City limits
Posted: November 26, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning 1 CommentToday’s Draft London Housing Strategy is the boldest attempt yet seen from a Conservative administration to get to grips with the housing crisis. It still does not go remotely far enough.
In his foreword, mayor Boris Johnson says London is facing an ‘epic challenge’ of building more than 42,000 new homes a year, every year, for 25 years. Of these, 15,000 would be affordable and 5,000 for market rent.
That is no exaggeration. As he goes on to say, that is ‘a level of housebuilding unseen in our great city since the 1930s’. To put it in perspective, the average over the last 20 years, at a time when the population was growing rapidly, was 18,000 per year. London has not come close to 42,000 completions a year since the war, even at the peak of the council housing boom in the late 1960s.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Bonus culture
Posted: October 31, 2013 Filed under: Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentSo has what started out as ‘a Rolls Royce idea’ ended up ‘a Reliant Robin policy in practice’?
That’s not me describing the New Homes Bonus but Conservative MP Stewart Jackson. Now a member of the public accounts committee (PAC), he was speaking at an evidence session in June ahead of its report published this morning. He was also a shadow communities minister at the time the bonus became a Conservative flagship policy.
With scepticism like that on the Conservative side it’s little wonder that the PAC has more scathing criticism of the handling of the policy. It follows an embarrassing verdict (for the DLCG) delivered by the National Audit Office (NAO) in March.
2020 vision
Posted: September 24, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentEd Miliband’s conference speech was much vaguer about housing than the advance briefing but it still sounds like good news.
The Labour leader said that ‘we’ll have an aim that at the end of the parliament Britain will be building 200,000 homes a year, more than at any time in a generation’.
He said that in 2010 there were a million too few homes in Britain but that the shortfall would rise to two million – the equivalent of five cities the size of Birmingham – by 2020 if we carry on as we are.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Shappsenfreude
Posted: March 27, 2013 Filed under: Empty homes, Housebuilding, Local government Leave a commentSo, shockingly, it turns out that the government’s ‘powerful new incentive’ to councils to approve more homes may not be working out quite like that.
A damning report on the New Homes Bonus published today by the National Audit Office (NA0) is deeply embarrassing for the DCLG and former housing minister Grant Shapps but it hardly comes as a huge surprise.
The flaws were pretty clear right from the beginning. As I argued when the first allocations were made, it is not really a bonus and it amounts to a mechanism for transferring funding from deprived areas of the north to affluent areas of the south for homes that would have been built anyway.
Growing pains
Posted: February 5, 2013 Filed under: Local government, Private renting Leave a commentIf you drive a car, you need a license, an MOT and insurance. Why should it be any different to rent out a house?
That point – made by Jacky Peacock of the National Private Tenants Organisation at a Communities and Local Government committee hearing yesterday – got me thinking about the whole issue of licensing and the private rented sector.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Lack of support
Posted: January 21, 2013 Filed under: Local government, Welfare reform | Tags: council tax benefit Leave a commentAfter a u-turn by the Welsh government, England is the only UK nation still planning to cut council tax benefit in April – and not all of England either.
As tenants and landlords gear up for the bedroom tax and the household benefit cap in April and the start of the universal credit in October, it’s all too easy to forget the cut that will see affected households lose another £2 to £3 a week. The cut will see administration of council tax benefit transferred from the UK government to devolved administrations and English local authorities but with a 10 per cent cut in funding that will save the Treasury £470 million.
Wales had been planning to implement a national scheme but late on Thursday the devolved administration revealed that it had found an extra £22 million to help with bills in 2013/14.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 