Posted: June 30, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Homelessness, Local housing allowance, Social housing, Temporary accommodation |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
‘Everything starts with a good home and this country finally has to put that at the top of its priority list.’
Housing has rarely been as central to the vision of a prospective prime minister as it was in the speech by Andy Burnham on Monday.
The speech was billed in advance as being all about devolution and how the success of the model inherited and further developed by Mr Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester can be spread across the country.
And there was plenty of that as he promised ‘the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen’ driven by a new No10 North based in Manchester.
But what really struck me was how fundamental housing is to that wider vision: ‘If you don’t give people a good home then what chance of having a good life?’ was his rhetorical question.
The new MP for Makerfield has often taken positions on things like public control of essential services, council housing, high private rents and Local Housing Allowance that are to the left of the current government.
The question is whether those policies would really be priorities for Mr Burnham as a prime minister with a million and one other things to think about: not just devolution but the NHS, defence, education, immigration that usually dominate the political agenda.
For all his emphasis on devolution and building things from below, powerful backing from the top will be required to deliver change in housing against entrenched interests elsewhere in government.
Mr Burnham’s ‘10-year mission to raise people’s living standards’ sounds similar to Keir Starmer’s Plan for Change and ‘decade of national renewal’ at first glance.
But where the current prime minister’s missions had little to say about housing, his successor puts homes front and centre in what he’s saying about ‘greater public control of essential services like water, housing, energy and transport’.
In this story the loss of 1.5 million council homes since the 1980s has led directly to a ‘housing trap’ in which the benefits system chases higher private rents, governments try to control costs via freezes in Local Housing Allowance and the costs fall on local councils paying for temporary accommodation with a ‘ruinous’ impact on the public finances.
The answer, says Mr Burnham, is ‘the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period’.
He’s said this many times before as mayor while begging questions that have still not been answered.
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Posted: April 7, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, History, Housebuilding |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Walk down Wentworth Road in north Oxford and you will come across the scene of one of the most famous episodes in housing history.
It’s a story that has come to symbolise the class divisions of the past but there are also contemporary resonances for housing and society more generally.
About halfway down the street you’ll notice something strange: the house numbers suddenly go out of sequence and the street name changes to Aldrich Road. Look at the wall of the house opposite and you will see a blue plaque commemorating what happened there in 1934.
The story is very well told in a new series on Radio Four. The Shadow of the Cuttleslowe Walls does much more than just delve into the past, it also looks at the present and what has happened to the area since tells us about housing now.
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Posted: March 4, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Local government, Temporary accommodation |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
There were by choice no policy announcements in the Spring Statement but the message about the government’s housing priorities could hardly have been clearer.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves had deliberately downplayed the significance of the statement, which was meant to be an update on the public finances rather than a full-blown Budget.
That meant that – with one exception – there were no background documents to wade through to find hidden announcements and hints about future policy direction.]
The exception came from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and the first message was about the key manifesto target of 1.5 additional homes in this parliament.
Not a chance, says the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook: in the five years from 2025/26 to 2030/31 the independent watchdog forecasts there will be just 1.3 million net additions across the UK (30,000 higher than it forecast in November).
Net additions will fall in line with subdued recent housing starts to just 220,000 in 2026/27, it says, but then rise sharply to just over 305,000 by 2030/31 ‘reflecting the impact of planning reforms’.
That may sound closer than we thought to 1.5 million and the government will welcome the acknowledgement of the impact of its policies.
But eagle-eyed readers will already have spotted that the target is for England whereas the forecast is for the UK and that they cover different time periods.
Adjusting for homes built in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland only increases the size of the shortfall: England-only net additions will total around 1.1 million, 400,000 short of the target.
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Posted: January 30, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Decent Homes Standard, Energy efficiency, Housing associations, Housing conditions, Rents, Section 106, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
After weeks and even months of significant announcements delayed and promised ‘in due course’ it feels as though, like buses, they have all arrived at once.
From the Warm Homes Plan and energy efficiency to commonhold and leasehold reform, from the Decent Homes Standard to rent convergence and from Section 106 to a new social housing taskforce the list goes on and on.
On social and affordable housing, the announcements are summarised in an update to last July’s plan for ‘a decade of renewal’.
The flurry of activity seems intended to clear the decks for the opening of bids for the Social and Affordable Homes Programme in February by giving providers increased certainty about their finances.
On housing in general, the common factors seem to be removing obstacles in the way of development and giving owners and tenants more control over their lives and better conditions.
In most of these decisions, the government has faced a choice between two or more competing views or interests. It has usually gone for the middle ground.
On rent convergence, for example, last year’s consultation asked whether below-formula social rents should increase by an extra £1 or £2 a week but social landlords were pressing for £3.
In deciding on this, ministers had to weigh the costs to tenants and the Department for Work and Pensions against the positive impact on landlord investment in improvements and new homes and balance the interests of existing tenants against people waiting for a social home.
The decision to allow an extra £1 a week from April 2027 and £2 from April 2028 splits the difference but the delay means the extra income will be slow to arrive and in any case it will probably not be enough to make up for the rent cuts imposed in the 2010s.
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Posted: August 14, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
England should be building 100,000 new council houses a year, says a new report out this week.
It’s a call that would be routine if it was being made by one of the usual suspects, but this time it comes from, of all places, Policy Exchange.
