Passing the buck
Posted: June 26, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Help to Buy, Housing market, Mortgages | Tags: George Osborne, Mark Carney Leave a commentGeorge Osborne has spent so long outsourcing responsibility for the housing market to Mark Carney that it’s easy to forget the Bank of England’s actual brief.
Far from controlling house prices, or tackling affordability or making the market less dysfunctional, the Bank’s Financial Policy Committee (FPC) ‘is charged with a primary objective of identifying, monitoring and taking action to remove or reduce systemic risks with a view to protecting and enhancing the resilience of the UK financial system’ and a secondary objective ‘to support the economic policy of the government’.
So the measures the FPC announced today on high loan to income (LTI) mortgages and a slightly strengthened stress test on lending are about preventing future house prices from increasing household debt to a level that poses risks to the financial system rather than tackling current price levels and affordability.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Fresh ideas
Posted: June 17, 2014 Filed under: Housing market, Private renting | Tags: Generation Rent Leave a commentA new manifesto for private renters published today highlights the new thinking on housing emerging ahead of the general election.
This is the first of two manifestos being launched this week by new organisations with different priorities and constituencies to the existing ones. We’ll hear from SHOUT, the campaign for social housing, tomorrow but today it’s the turn of Generation Rent.
And it’s about time. Since the creation of the assured shorthold tenancy and the invention of buy to let, the private rented sector has more than doubled in size. That’s great news for landlords and letting agents but not so great for tenants with minimal security of tenure and consumer rights.
To illustrate my point, here are three recent bits of news.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
In our blood
Posted: May 29, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market 1 CommentOn a first glance at today’s new figures, the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme is failing to live up to the fears of its critics or the hopes of ministers.
The figures released by the Treasury show 7,313 sales in the first six months of the scheme. Of these, 72 per cent were for homes valued below £250,000 and 80 per cent were to first-time buyers.
Those completions account for around 1.3 per cent of mortgages over the six months so it’s hard to see how the Help to Buy 2 mortgage guarantee (HTB2) on its own can have contributed much to rising property prices.
Doubts about Dave
Posted: May 20, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market, Planning | Tags: David Cameron Leave a commentHow do David Cameron’s claims this morning about home ownership and new housing in his own constituency measure up to scrutiny?
It’s a measure of the growing political importance of housing took top billing in his Today programme interview sandwiched between reaction to the conviction of Abu Hamza and Britain’s relationship with Europe. Listen again here from about 1:30 in.
The interview was notable for me for two things: first an unequivocal claim to the old Tory mantle of the ‘property owning democracy’; and second a denial that Tory councils are nimbys made with specific reference to West Oxfordshire (Cameron’s Witney constituency has the same boundaries).
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
New regime
Posted: April 28, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Mortgages, Regulation | Tags: MMR Leave a commentWill the new mortgage rules tilt the playing field even further in favour or the housing haves and against the have-nots?
On the face of it’s hard to argue with the idea that lenders should check whether borrowers can actually afford their mortgage before they make the loan. But is it quite that simple?
After a long consultation, the new Mortgage Market Review (MMR) regime finally came into force on Saturday. The aim is to prevent a repeat of the irresponsible surge in lending seen before 2007. The lax rules then were symbolised by the self-certified mortgage, or liar loan, which is now banned.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Help or hindrance?
Posted: April 13, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market Leave a commentSo a year in to Help to Buy, who has it helped and what has the impact been so far?
Those are the questions I set out to answer in my feature in this week’s Inside Housing. It concludes that the limited number of Help to Buy transactions seen so far cannot have been enough on their own to account for what’s happened in the market in its first year. What’s been far more significant is the impact on the behaviour of buyers, sellers and housebuilders of a signal from the government that it will do everything it can to generate a housing market recovery. That, combined with a range of other government policies (and non-policies) and the favourable environment of record low interest rates, has duly produced one.
Budget 2014: the next five years
Posted: March 20, 2014 Filed under: Budget, Economics, Housing market, Private renting, Welfare state | Tags: housing benefit Leave a commentNever mind today and tomorrow: what does the Budget mean for housing over the longer term?
As usual, some of the most revealing information comes not in the speech or the Treasury’s background documents but in the Economic and Fiscal Outlook published by the Office for Budget Responsibility. This time around the detail and the forecasts for the next five years have a lot to say about housing benefit, the welfare cap and the housing market.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Buy, buy, bye?
Posted: March 11, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market, Mortgages | Tags: George Osborne Leave a commentAs George Osborne prepares for next week’s budget, even the people who’ve benefited are calling for changes to help to buy. But is he listening?
A survey out today finds that most mortgage lenders and brokers now believe that help to buy 2 – the more controversial mortgage guarantee element of the scheme – will be scaled back or scrapped before the official end date of 2016.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Minding the gap or moving the government?
Posted: March 10, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Housing market, London Leave a commentWhat can be done about the London problem: the growing economic divide between the capital and the rest of the country?
Mind the Gap, a two-part BBC documentary by Evan Davis, looked at the causes and consequences of the growing divide between London and the rest of the country. He argues that powerful economic forces are polarising Britain: in theory technology should mean we can work from anywhere but in practice the economics of agglomeration mean that businesses look to cluster together and secure the benefits go with being close to each other.
However, for all those positive effects there are negative externalities too: the pressures on transport infrastructure, the environment and perhaps above all housing. Not so slowly, but surely, Londoners are being priced out of their own city. Much of this was summed up by in part one of the programme by film first of The Shard and then, just a few miles, the derelict and the soon-to-be-gentrified Heygate Estate.
Jules Birch 