Making the most of Labour’s inheritance
Posted: April 18, 2024 Filed under: Housing need, Planning, Section 106, Social housing | Tags: Labour Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing
The economic inheritance of the next government will be so dire that it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prospects for housing investment will be even worse.
Take an already inadequate Affordable Homes Programme, add higher costs for construction, building safety, decarbonisation and follow the freeze on capital investment implied in current spending plans and you seem to have a recipe for housing disaster.
However, an important chapter in the latest UK Housing Review challenges that view on two important levels.
Glen Bramley builds on his longstanding work on housing need by essentially looking through the other end of the telescope at different scenarios for total completions of new homes in 2031 (ie after market conditions have recovered from the cost of living crisis etc).
His ‘low’ scenario corresponds with actual performance recently while ‘very low’ takes account of the current economic climate and recent changes in government planning policy that will reduce supply still further.
As the graph shows, under the ‘low’ scenario, there would be just 211,000 completions per year by 2031, with around 66,000 affordable homes including 35,000 for social rent. ‘Very low’ cuts those numbers by more than 20 per cent to just 164,000 overall and 50,000 affordable including 24,000 for social rent.
Judged against those numbers, the other three scenarios look a long way off, especially the promised land of ‘High-medium’ and ‘High’, which correspond with Labour’s pledge of 1.5 million new homes over five years and longstanding calls for 90,000 social rent homes a year.
Read the rest of this entry »The problems with shared ownership
Posted: April 11, 2024 Filed under: Section 106, Shared ownership Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Is shared ownership at a crossroads or a dead end?
The fact that the question has to be posed at all is an indications of the issues now facing the part-buy, part-rent product that has been a mainstay of the affordable home ownership market, Section 106 planning contributions and housing association development programmes over the last three decades.
But after a month that has seen a critical report published by an all-party committee of MPs and relentlessly negative media coverage based on the personal experiences of shared owners, it is also a question that needs answers urgently.
A front-page story in The Observer featured shared owners who have fallen victim to soaring service charges and increases of more than 40 per cent in a year.
With grim irony, they had bought homes at Elephant Park in south London, site of the controversial demolition of the Heygate estate that was meant to be a showpiece for market-led regeneration.
BBC London has reported on cases including a shared owner in King’s Cross in north London whose annual service charge for 2024 rose 274 per cent from £4,200 to £16,000.
There may be many shared owners out there who are happy with their home but these are far from the first horror stories and sadly they will not be the last about a tenure that is meant to offer buyers an affordable way to staircase their way up the housing ladder.
The all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee published a report just before Easter highlighting above-inflation rent increases, uncapped service charges, repairs and maintenance liabilities and complex leases that it said make shared ownership ‘an unbearable reality’ for people looking to become full owners.
Read the rest of this entry »Gove enters the multiverse
Posted: February 16, 2024 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: Michael Gove Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Everything everywhere all at once’ is how Michael Gove describes the welter of proposals on housing announced this week and under consideration for the Budget next month.
In one of the alternative realities that make up in the multiverse in the 2022 film, this is his Long-Term Plan for Housing producing results at last. In another, the Conservatives end their in-fighting and build on their victories in Thursday’s two by-elections.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the housing secretary makes clear what he believes is at stake if young people feel they are excluded from home ownership: ‘If people think that markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get — and this is the worrying thing to me — an increasing number of young people saying, ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I don’t believe in markets.’
And he says he remains committed to a ban no-fault evictions via the Renters Reform Bill and determined to face down opposition from ‘vested interests’ to the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill.
Read the rest of this entry »Review – Britain’s housing crisis: What went wrong?
Posted: October 24, 2023 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning, Television 1 CommentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Watch a few minutes of the new BBC housing documentary and you’ll get annoyed. Watch an episode and you’ll be full of righteous anger.
Over two hour-long episodes, Britain’s Housing Crisis: What Went Wrong?does a great job of revealing the key episodes along the way and the bad actors at the heart of them.
Interviews with leading politicians, special advisers, financiers and developers are intercut with archive news footage that neatly illustrates the way that things got steadily worse as national politics concentrated on the external crises like the credit crunch, Brexit, Covid and the rest. These are complemented well by interviews with activists who campaigned for action to put things right.
The programme does a great job of telling the story of, as the first episode puts it, ‘how a dream was destroyed by two decades of political and economic failure’ and of putting that in the wider context of house prices inflated by lax mortgage lending to the detriment of the rest of the economy.
It traces what’s gone wrong with the property-owning democracy promised by post-war politicians as house prices have soared to ever more unaffordable levels since New Labour won the election in 1997.
