How does the King’s Speech measure up?

Posted: July 18, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Leasehold, Legal, Planning, Private renting, Section 21, Social housing, Temporary accommodation | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Amid the excitement of the first Labour King’s Speech in 15 years, it may seem churlish to inject a note of scepticism. 

The excitement lies in the prospect of planning reform to deliver more homes, the potential of more devolution in England, the promise of improved rights for private renters and the hope that we could at long last see the abolition of leasehold. 

Nobody should under-estimate the potential of this programme to improve the lives of millions of private renters and leaseholders or the determination of the government to use its mandate to deliver more new homes. 

Yes, we already knew all of this from Labour’s manifesto but hearing them in the King’s words amid the pomp and ceremony of the state opening of parliament begins their transition from promises on a page to action in the real world. 

The scepticism comes from two directions. First, and most obviously, the closer we get to implementation of these reforms the more the details matter. 

The background document has some of these but more will follow once the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, English Devolution Bill, Renters’ Rights Bill and Draft Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill make their way through parliament over the next few months.

The second reason for scepticism is the hype that comes with it. ‘Take this paragraph from the prime minster’s introduction to the King’s Speech: ‘Too many people currently live with the threat of insecurity and injustice, and so we will make sure everyone can grow up in the secure housing they deserve. We will introduce tough new protections for renters, end no fault evictions and raise standards to make sure homes are safe for people to live in.’

The second sentence describes what the government will do for private renters. These are good but they do not come close to meeting the aspiration in the first.

A dose of high-flown rhetoric is perfectly understandable but Keir Starmer also made a point of stressing ‘patient work and serious solutions, rather than the temptation of the easy answer’.

So how does the King’s Speech measure up to that?

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The long wait for meaningful reform of leasehold

Posted: May 29, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Leasehold, Legal | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Churchill was in no doubt that leasehold needs fundamental reform.

‘Who was more likely to be a contented citizen, the man who was a freeholder and who was in his property, or the man who was at the mercy of a colossal landowner?’ he asked in a Commons debate.

It says everything about the snail’s pace of progress on leasehold reform that the speaker was not Winston Churchill, the wartime leader and Conservative prime minister in the 1950s, nor even the more youthful Winston Churchill who was a radical land reformer as a Liberal MP in the 1910s.

Instead it was his father, Randolph Churchill, backing one of the first meaningful attempts at leasehold reform way back in 1884. Needless to say, the leasehold enfranchisement bill was blocked by a Conservative government full of property owners.

Flash forward 139 years and the same argument applies to almost five million leaseholders in England and Wales, the only two countries in the world that have still not abolished or radically reformed an archaic system that dates back to the Domesday Book.

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The tide turns on deregulation and the private sector

Posted: February 17, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Fire safety, Housebuilding, Legal, Private renting | Tags: | Leave a comment

The package of building safety changes announced this week by Michael Gove represents an extraordinary shift on any number of different levels.

Whether it’s effectively banning developers from building anything if they fail to cooperate or rewriting the terms of tens of thousands of leasehold contracts, the amendments to the Building Safety Bill will fundamentally change the way that flats (at least those over 11m) are maintained and managed.

The package inevitably raises a whole series of questions that I’ll return to in a future column but for now I want to concentrate on what it says about the extent of the change in the government’s attitude towards the private sector in housing.

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Where is the Winter Housing Plan?

Posted: September 29, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Legal, Private renting, Section 21, Social housing | 1 Comment

Originally written as a column for insidehousing.co.uk.

In March housing secretary Robert Jenrick promised that nobody will lose their home because of the pandemic. In June that turned out to mean that nobody will lose their home ‘this summer’.

The evictions moratorium was extended twice at the 11th hour but there was no movement this time and it ended last Monday – a day before the Autumnal equinox – with an empty promise of ‘comprehensive support for renters’.

If the moratorium had expired a week later – after the new pandemic restrictions for the next six months announced by Boris Johnson on Tuesday and after the new Job Support Scheme announced by Rishi Sunak on Thursday – the pressure for it to be extended would have been overwhelming.

Instead, with promises of Christmas truces, exemptions for areas in lockdown and prioritisation of cases, we have lurched into a situation that ensures that lots of people definitely will lose their homes in the next few months.

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England gets there in the end with evictions climbdown

Posted: August 25, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Legal, Private renting, Social housing | 1 Comment

Originally written on August 24 as a column for Inside Housing.

The u-turn was not as dramatic as the one over exam results and it means Robert Jenrick will not for now be joining Gavin Williamson in detention after the politics class.

But, now that it’s happened, does the 11th-hour climbdown over the Coronavirus evictions ban foreshadow a more permanent improvement renters’ rights after the pandemic?

