Hidden reality
Posted: May 29, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit Leave a commentIf you missed Britain’s Hidden Homeless last night it’s well worth making time to catch on iPlayer.
The BBC documentary was presented by Speech Debelle, the Mercury-prize winning rapper with personal experience of what she was talking about. She spent three years sofa surfing and in hostels after falling out with her mum at 19 and wrote the opening song of what went on to be her prize-winning first album while in a hostel.
So this was far more than the standard celeb-fronted BBC3 documentary. You believed her when she said that hidden homelessness is three times bigger than the official figures suggest and that things are worse now than they were for her ten years ago.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.
Welfare reform Mark 2
Posted: May 16, 2012 Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform 3 CommentsWith (depending on your point of view) neat or cruel irony the number of part-time employees hit a record high within hours of them being identified as a major target for a second round of welfare reform.
Official figures published on Wednesday morning confirmed that unemployment fell by 45,000 to 2.63 million people and the number of people in work rose by 105,000. However, within that total the number of people working part-time because they cannot find full-time work rose to a record high of 1.4 million. There are now eight million part-time employees and 4.2 million self-employed people – both the highest numbers since records began in 1992.
Beyond our Ken
Posted: May 8, 2012 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Housing market 5 CommentsIn 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.’
Stoke-on-Thames: location, location, location
Posted: April 24, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting 5 CommentsThe news about Newham and Stoke has touched a nerve like few other housing stories this year. I wonder though if the coverage so far has identified the crucial issue.
The story broke on the Today programme on Tuesday morning. Newham had written to 1,179 housing associations around the country asking for help in finding homes for people affected by housing benefit cuts. The reason Stoke is in the headlines is that a housing association there went public with the letter (here). Housing minister Grant Shapps appeared alongside Newham mayor Robin Wales and accused him of ‘playing politics’ with the issue (something that Shapps himself would of course never do). I blogged my initial take on the issue for Inside Housing here but there are excellent blogs out there too from Polly Curtis, Steve Hilditch, Nancy Kelley and Toby Lloyd.
Stoke-on-Thames
Posted: April 24, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting Leave a commentStoke? Hull? Newham? Croydon? Westminster? Housing benefit cuts are a story in search of a location.
What I mean by that is that the story that dominated this morning’s Today programme could have been about just about any borough in London and any city in the north and midlands. We all know that sooner or later there will be real faces to put to the victims of the housing benefit cuts and real places where the problems will emerge. Up to now, though, and with several of the more draconian cuts still to come, we’ve had largely anecdotal evidence.
Read more on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.
Repeating the same mistake?
Posted: April 5, 2012 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit 7 CommentsI am getting an appalling sense of déjà vu reading a story in today’s Telegraph that ‘young unemployed may be forced to live with mum and dad’.
The ‘radical proposal’ is apparently being worked on by Downing Street and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as ‘part of a drive to make sure people are better off working than on benefits’.
Family values
Posted: March 7, 2012 Filed under: Budget, Housing benefit, Mansion tax, Welfare reform Leave a commentAnyone who has followed the debates about housing benefit cuts and the Welfare Reform Bill will probably have been thinking the same as me during the debates this week about the mansion tax and child benefit.
Surely we heard exactly the same arguments about ‘fairness’ and ‘family’ in all the debates over the last year about welfare reform and housing benefit cuts?
Last post
Posted: March 1, 2012 Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Tags: government, politics 1 CommentAnd so, having ‘done this to death’, the bedroom tax and the Welfare Reform Bill have passed their final parliamentary hurdle.
The quote came from welfare reform minister Lord Freud as peers debated a final attempt to amend the under-occupation penalty. It may have been accurate in terms of the parliamentary procedure but it will have a hollow ring for landlords and tenants as they spend the next 13 months agonising about how a measure that will cost 670,000 people £14 per week will be implemented.
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.
