Jubilee generations

Posted: June 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housing market | 2 Comments

As the Queen prepares to celebrate 60 years on the throne, here are my six housing generations and their very different experiences of six decades of housing market booms and busts.

I wasn’t going to write a Diamond Jubilee blog as the ground has already been so well covered by Steve Hilditch and Colin Wiles and in the papers but then I read this Telegraph blog by Ian Cowie and I couldn’t resist.

The piece is not quite as terrible as the ‘sixty happy and glorious years of soaring house prices’ headline might suggest but it got me thinking. Much of the story of those 60 years really is about the expansion of home ownership and the 80-fold increase in house prices but it looks very different according to when you were able to buy:

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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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A tale of two power lists

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housing market, Social housing | 4 Comments

I don’t normally pay much attention to power lists (especially when I don’t feature on them) but two that came out this week contain some fascinating insights into housing and property.

First up came the Telegraph’s Property Power List topped by Sir Terence Conran. The paper claims that: ‘The 25 entries on our list represent a cross-section of the most important people working in the buying and selling of British homes. It includes those who work in the property field day-to-day, as well as those who exert their power from the fringes.’
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The black comedy of property taxation

Posted: March 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Housing market, Mansion tax | 1 Comment

Why is it that so few chancellors ever consider the effect of their decisions on taxation on housing?

The obvious answers are political ones: housing is near the bottom of the list of priorities; no chancellor can afford to alienate the homeowning majority; and any changes to the tax system inevitably create losers as well as winners.

As George Osborne puts the finishing touches to the Budget, speculation continues about several measures that could have a huge impact: a long-overdue clampdown on stamp duty avoidance (Osborne has already committed to this – see my blog for Inside Housing here); extra council tax bands (a distinct possibility); and a mansion tax (advocated by the Lib Dems but supposedly ruled out for now by David Cameron). Yet all of the ideas are about raising revenue for tax cuts elsewhere. There is no suggestion of the more general reform of property taxation that is so badly needed.

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Rubber stamp

Posted: March 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Housing market, Mansion tax | Leave a comment

So George Osborne will come down ‘like a ton of bricks’ on people who avoid stamp duty by buying homes through offshore companies. What took so long?

The chancellor confirmed in TV interviews over the weekend that the loophole beloved of celebrities, rock stars and the global super-rich will be closed in the Budget on Wednesday.

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

The sound of squawking

Posted: March 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Mortgages, Right to buy | 2 Comments

Yesterday should have been a day of triumph for Grant Shapps and the DCLG. Instead it was the day when the chickens began to come home to roost.

The day began so well too. Well-placed leaks in the Sunday and morning papers prepared the ground for TV and radio saturation for the launch of two key parts of the housing revolution promised by David Cameron in his party conference speech and first outlined in last year’s housing strategy: the new build indemnity guarantee and the expansion of the right to buy.

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Shaky start

Posted: March 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Mortgages | Leave a comment

If NewBuy really is to be about supporting buyers and new homes rather than just subsidising housebuilders here are 10 questions that need answers.

The launch of the scheme this morning got off to a somewhat shaky start, with many reports claiming (wrongly) that it is for first-time buyers and others (rightly) pointing out the advantages for builders.

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

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