Posted: March 28, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing, Bed and breakfast, Local housing allowance, Social housing | Tags: UK Housing Review Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
So where next? The publication of the UK Housing Review this week is a chance to take stock and ask where the housing system may be heading.
The sense is one of considerable flux, for home ownership as the housing market downturn continues, for private renting as the momentum behind increased regulation grows and for social housing as landlords face competing demands for scarce resources.
The paralysis of policy signalled by a Budget that mostly ignored housing could be just a temporary lull ahead of a UK general election.
As ever, the review puts all that into context. For starters, John Perry’s chapter on housing expenditure shows where total government support (in grants, loans and guarantees) for housing is going. The balance between the private market (59 per cent) and affordable housing (41 per cent) may not be quite as skewed as it was in the heyday of Help to Buy but it is still tilted in one direction.
The good news is that public spending on affordable homes has risen in real terms since the dark days of the coalition government. Investment under three Affordable Homes Programmes is set to peak this year – but the looming cliff edge is an indication of the big decisions that lie ahead:
Current spending plans (as in the Budget) rely on eye-watering (and unrealistic) austerity after the next election so that they comply with the chancellor’s fiscal rules. Key decisions lie ahead in the spending review after the next election regardless of who wins.
What is getting built is also skewed. There were 59,175 affordable housing completions in England in 2021/22, the highest for 11 years. However, more than 20,000 of those were for affordable home ownership and 28,000 for affordable rent, leaving just 7,528 for social rent (plus another 3,080 for similar London Affordable Rent).
Contrast that with Scotland, which managed 9,757 affordable completions in 2021/22 including almost as many social rent homes (7,306) despite having a population about a tenth of England’s.
Read the rest of this entry »Budget leaves housing frozen out
Posted: March 15, 2023 Filed under: Budget, Devolution, Energy efficiency, Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
In a Budget where everything had to begin with E there was little hope for housing.
Neither Rishi Sunak’s economic priorities nor Jeremy Hunt’s e-list (enterprise, employment, education and everywhere) left much room for an issue on which the Conservatives appear to have given up.
On energy, there was good news for tenants on pre-payment meters and for everyone with the extension of the price guarantee.
However, there was no more support for a policy that would do more than anything else to reduce dependence on unreliable overseas energy supplies and Vladimir Putin.
Investment in the decarbonisation of existing homes would cut energy demand at the same time as it cut carbon emissions and bills for tenants and home owners and delivered on the government’s new priority of energy security.
Energy efficiency even begins with the right letters but that either counts as a double negative or was quietly forgotten.
Read the rest of this entry »Waiting for renter reform
Posted: February 9, 2023 Filed under: Local housing allowance, Private renting, Section 21 Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Take your pick. Section 21, housing benefit, tax, net zero, standards, Covid, the courts, mortgage rates, tenants.
All of them reasons why there will be an exodus of landlords and homes from the private rented sector if you believe what you read in certain newspapers. All of them are one more nail in the coffin of buy to let.
One or more of those reasons will be quoted in every article about landlords selling up but, though there may be an element of truth to some of them, few will stop to point out that the party lasted for years. I don’t remember many landlords cutting their rents when mortgage rates fell to record lows after 2009 or complaining about the capital gains they’ve made since.
What matters, as MPs on the all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee points out in a report published today [Thursday] is who buys the homes that landlords are selling.
Properties sold to another private landlord, or perhaps to a local authority or social landlord, are still available for rent. Those sold into owner-occupation will reduce demand for rentals if the new owner was previously a renter.
The really damaging destination is when homes for rent are sold, or converted, into short-term holiday lets and that means that the Westminster government must go further than tentative plans for registration.
That’s a powerful reminder that reforming the private rented sector is about much more than ‘greedy landlords’ or a ‘war on buy to let’ and that any new system has to balance different interests and demand from different groups for decent homes to rent.
Read the rest of this entry »Action for now, solutions not yet
Posted: May 26, 2022 Filed under: Benefit cap, Cost of living, Energy efficiency, Local housing allowance Leave a commentThe £15 billion energy cost support package announced by Rishi Sunak rightly benefits the poorest households most but it remains to be seen what it will do about the cost of living in general and the cost of housing in particular.
