Posted: November 30, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Local government, Shared ownership, Starter homes | Tags: George Osborne, spending review |
Originally posted on November 30 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
For some reason, George Osborne made me think back to the school playground as he set out his spending plans for the next five years.
As the sidekick and heir apparent to the head boy, the chancellor has the power to get what he wants. First he had to correct his mistake from the Summer Budget when he was caught redhanded trying to steal the dinner money of most of the poor kids. He has now handed it back to the Strivers but will be waiting for them in the bushes to claim it back after school.
With that out of the way, he was free to get the gang together to build some homes, by which he means almost exclusively homes to buy. First in line were his main allies the housebuilders.
When you’ve already benefited from billions of pounds worth of loans, guarantees and relaxations in the rules on planning and energy efficiency, what’s another £2.3bn between friends? Yet this was different: the first time that I can remember that grant (presumably it is grant) has gone to pay for something that will not be recycled into more homes.
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Posted: October 27, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Local government, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Social housing, Starter homes | Tags: Brandon Lewis, Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on October 20 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
A few answers and yet more questions: my round-up of the latest developments on the Housing Bill.
An ex-colleague used to speak in awed tones about the time he saw an old-school football reporter compose his match report for the Football Pink as the final whistle sounded. He took a cigarette packet out of this pocket, drew lines on it in the shape of paragraphs, and then dictated a word-perfect report down the line to the copy takers.
Much has changed since the olden days: smoking in public places; laptops and the internet have replaced phones and copy takers; and Pink ‘Uns died out long ago in most cities. But looking back at the events of the past week it seems that cigarette packets remain as popular as ever for drawing up plans – and for things infinitely more complicated than football matches.
This was exactly the metaphor used by an anonymous source in Jill Sherman’s story in The Times last week that the government is set to phase in the extension of the right to buy because of concern over the costs. ‘The Treasury people are hanging their heads in despair,’ the source said. ‘How did this policy that was made up on the back of a fag packet get adopted during the election campaign?’
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Posted: October 6, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Conservatives, Greg Clark, National Housing Federation |
Originally posted on October 13 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
If the result of the NHF ballot was a foregone conclusion, just about everything else about the extension of the right to buy remains unclear.
With a majority of 93% by stock and 86% by membership, the NHF has a result it can present to the government as a resounding endorsement of its voluntary deal. True, it’s only 55% of those eligible to vote (or, as Joe Halewood argues, 20% of all registered providers) but that presentation is what really counts. Given the dubious nature and timing of the vote, this was always going to be the result (see my related post Deal or No Deal?).
But anyone looking for a response from Greg Clark at the Conservative conference on Monday will have come away disappointed. The communities secretary extolled the virtues of the right to buy, argued housing association tenants have the same ambitions to own as everyone else and delivered the line Tories wanted to hear: ‘We are doing what we promised, we are extending the right to buy to housing association tenants.’ But there was no explicit reference to the deal rushed through in time for the conference.
The omission may just be a demonstration of the political sensitivity involved. Early reports said Clark had watered down the manifesto pledge (something he denied, though the voluntary arrangement may result in the right to a discount rather than a right to buy for some tenants). However, it’s also a reflection of how much has still to be resolved.
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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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Jules Birch 