Budget boost leaves housing gaps
Posted: March 16, 2020 Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Fire safety, Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally published on March 11 as a blog for Inside Housing.
This is a Budget that does not live up to its own hype and has some glaring omissions but still brings some good news for housing.
There are three big positives: a £12.2bn Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) over the five years from 2021/22; an additional £1bn for a Building Safety Fund to remove dangerous cladding; and £650m to help rough sleepers into permanent accommodation.
Add the reversal of an interest rate hike for borrowing for new council homes, extra funding for housing infrastructure, £1.2bn in consequentials that other UK nations can invest in new homes and an extension of Shared Accommodation Rate exemptions to young rough sleepers and other vulnerable groups, and this looks like one of the best Budgets for housing in the last 10 years.
However, that’s not setting the bar especially high, and you don’t have to look very far below the surface before the questions start to mount up.
Signals from long-delayed debuts for Jenrick and McVey
Posted: January 15, 2020 Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Fire safety, Home ownership, Land, Leasehold, Permitted development, Right to buy 1 CommentOriginally published on January 15 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Robert Jenrick and Esther McVey faced their first parliamentary questions as housing secretary and housing minister on Monday – almost six months after they took up their posts.
The reasons for the remarkable delay to their despatch box debuts – the summer recess, Brexit and the December election – are not hard to guess and are also why housing has slipped down the political agenda in the meantime.
But, give or take the odd appearance in parliamentary debates and in front of select committees, the delay also means that we still have only a fuzzy picture of what they really think about the key issues stacking up in their in-trays.
And it came in the wake of a report in the Daily Mail over the weekend about an apparent clash between the two over where the government should spend its housing cash and which voters they should be targeting.
10 things about 2019 – part one
Posted: December 24, 2019 Filed under: Council housing, Fire safety, Home ownership, Private renting, Section 21, Tenants Leave a commentOriginally posted on December 24 as a blog for Inside Housing.
It was the year of interminable votes on Brexit, two prime ministers and finally a decisive election victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.
It was also the year that the housing crisis continued to intensify and the year that previous fixes were exposed for the sticking plasters that they really were.
Here is the first of a two-part look back at what I was blogging about in 2019.
1) The politics of housing
Regime change at Downing Street brought a new housing minister heavily implicated in welfare ‘reform’, a renewed focus on home ownership and what I called ‘a great leap backwards’ at the Conservative conference.
At the December election 15 per cent of voters told Ipsos MORI that housing was one of the most important issues for them – down from 22 per cent in 2018 as Brexit and the NHS dominated but three times more than in 2010.
And yet the politics of housing did not seem to matter much as the Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won a big majority away from the big city seats where Generation Rent, homelessness and the cladding scandal had seemed to offer fertile ground for Labour and the Lib Dems.
It was a year that ended with a decisive victory for the leader that promised Brexit and crushing defeat for the parties whose policies might just have fixed the housing crisis.
The bigger question was how far The People’s Government will diverge from Theresa May’s focus on housing and renter issues. The December Queen’s Speech confirmed some continuity, but the Tory manifesto offered few clues and far more emphasis on home ownership seems a given.
Loans, homes and infrastructure
Posted: October 25, 2019 Filed under: Council housing, Housing finance, Uncategorized | Tags: Public Works Loans Board, Treasury Leave a commentOriginally posted on October 25 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The row over the hike in the interest rate for borrowing from the Public Works Loans Board (PWLB) is important in itself but it also raises a more fundamental point about social housing investment.
The rate increase imposed by the Treasury earlier this month seems to have been sparked by concern about councils investing in shopping centres rather than homes, which is ironic given that their rationale is to find new revenue streams to compensate for Treasury-imposed austerity.
However, it reinforces the impression that the government still does not trust councils to invest wisely in housing or anything else.
That view goes way back to 1979, of course, and the borrowing and spending controls that the Thatcher government imposed on council housing along with the right to buy.
But it also recalls the way that the government finally introduced self-financing in April 2012 but accompanied it with caps on borrowing and then undermined their business plans by imposing the 1% a year rent cut from April 2016.
Now, just at the point when research by Inside Housing reveals that councils are ready to scale up their housebuilding, the beancounters have struck again.
