Posted: October 2, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Greg Clark, National Housing Federation |
Originally posted on September 28 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
As the clock ticks down to 5pm on Friday, what should really count in the momentous decision to be taken by housing associations?
My first thought was this is like the ‘offer he can’t refuse’ scene in The Godfather. Vote No to the ‘voluntary’ deal on the Right to Buy and you may not wake up in bed next to the head of your favourite horse but you will be inviting Osborne to do his worst in the spending review in November.
Then I thought of the BBC. Looked at in terms of narrow self-interest it seems a no brainer. Better, surely, to strike a deal on the most generous terms you can now than wait for the government to impose the same thing on much worse terms later. That’s exactly what the BBC did before the Budget when it ‘voluntarily’ swallowed the cost of free TV licenses for the over-75s in return for an increase in the license fee.
My next thought was more cynical. Isn’t the NHF a bit like the Premier League when it signed the deal with Sky that excluded the rest of football from its TV billions? Even Sky didn’t make the other clubs sell their best players to pay for it.
And then I came back to the comparison that defenders of housing associations in the House of Lords spent the Spring and early Summer making: the complaint that this is the biggest seizure of charitable assets since the dissolution of the monasteries. Except that as far as I know the monastic orders did not voluntarily agree to the seizure provided they received full compensation paid for by the forcible sale of convents.
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Posted: September 17, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Local government, Right to buy | Tags: Shelter |
Originally posted on September 17 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
As official figures further undermine the government’s credibility on the right to buy there are new doubts about the feasibility of the plan to extend it.
If ministers are to meet their pledge of one for one replacement of all homes sold, starts on site should now be rising sharply as receipts from earlier sales feed through the system. Any guesses what’s happening instead?
That’s right, the latest quarterly stats from the DCLG show that just 307 replacements were started between April and June – down 17 per cent on a year ago. The significance of this is not just the year-on-year fall itself, the first since the government ‘reinvigorated’ the right to buy with increased discounts and the replacement pledge in April 2012. Nor even that starts are down 56 per cent on the previous quarter (the end of the financial year). It’s also that this quarter marks three years since the start of the new scheme: the small print of the pledge says that replacements will be built within three years for all additional homes sold on top of those already forecast.
That in turn raises severe doubts about the government’s claim that it can fund the extension of the right to buy through the forced sale of high-value council homes. It claims this will raise enough to pay for the discounts, pay off the historic debt, replace all homes sold one for one and set up a brownfield fund. The detail has not yet been published but the plan has led to alarm even among Conservatives about the impact in London.
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Posted: September 11, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing associations, Local government, Shared ownership, Social housing | Tags: spending review |
Originally posted on September 11 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
With 11 weeks to go until the spending review, final efforts are being made to convince George Osborne of the case for housing.
The trouble is he’s already made it pretty clear he’s only interested in home ownership, may cannibalise what’s left of the housing budget to pay for it and he doesn’t seem to like housing associations much.
What we know so far is that the chancellor wants to cut departmental spending by £20bn and that departments have been told to model for two different scenarios: real terms cuts of 25% and 40%. If that is not bad enough, housing is an unprotected area and so bound to suffer when Osborne announces the details in November, potentially in multiple ways.
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Posted: June 3, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, Right to buy | Tags: House of Lords, Lord Best, Lord Kerslake |
If the opening salvoes are anything to go by, we are in for a long battle in the House of Lords over the right to buy.
The Conservatives do not have a majority in the Lords. By convention peers do not vote against legislation that was in the government’s manifesto but that still leaves plenty of room for amendments. It’s also hard to see how the government could claim financial privilege to reverse Lords amendments, as it did with the Welfare Reform Act.
Tuesday’s debate was only a short one on that bit of the Queen’s Speech but it was also a preview of the key themes that will be debated over the next few months and some of the key peers who will be making the arguments.
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Posted: June 1, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, London, Right to buy, Social media |
As all the attention focuses on housing associations, what about the impact of the right to buy extension on local authorities?
Councils in England have sold 1.8 million homes to tenants since 1980. Sales accelerated again following the introduction of increased discounts by the coalition with little sign of the promised one for one replacement. Now they face being forced to sell their remaining high value stock as it becomes vacant to pay for the discounts for housing association tenants. The receipts will allegedly finance the discounts, plus the construction of replacement homes plus a £1 billion brownfield regeneration fund.
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Posted: May 27, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Benefit cap, Garden cities, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Local government, Planning, Starter homes, Welfare reform | Tags: Conservatives |
Is One Nation Conservatism anything more than PR puff? The conclusion of my blog sets out 12 tests of what it could and should mean in housing.
In the wake of the unexpected election result influential voices within the Conservative Party talked about the need for a new appeal to the aspirational working classes. Whether it’s called Blue Collar or One Nation Conservatism, the idea is to shake off the negativity of the nasty party, steal Labour’s clothes and lock in another majority for 2020.