But why just two decades? And why start in 1997 when that edits out key parts of the social housing story: the Right to Buy, the strangulation of council housing and the rise of housing associations and private finance.
For home ownership, it starts after the zenith of the property-owning democracy under Margaret Thatcher. It also ignores the liberalisation of the financial system in the 1980s that led to the demutualisation of building societies, broke the link between savings and lending and opened the UK mortgage market up to international capital flows.
For private renting, it leaves out the ending of security of tenure in 1988 that would later underpin the rise of Buy to Let and landlords pricing out first-time buyers.
That also meant it did not put what’s happened to house prices since 1997 in the context of previous booms. Look back to 1989-1992 and you’ll see the key difference that it was followed by a crash that eventually made prices relatively affordable again. Starting in 1997 gives the slightly misleading impression that prices have almost inevitably gone in one direction.
Read the rest of this entry »The parties start to set out their general election stall
Posted: May 4, 2023 Filed under: Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If this week was a preview of what the main parties will be offering on housing at the next general election then it is probably best to look away now.
Perhaps the best that can be said is that, just as Thursday’s local elections only offer clues as to the outcome of next year’s big event, so the policies announced in the run-up to them may only be a taster of what’s still to come.
But that is being optimistic: otherwise we got some standard tropes from Labour about
home ownership and signals that the Conservatives could be about to reach back into their collection of greatest misses.
In a series of interviews on Sunday, Keir Starmer set out his ambition for Labour to be ‘the party of home ownership’:
This standard appeal to aspirational voters begs some obvious questions about how and what else.
Restoring targets for housebuilding recently scrapped by the Conservatives would be a good start and would come alongside existing Labour policies of ‘first dibs’ for local first-time buyers and a block on overseas buyers.
But whether that will be enough to generate 300,000 new homes a year (the targets hadn’t done that before they were scrapped) and whether even that will make homes more affordable must both be doubtful.
The following day (coincidence?) The Times reported that Rishi Sunak is putting Help to Buy ‘back on the table’ as a key plank in the campaign for a potential Conservative fifth term.
Government sources told the paper that the move could come in the Autumn Statement or the Spring Budget. ‘We cannot go into the next election without an offer for first-time buyers,’ said a minister. ‘We all know that homeowners are more likely to vote Conservative and we cannot cede this ground to Labour.’
Read the rest of this entry »Gove’s admission begs more questions
Posted: January 30, 2023 Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Michael Gove’s admission that ‘faulty and ambiguous’ building regulations set by central government were partly to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken even passing notice of the evidence at the public inquiry.
That a statement so blindingly obvious should be enough to prompt a worried look from one of the levelling up secretary’s media minders speaks volumes about the government’s stance up to now. It also begs significant questions about the administration’s approach to housing going forward.
The admission (and the look) came in an interview with the Sunday Times trailing the announcement on Monday that developers have six weeks to sign legally binding contracts to repair unsafe buildings or, in effect, lose the ability to build anything else.
As the levelling up secretary told Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News: ‘The people who were responsible for erecting buildings which we now know are unsafe have to pay the costs of making sure those buildings are safe.’
Except that making UK-registered developers liable for fixing the blocks they built themselves via the contracts but for paying to fix other buildings via the Building Safety Levy does not really capture all of those responsible.
As the inquiry has revealed, that list includes just about every part of the construction industry, and especially product manufacturers. Mr Gove’s written statement on Monday does say that contractors and manufacturers are among those whose conduct is being investigated by his department’s Recovery Strategy Unit.
The list now also includes a government that Mr Gove says ‘collectively has to take some responsibility’ (meaning current and previous governments).
Read the rest of this entry »Building a better future or surrendering to the past?
Posted: January 10, 2023 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
So now we know what the ‘people’s priorities’ are – and housing is not one of them.
The fact that housing did not feature in the speech from Rishi Sunak setting out his agenda for the new year is not a surprise in itself – his five pledges all covered issues with far greater political saliency.
But it is still surprising that in a speech on ‘building a better future’ he did not mention housing at all and that, apart from a boast about stabilising mortgage rates, the speech steered clear of traditional Tory territory on home ownership.
He did talk about community (‘a better future also means reinforcing people’s pride in the places they call home’) and making places better (‘I love my local community and it’s not right that too many for far too long have not felt that same sense of meaning and belonging’).
But he is talking here about people who already have places they can call home and avoids any mention of those who do not have a home or need a new or more affordable one.
And that is no coincidence because he was speaking in the wake of the government’s surrender late last year to its own backbenchers on planning and housebuilding.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 