The limits of localism

Posted: March 13, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Local government, Private renting, Regulation | Tags: | Leave a comment

Have any of the 516 housing announcements made by the DCLG under the coalition plumbed lower depths than this week’s ‘ending the tenant tax to help tackle rogue landlords’?

It’s not that there is no tenant tax out there to be tackled. The government could end the extortionate letting agent fees. It could stop the rent shortfalls faced by tenants whose local housing allowance has been cut. And it could limit the tax and financing advantages enjoyed by buy-to-let landlords that trap people as renters. Even if we limit the term to the private rented sector, and don’t include the bedroom tax, there are any number of options.

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Bonus verdict

Posted: December 17, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Local government, Planning | Tags: | 2 Comments

The New Homes Bonus, the government’s flagship policy on housing supply, is listing badly. Does it deserve to stay afloat?

Labour has pledged to scrap the policy introduced by Grant Shapps as a ‘powerful new incentive’ for local communities to support new homes. The National Audit Office delivered a damning verdict last year. And a Conservative member of the public accounts committee memorably described it as a Rolls Royce idea that ended up as a Reliant Robin in practice.

Now, the government has finally published an evaluation, which summarises the results of internal DCLG and externally commissioned the research. So what’s the verdict?

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2020 visions

Posted: October 20, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Local government, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

So what clues does the Lyons Review offers us about housing up to 2020? Here are some more thoughts.

The review is important in its own right as one of the most significant political reports on housing in the last ten years. However, it also gives us a much more detailed impression of what life will be like under a Labour government in the second half of this decade to add to the outlines of what we can expect under the Conservatives.

I argued in my blog last week that Lyons is good on housebuilding but offers little to supporters of social housing. If you judge the review by what it was asked to do (provide recommendations to Labour on how to get to 200,000 new homes a year in England by 2020) your verdict will tend to be positive. If on the other hand you ask whether recommendations made within these constraints are enough to solve the housing crisis you will be much more negative (for example, see this blog by Alex Hilton).

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

 

Discretion and discrimination

Posted: May 9, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Local government, Welfare state | 3 Comments

Shocking new figures published by Inside Housing reveal yet again the holes in the safety net provided by discretionary housing payments (DHPs).

On one level it beggars belief that in the last financial year councils turned down 70,000 requests for help from tenants facing cuts in their housing benefit and returned £9 million of DHP funding to central government.

On another, it’s no surprise that a system devolved to local authorities facing their own budget cuts has experienced problems or that one based on local discretion has varied so much between different areas.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Paying the (affordable) rent

Posted: April 8, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Local government, Social housing | Tags: , | Leave a comment

The affordable v social debate took centre stage in the Commons yesterday and also emerged as an issue in the prospectus for new borrowing for council housing.

Communities and Local Government questions initially saw the usual routine in which a Labour MP asks a question about social rented housing and coalition ministers boast about the affordable homes programme.

Yesterday was different. Perhaps it was because Labour’s Heidi Alexander challenged the obfuscation directly:

‘I asked the Minister about social rented housing, not just affordable housing. The truth is that this Government do not want to build social housing; they want to decimate it. Will he tell me why the number of social rented homes being built in London last year was roughly one tenth of the number being built in the capital in 2009?’

And perhaps it was because the minister answering the question was not the housing minister Kris Hopkins but his fellow junior communities minister Stephen Williams. Hopkins seemed to be confined to questions about private renting and self build and, disappointingly, was not asked about his contention on Newsnight that rising house prices are ‘a good thing’.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Making the move

Posted: March 13, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Legal, Local government, Private renting | Leave a comment

Forced out of area moves are on the increase and they are not just happening in London.

The Oxford Times reports this week on cases of people being offered homes as far away in Cardiff, Cheltenham and Birmingham. The council blames the cuts in housing benefit and the benefit cap that make it impossible to find affordable private rented accommodation but a local solicitor has accused it of dumping people outside the area.

Elysha Britnell, a 22 year old mother of two children, was told she would have to move out of her temporary accommodation in Oxford and accept a home in Birmingham. She says she has no family and friends outside Oxford and has never lived anywhere else and is appealing against the decision:

‘I’m Oxford born and bred. If this appeal fails I’ll be completely homeless. I have got nowhere else to go. Even if I go to Birmingham, I may as well be homeless, because I have nobody there.’

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Rent squeeze

Posted: February 19, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Labour market, Local government, Social housing | Leave a comment

Why is there so little debate about the fact that social housing rents are set to rise so much faster than prices and earnings?

Figures out this week from the ONS show that CPI inflation rose 1.9 per cent in the year to January and average earnings rose just 1.1 per cent in 2013. Earnings have now been falling in real terms since 2010, the longest period forat least 50 years.

And yet all around the country social landlords are preparing to increase their rents by at least twice the rate of inflation, and many times more than earnings, according to recent surveys by Inside Housing.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Rough times

Posted: February 13, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Homelessness, Local government | Leave a comment

In a grim few years for housing and homelessness No Second Night Out stands out as a rare bright spot.

The idea behind the scheme, which was extended to 20 areas outside London in 2011, is that the longer someone sleeps rough the greater the risk that they will become trapped on the streets and vulnerable to crime, drug or alcohol issues or mental or physical health problems. No Second Night Out (NSNO) aims to help people off the streets as quickly as possible and ensure that they do not return.

 Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

10 things about 2013: part 1

Posted: December 23, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Legal, Local government, Social housing, Welfare reform, Welfare state | Tags: | Leave a comment

The first of a two-part look back about the issues and people that I’ve been blogging about this year.

1) The year of the bedroom tax

Thinking back to the beginning of January it was obvious that the under-occupation penalty would be a huge issue for housing in 2013. What soon became clear was that it would go mainstream in the national media and parliament too. The closer we got to implementation in April, the more scrutiny it received, and the more that happened the clearer the unfairness and the contradictions at the heart of the policy came into focus. All the attention seemed at first to take the government by surprise too. It wasn’t until February that Grant Shapps came up with the government’s preferred term: the spare room subsidy. That prompted me to blog about the battle of language on the issue and in the wider debate about welfare/social security.

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City limits

Posted: November 26, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning | 1 Comment

Today’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

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