Starter for 20
Posted: December 15, 2014 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, Planning | Tags: Starter homes 1 CommentThe government’s plan for starter homes with a 20 per cent discount begs all sorts of questions. Today we got some of the answers.
The scheme announced by David Cameron this morning was first trailed in his conference speech in October as an idea for after the election but has now apparently been brought forward to start early next year.
Some of the details of Dave’s Dream Homes seem to have changed along the way. According to a DCLG consultation also published today, the starter homes initiative seems to amount to an extension of rural exceptions sites to urban areas. So how will it work?
Property and the political elite
Posted: November 24, 2014 Filed under: Equality, Housing market, Mansion tax, Tax | Tags: Emily Thornberry 7 CommentsIt’s now received wisdom, and a key part of UKIP’s appeal, that we are ruled by politicians who are out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. How much of this is down to house prices?
Perceived divisions between politicians and voters are nothing new of course. Nor are accusations of champagne (or Islington/Hampstead) socialism and a huge gap between Labour leaders and their core vote. However, if these are US-style ‘culture wars’ over the politics of identity and national flags, they are being fought in the language of house prices, as shown only too clearly in this week’s Mail on Sunday story about the ‘Thornberry set’ and the North London ‘liberal elite’.
The issue was highlighted by last week’s tweet by Labour MP Emily Thornberry about a flag-festooned house in Rochester & Strood and then brought home by media coverage of its Sun-sponsored owner knocking on the door of her ‘£2 million house’ in Richmond Crescent in Islington. This street is iconic in New Labour circles because it’s where Tony and Cherie Blair lived immediately before they won the 1997 election. Former Islington council leader turned Labour MP and chair of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge still lives there. This is a street of seriously big North London houses but they weren’t always worth in the millions.
Taxing problems
Posted: October 14, 2014 Filed under: Housing market, Tax 1 CommentCould we invent a worse system of taxing housing than the one we have now?
As modest attempts at reform are made to howls of protest from those who stand to lose out, it’s worth standing back a moment to reflect on what we tax (and why) and what we don’t.
We have an annual tax on the value of all homes but the council tax in England and Scotland is based on property values as they were in 1991 with a top band of just £320,000. The owner or tenant of a modest semi in Wolverhampton can end up paying more than an oligarch with a multi-million pound home in Westminster. The system was designed to narrow the differences between the top and the bottom from the start but failure to uprate it in line with house prices has amplified the distortions.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Starter’s orders
Posted: October 3, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market | Tags: Conservative conference, David Cameron 1 CommentWho did David Cameron have in mind when he talked about the ‘vested interests’ that are blocking new homes?
Given the effort that goes in to honing a conference speech to get the messages exactly right, and the fact that the prime minister was reading from an autocue rather than speaking without notes like Ed Miliband, it seems safe to assume that he meant exactly what he said. Here’s what he told the Conservative conference this week:
‘For those wanting to buy a home, yes – we will help you get on that housing ladder…but only if we take on the vested interests, and build more homes – however hard that is.’
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
About time
Posted: September 1, 2014 Filed under: Garden cities, Housing market, Mortgages | Tags: earnings, house prices Leave a commentSellafield. Parental help. Mortgages lasting 40 years. Welcome to housing affordability in the 21st century.
Exhibit one is a survey by the TUC comparing median house prices and earnings in local authority areas across England. It finds that Copeland in Cumbria, home of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility, is the only one that is easily affordable on less than three times earnings. Nowhere in southern England is affordable at less than five times earnings.
Exhibit two is an opinion poll of parents conducted by the National Housing Federation. It finds that 81 per cent of parents are worried about the impact of rising house prices on the next generation, 69 per cent think their children will not be able to buy without their financial support and 25 per cent are already saving for their children’s first home.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Crisis? Quelle crise?
Posted: August 20, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Private renting, Regulation Leave a commentThe French housing market is ‘in meltdown’ after housing starts plunged to the crisis level of double what we are managing on this side of the Channel.
President Francois Hollande reconvenes his Cabinet today after returning from holiday with ministers working on a recovery package topped by measures to stimulate the construction industry.
Syria rather than housebuilding may be the reason why David Cameron cut short his holiday in Cornwall but the economic mood here could hardly be more different. House prices are up 10.2 per cent in the last year and ministers claim that their ‘long-term economic plan is getting Britain building again’.
There are no prizes for guessing which of the two countries saw 306,654 housing starts in the year to June and which will be lucky to manage 160,000 over the same period.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Closed doors
Posted: July 28, 2014 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, London, Planning | Tags: New York City Leave a commentWhat is it about a ‘poor door’ that causes so much outrage?
The term has captured something on both sides of the Atlantic: first on an exclusive development in New York City last year and then applied to agrowing trend in London reported in Saturday’s Guardian.
The London building at the centre of that story – One Commerical Street on the eastern fringes of the City – was the same one that I blogged about last year when it was chosen by chancellor George Osborne as the venue for his speech arguing that the economy was ‘turning the corner’.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 