Part one of this blog featured calls by people like Tim Montgomerie, David Green, Nick de Bois and Christian Guy not just for a radical new approach to housebuilding to spread the benefits of home ownership but also a new approach to housing to meet the needs of renters. Guy called housing ‘one of the social justice issues of our time’. There was more of this over the weekend, with Chris Walker of Policy Exchange calling housing ‘key to a Conservative vision for working people’.
But what does all this Tory philosophising amount to? The desire to appeal to aspirational workers (and for power in 2020) is certainly genuine enough but is the party really ready for its implications? The suspicion remains that this is as much about redefining the meaning of ‘One Nation’ as it is about changing course: one nation for those able to Work Hard and Do the Right Thing that looks the other way when it comes to those who cannot and ignores the fact that many of them will still not be able to pay their rent.
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Posted: April 22, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, London, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Policy Exchange |
Can two former housing ministers, a flagship Conservative local authority and David Cameron’s favourite think tank all be wrong?
Conservatives may dismiss as self-interested scaremongering the hostile reaction to their manifesto plan to extend the right to buy to all housing association tenants. What happens when you deconstruct the plan using the statements and actions of people on their own side?
1) Because two former Conservative housing ministers say so…
We already knew that Grant Shapps told the 2012 CIH conference that it was not viable in the current financial climate. ‘If I wanted to extend right to buy, which I do, we would have to find billions of pounds,’ he said.
Over the weekend, the Observer reported that Kris Hopkins told Lib Dem MP Tessa Munt in a letter in late 2013 that:
‘Unlike local authorities, housing associations are independent, not-for-profit voluntary bodies and if they are obliged to consistently sell off their stock at less than market value they might find it difficult to borrow which could impact adversely on their repair and maintenance programmes and affect the future provision of affordable housing.
‘The government does not consider that it would be reasonable to require housing associations to sell these properties at a discount. Any increase to the discount available under the Right to Acquire would only be possible through upfront central government subsidy, potentially incurring a high liability for the public purse.’
The policy that was not viable as part of the ‘long-term economic plan’ now seems to make perfect sense in the financial climate of an election campaign. Little wonder that opposition to it is not confined to the usual suspects.
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Posted: April 14, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, Right to buy | Tags: Conservatives |
So does the ‘buccaneering’ Conservative plan to extend the right to buy to housing association tenants stack up?
I was on 5 Live earlier talking about the big idea in today’s Tory manifestoand as usual only got to say half of what I wanted to say. The package beforehand was interesting: tenants from a housing association estate in the Old Kent Road were enthusiastic; but people on an estate in Dartford where the homes were long ago sold off could see the consequences as housing benefit ends up going to private landlords.
I argued that it’s a great idea in theory: if you can help people buy their own home and have enough money to build replacements, why not do it? In practice though, we’ve never come close to achieving this. The government promised one for one replacement for council homes sold in 2012 but the rate so far is one new home started for every 11 sold.
Extending the right to buy to housing associations was meant to be part of the original right to buy in the 1980s but dropped because it was too expensive and because so many associations are charities who have to use their assets for charitable purposes. If Margaret Thatcher couldn’t make it work then, how will David Cameron make it work now? If it’s such a great idea in England, why is Scotland ending the right to buy in 2016 and Wales consulting on doing the same?
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Posted: April 13, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Help to Buy, Housing benefit, Housing market, Local government | Tags: Labour |
If you’re looking for anything new on housing in the Labour manifesto you’re going to have to search very hard for it.
The party’s priorities were clearly elsewhere in the document launched this morning and the housing sections are largely rehashes of Labour’s response to the Lyons Review and of previous statements on social security.
Housing gets a mention in the introduction but only in relation to housebuilding and home ownership:
‘We are not building the homes we need. Our sons and daughters have been shut out of the housing market and too often they are forced to leave the communities where they were brought up.’
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Posted: March 25, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Local government, London, Regeneration, Social housing | Tags: Andrew Adonis, IPPR |
Inner city council estates were once the solution to the housing crisis, then the problem. Now they could be the solution again. But for who?
There is arguably no more controversial issue in housing than the regeneration of existing social housing estates, especially in London. Schemes in boroughs right across the capital have hit the headlines, mostly for the wrong reasons.
In a report this week, the Labour peer Lord Adonis and the think tank IPPR presents a vision for what they call ‘city villages’. The scope is broad, with town centres, private renting and the great private estates of central London discussed alongside some opposing views about new towns. However, the focus is overwhelmingly on the densification of existing council estates with mixed tenure development. If anyone attending the launch needed any reminding that this is controversial territory, tenants from the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates in Hammersmith & Fulham were protesting outside.
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Jules Birch 