The right-wing think tank was the incubator for the ideas that dominated the Conservative agenda in the 2010s and its alumni played a key role under successive Tory-led governments.
Among its greatest hits in the glory days of the coalition were calls for all social homes to be nationalised, with most sold off to tenants and only a rump left for the most vulnerable.
That was followed by proposals to sell off all ‘high-value’ social housing and fully commercialise housing associations.
True, the ideas were usually justified as ways to generate more affordable homes overall but the underlying agenda seemed to be that, far from tackling social exclusion and poverty, social housing was a cause of them
In the wake of the 2024 election, Policy Exchange is playing a less partisan tune and this report comes with endorsements from Labour as well as Conservative politicians.
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Posted: July 2, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Rents, Right to buy, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The spending review may have given us the headlines but a flurry of announcements on Wednesday fills in much of the detail about what the government is calling ‘a decade of renewal for social and affordable housing’.
On new homes, a key question was how the £39 billion will be spent over the next 10 years and, in particular, what the trade-off will be between maximising total output of affordable homes and giving greater priority to social rent.
That got an answer in an overnight press release: a renamed Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) is forecast to deliver 300,000 homes over the ten years (30,000 a year), of which at least 180,000 (18,000 a year or 60 per cent) will be for social rent.
To put this in perspective, the current AHP was originally meant to produce 180,000 affordable homes over the five years from 2021 to 2026 (36,000 a year) but rising construction costs cut that to between 110,000 and 130,000 (22,000 to 26,000 a year. Of those, just 40,000 (8,000 a year) are forecast to be for social rent.
Importantly, strategic partnerships will be able to bid for funds over the lifetime of the programme, which should give at least some protection from the risk of cuts if a government more hostile to housing wins the next election.
Another trade-off is the split between London, where higher land prices and construction costs mean more grant per home is needed, and the rest of the country.
Under the current AHP, the Greater London Authority (GLA) got £4.1 billion (36 per cent) and Homes England £7.4 billion (64 per cent) of the grant available.
Under SAHP, the GLA’s share will be cut to 30 per cent or up to £11.7 billion. It’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that more than half of the 126,000 homeless households stuck in temporary accommodation waiting for a social home are from London.
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Posted: March 10, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Housing associations, Housing finance, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
An intriguing Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHLCG) response to a select committee report on Friday might just provide a glimpse into the government’s thinking ahead of the vital spending review due in June.
Back in May 2024 the then Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee sounded the alarm about the finances and sustainability of the social housing sector and called for a whole series of sector-friendly changes.
The response comes 10 months later (long after what is meant to be a 60-day deadline) but the world has changed in the meantime, with a Labour government elected and a renamed department and committee.
So in one sense it is a free hit for MHCLG to echo most of the committee’s warnings and pin the blame for what’s gone wrong on the Conservative administration.
It does not just agree that ‘the social housing sector faces increased financial pressures, exacerbated by years of under-funding and real terms rent cuts’, it also puts some numbers to the flashing blue lights.
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Posted: August 13, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
This month marks the centenary of one of the most important pieces of legislation in housing history.
The Housing (Financial Provisions) Act 1924 – better known as the Wheatley Act – was introduced by the UK’s first-ever Labour government, a minority administration headed by Ramsay MacDonald that only lasted for 10 months.
A century later, with Keir Starmer only the fourth Labour prime minister to win an overall majority, are there lessons to be learned?
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Posted: May 8, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Decarbonisation, Fire safety, Housing associations, Housing finance, Rents, Social housing |
Originally written as a blog for Inside Housing.
How long can you keep juggling before it all goes horribly wrong?
That’s the question for social landlords posed by a new report from the all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee on the finances and sustainability of the social housing sector.
Juggling a couple of balls is simple. Three gets easier with practice. Four needs intense focus. Add more balls and external distractions and you risk dropping the lot.
The issues that need to be juggled are familiar ones: how do you continue to build new homes, decarbonise existing ones, fix fire safety problems and regenerate older stock when there is not enough grant to go around, construction, energy and insurance costs have soared and supposedly long-term rent settlements keep being revisited?
As the report points out, we are already seeing the results. Fiona Fletcher-Smith of L&Q told the committee that under the affordable housing programme that ended in 2021 it built 10,000 new homes in London but ‘this year in this programme we are bidding for 1,000. It is a dramatic drop.’
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Posted: June 13, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Cost of living, Council housing, Housing associations, Housing finance, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For as long as I can remember the social housing business model seems to have been at a turning point.
From private finance to stock transfer, from affordable rent to welfare reform and from austerity to the rent cut, the policy changes have kept coming against a wider backdrop of financial crisis, Grenfell, Covid, Rochdale and the cost of living crisis.
For years it’s seemed that something has to give – until it does and landlords have to do more with less and tenants get less for more and apparent turning points become spinning in ever-decreasing circles.
This time around, though, you really get the sense that things can’t simply continue as they are and as they have been.
That was what came across quite powerfully both from this week’s first hearing of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee’s inquiry into the finances and sustainability if the social housing sector and from the written evidence submitted in advance. The inquiry continues with a new set of witnesses on Monday.
This is not just about the impossibility of squaring the circle between competing priorities, of continuing to deliver new homes at the same time as fixing unsafe buildings, regenerating ageing estates and decarbonising existing homes.
And it’s no longer just about doing more with less either. The return of inflation, and even larger increases in construction prices, mean delivering the same with much less.
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Jules Birch 