Posted: February 21, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Legal, Scotland, Social housing, Welfare reform |
It seems remarkable that with less than 40 days to go until we start taxing them we still don’t really know for certain what a bedroom is.
So it’s not surprising that the move by Knowsley Housing Trust to reclassify 566 of its two- and three-bed homes as one- and two-bed has attracted so much attention. Chief executive Bob Taylor told Inside Housing that a stock review showed some homes are currently classified as having more bedrooms than they actually have, because tenants are not using the extra rooms as bedrooms and were therefore paying too much rent.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: January 29, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
With just 62 days left the bedroom tax has gone mainstream in parliament and the national press.
The last week alone has seen three different debates in the Commons, a DWP questions in which it was the main issue, and stories in the Sun and Mail as well as, more predictably, the Guardian, Daily Record and Mirror.
Meanwhile virtually every local paper in the UK seems to be finding families affected by the tax that few of their readers would consider to have a ‘spare room’. From Bute to Torfaen and from King’s Lynn to Northampton to Hartlepool the bedroom tax is big news. In Hull, a family of seven in a four-bed house say they face losing £20 a week because of the rules on how old children have to be to get their own room.
But will any of it make any difference to what happens from April 1?
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: January 24, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Private renting, Welfare reform |
One of the first things that any child learns is that 1+1 = 2. Not any more it seems. In the world of austerity 1+1 = 0.5.
That was the thought that struck me after reading work and pensions minister Steve Webb sum up for the government in the committee stage of the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill this week. Thanks to his widely applauded work on pensions reform, Webb would come close to the top of many people’s lists of effective coalition ministers and he also knows his brief better than most people in Westminster. Yet for me he has always tried too hard to defend the latest piece of indefensible welfare ‘reform’.
And that’s exactly what happened on Monday as the Uprating Bill was rushed through its committee and third reading stages with debate severely limited and time to consider just one amendment.
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Posted: January 15, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Economics, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Local government, Social housing |
Without local authorities, England has only seen more than 200,000 housing starts three times since the war. So why is council housing being ignored now?
As John Perry argues in Inside Housing, councils are currently building around 3,000 homes a year but they could build 15,000 if they were given more freedom to borrow. ‘A government that is desperate for house building shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth,’ he says.
Desperate is exactly the right word for our current performance on housebuilding: just 105,000 starts in England in 2011/12, down from a miserable 112,000 in 2010/11 and less than half the level needed to meet demand and prevent an ever-increasing spiral of rising prices and rents.
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Posted: January 9, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform |
Housing is barely mentioned in the DWP impact assessment of the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill but there is little doubt that the impact will be huge.
The technical reason for the omission appears to be that the Bill only covers benefits and tax credits for which primary legislation is needed to change the uprating method. The 1 per cent increase also applies to the local housing allowance but this can be done by regulation and so is not included in the assessment.
The obvious direct impact will be on private tenants. The 1 per cent uprating in LHA effectively amounts to a cut within a cut within a cut within a cut. More on this aspect below.
However, the impacts do not stop there.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: December 28, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
The first of a two-part look back at the issues and people that I was blogging about in a momentous year for housing.
1) Private renting: a year of growth
I predicted in January that 2012 would see the private rented sector overtake social renting. As things turned out, I was wrong – but not by much. Whether you judge it by the number of homes or the number of households or the answers given by people in the Census, a combination of growth in buy to let, shrinking home ownership and the slow decline of social housing mean it will happen sooner rather than later.
It was also a year that the boundary between the two sectors continue to blur: social housing responded to the tenure shift as a series of social landlords from Thames Valley to L&Q launched private renting initiatives; private landlords like Grainger registered social housing subsidiaries; and the government approved proposals in the Montague report to kick start institutional investment in private renting.
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Posted: December 19, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
It seems about as realistic to expect clear answers from the direct payment demonstration projects as it does to expect them from senior civil servants at a select committee hearing – and that’s exactly how things turned out this week.
As the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was publishing the first data from the projects, witnesses including its permanent secretary Robert Devereux and head of housing policy division Andrew Parfitt were appearing before MPs at the public accounts committee (watch again here). The two things happened so simultaneously that the officials told the MPs that there was ‘no data on arrears so far’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: December 17, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
The big shift from owning to renting revealed in the Census has potentially massive implications for government spending on housing costs.
The headline results revealed by the Office for National Statistics last week were that home ownership fell from 68.3 per cent of households if England and Wales in 2001 to 63.5 per cent in 2011. Private renting increased from 9 per cent to 15 per cent and social renting fell from 19.3 per cent to 17.6 per cent.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 22, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Tags: housing benefit, under-25s |
Decidedly mixed signals are emerging from different parts of the government over cutting housing benefit for the under-25s.
David Cameron seems determined to press ahead with the idea he first raised in April and then again at the Conservative conference in October. At prime minister’s questions yesterday he told Labour MP Mary Glindon: ‘I know that housing benefit is a very important issue, but there is a problem, which needs proper attention: we seem to give some young people a choice today, in that if they are on jobseeker’s allowance they can have access to housing benefit, but if they are living at home and trying to work they cannot. We need to recognise that in many cases we are sending a negative signal to young people through our welfare system.’
If that sounds like full steam ahead, Mary Glindon was getting some very different signals barely an hour earlier during a Westminster Hall debate she secured on the issue. Lib Dem communities minister Don Foster told her: ‘The hon. Member for North Tyneside said that the idea is something that the Government might effect, but the fact that something was said at a Conservative party conference does not mean that it becomes coalition policy. At the moment, it certainly is not.’
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 12, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Economics, Housing benefit | Tags: housing benefit, Public spending |
As Crisis launches a campaign against ‘unworkable and irresponsible’ cuts in housing benefit for the under-25s, there is another scary reminder today of the bleak prospects for the next spending review.
Fiscal Fallout, a report from the Social Market Foundation and Royal Society of the Arts, concludes that the flat-lining economy will make the structural deficit significantly higher than forecast in the Budget in March.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 