The package announced on Friday following consultation with the judiciary extends the ban by four weeks from August 23 to September 20 in England and Wales. It also extends the notice period for tenants in England from three to six months in all cases except those involving anti-social behaviour and domestic abuse.

This is the second extension to the ban announced at the 11th hour, as it was originally only meant to last until June, then extended to August.

You still have to wonder what took so long: the Welsh Government introduced a six-month notice period under its devolved housing powers a month ago but is reliant on decisions in Westminster about the evictions ban because judicial affairs are not devolved.

It has also announced low-interest loans for tenants in arrears worth £8 million (the equivalent of £140 million in England given its far larger population) and maxed out discretionary housing payments but is still facing pressure to go further.

At least England got there in the end, though. The question now, given that four weeks is not very long, is what comes next?

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MPs call for action on rough sleeping and renting

Posted: May 22, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Coronavirus, Legal, Private renting, Rough sleeping, Section 21, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The government will miss a ‘golden opportunity’ to end rough sleeping once and for all if it fails to turn temporary measures into something more permanent.

And ministers must beef up ‘toothless’ plans to protect renters in the wake of the Coronavirus crisis or risk a new wave of homelessness.

Those are the top-line messages from an all-party group of MPs today. But an interim report on protecting rough sleepers and renters from the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee also goes much further in endorsing calls by campaigners for wider changes to the housing system.

They recommend:

  • A dedicated funding stream to end rough sleeping, likely to be at least £100 million a year
  • Improved support for councils to help people with no recourse to public funds who will otherwise end up back on the streets
  • Boosting the supply of suitable housing by re-establishing the National Clearing House Scheme set up after the financial crisis for unsold homes and giving councils more flexibility to buy them
  • Turning the increase in the Local Housing Allowance to the 30th percentile from a temporary into a long-term measure and looking at the impact of raising rents further.

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Ending leasehold’s ‘industrial-scale racket’

Posted: July 12, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Leasehold, Legal | Leave a comment

Originally posted on July 12 on my blog for Inside Housing.

As far back as I can remember, every government has promised to tackle abuses of our outdated system of leasehold.

Between 1979 and 1997, the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major legislated four times on leasehold reform.

The Labour government of Tony Blair promised ‘a comprehensive package of leasehold reforms’ in 2000 and introduced the alternative system of commonhold in 2002.

Piecemeal reforms improved things a bit for leaseholders but commonhold has still only been used on 50 developments at an optimistic estimate – in contrast to the expansion of similar tenures like strata title and condominiums across the rest of the world.

Little wonder when leasehold offers so many advantages to be profitably exploited by landowners, housebuilders and freeholders.

Now, in the wake of the twin scandals of cladding and leasehold, all that could – finally – be about to change.

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The politics of longer private tenancies

Posted: July 2, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Legal, Private renting, Scotland | 2 Comments

Originally published on June 2 on my blog for Inside Housing.

When it comes to the private rented sector are we all Chavistas now?

Back in 2014, when Ed Miliband’s Labour proposed a standard three-year tenancy with limits on rent increases, Conservative party chair Grant Shapps was quick to accuse it of ‘Venezuelan-style socialism’.

Flash forward four years and the Conservatives have stolen Labour’s policy at the last two elections and announced plans of their own for three-year tenancies – and if they are not quite proposing limits on rent increases they are not ruling them out either.

Even two years ago it would have been unimaginable for them to propose anything like the proposals announced by housing secretary James Brokenshire on Monday and first reported in the Conservative-supporting Telegraph on Saturday night.

Indeed, far from increasing security for private renters, Conservative-led governments had spent the years since 2010 attempting to undermine it for social tenants.

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The problem(s) with leasehold

Posted: April 13, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Legal | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally published on April 13 on  my blog for Inside Housing.

Question: When is a home owner not really a home owner? Answer: When they are a leaseholder.

Leaseholders have the responsibilities of being an owner without having all of the rights. They own the bricks and mortar* of the homes they are living in – but only for the length of their lease – and they do not own the land it is built on.

They pay a mortgage but they also pay ground rent to the freeholder and a service charge for maintenance carried out by companies over whom they may have no control. They may see themselves as owners but in the eyes of the law they are tenants.

The issue has come to a head recently with the scandal of developers selling leasehold new houses and then selling on the freehold for a profit. Unwitting buyers have found themselves facing bills for ground rent that double every 10 years and an escalating bill for buying the freehold.

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Manifestly without reason

Posted: November 8, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Legal | Leave a comment

Originally published on November 8 on my blog for Inside Housing

On a day when it was badly needed the judges of the Supreme Court obliged with some good news.

Yes, it was mixed with bad news in the judgement on the bedroom tax, as two claimants won their case and others were refused, but it was still a welcome vindication of the case put forward by the Carmichaels, the Rutherfords and their lawyers. In the words of the judgement, the decisions on their housing benefit were ‘manifestly without reason’.

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