Under the package announced by the chancellor on Thursday, 8 million households on benefits will get a one-off payment of £650 paid in two lump sums in July and the Autumn. Add that to the £400 energy support payment (rather than a loan) that will go to everyone and the £150 payment already made (at least in theory) to those in Bands A-D for the council tax, and the Treasury says this amounts to £1,200 help towards the cost of living for the most vulnerable.
Background documents confirm the one-off payment will not count towards the benefit cap, unlike the £20 a week uplift to universal credit during the pandemic. That should avoid many more households seeing the help disappear as fast as it arrives.
Sunak had been under pressure to do more on benefits not just because of energy costs but also because of the large gap between the 3.1 per cent uprating of benefits in April (based on last September’s inflation rate) and the current 9 per cent rate of CPI inflation.
He said his one-off payment would be worth more than bringing forward next year’s uprating of benefits, as some had suggested.
And he also confirmed that the April 2023 uprating will be based on next September’s inflation rate, which could easily be more than 10 per cent, rather than retaining the option of declaring it to be unaffordable.
So far, so good, then and this is probably the package that the chancellor should have delivered in a Spring Statementthat looked inadequate at the time and has seemed even weeker with each passing week. This package looks to be both more generous and more redistributive than many people were expecting.
However, that also reflects the scale of the cost of living crisis. Add the £800 increase in the energy price cap expected in October to the £700 increase already seen in April and that is already more than the chancellor’s £1,200 for the most vulnerable and that is before you get to large increases in the price of food, fuel and other essentials.
And there was one major cost that was as absent from Sunak’s statement this week as it was from the one he made in March and the Queen’s Speech earlier this month. No prizes for guessing it must be housing.
Read the rest of this entry »The political choices on homelessness
Posted: February 28, 2022 Filed under: Homelessness, Local housing allowance, Universal credit Leave a commentEveryone In was one of the few success stories in housing policy this century but all that progress in tackling homelessness is about to go into reverse.
The stark warning in the latest Homelessness Monitor for England from Crisis is that levels of core homelessness will have gone up by a third between 2019 and 2024 if nothing changes.
If the reasons for the forecast are not hard to guess, the contrast with the progress made at the start of the pandemic when 37,000 people sleeping rough or at risk of doing so were given accommodation makes this even more depressing. So too the contrast between England and the continuing ambitions of devolved governments elsewhere in Britain to end homelessness altogether.
Rough sleeping was down 33 per cent and sofa surfing down 11 per cent in England in 2020 after that extraordinary initial effort under Everyone In but it soon morphed from a policy into branding for an initiative.
The result was that core homelessness (which means the most acute forms of homelessness including rough sleeping, sofa surfing and being in temporary accommodation) was also down 5 per cent on 2019 levels at 203,400 in 2020.
The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, another success story, also helped single homeless households, although the report points to weaknesses including continued lack of entitlement to accommodation for some groups (another issue being addressed elsewhere but not England).
So the good news is that the pandemic saw a welcome interruption in the upward trend in homelessness since 2012.
That’s backed up by the latest figures published this week showing that the number of rough sleepers fell for the fourth year in a row in the government’s latest annual snapshot survey – and by the repeal of the Vagrancy Act.
The bad news is that most of the support introduced during the pandemic has since been reversed, with the uplift withdrawn, LHA rates refrozen despite rising rents and mounting concern that evictions could rise sharply in 2022.
Read the rest of this entry »Benefit cap surge is a warning of worse to come
Posted: August 7, 2020 Filed under: Benefit cap, Coronavirus, Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on August 7.
Step away from planning reform for a few moments and grim news out today (Thursday August 6) reveals a more immediate crisis in the benefits system with even more alarming implications for the future.
Figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that the number of households subject to the benefit cap almost doubled to 154,000 between February 2020 and May 2020. Of those, 140,000 had children.
More households have moved on to Universal Credit over time so the grey line for total capped households is the one to watch – note that the increase is much bigger than when the benefit cap was reduced in 2016.
Jules Birch 