Promising signs on funding and new towns
Posted: February 19, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, New towns Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
After a relentless week of grim international news, it’s good to have something to celebrate on the domestic and housing front.
Until the spending review in the Spring, any assessment of the government’s overall approach to housing will have to be provisional but this week brought some hopeful signs.
First up was the announcement of an extra £300 million for the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP), plus for more temporary housing, then confirmation that this is in addition to the £500 million announced in the Budget in October.
At the time that seemed a little underwhelming given advance speculation that an extra £1 billion might be available but it now seems that some of that was held back.
True, the additional 7,800 affordable homes promised will only make up for a small part of the 50,000 to 70,000-home shortfall against what the 2021-26 AHP was originally expected to deliver, but that still represents a significant short-term boost for this year and lays down a marker for the future in the spending review.
It also recalls the last couple of years of the last Labour government, when regular announcements of extra investment added up to something more significant over time.
Next up, and more for the long term, is the announcement that more than 100 sites across England have been put forward as candidates for the next generation of new towns.
Read the rest of this entry »Housing’s brief appearance in the election spotlight
Posted: June 20, 2024 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, New towns, Planning, Private renting, Right to buy Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The focus of the election finally turned to housing today (Thursday) but blink and you may have missed it.
The issue described as ‘the dog that hasn’t barked’ by Nick Ferrari on LBC was briefly across the airwaves with housing secretary Michael Gove leading for the Conservatives and shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook representing Labour in the wake of plans for renter reform launched overnight.
However, an anonymous quote in Politico Playbook did cause some howling, with a Labour official supposedly saying that ‘I don’t care if we flatten the whole green belt, we just need more houses in this country’.
Rishi Sunak took time off from preparing for tonight’s Question Time to tweet that it was ‘good to finally get Labour’s real views on Britain’s green belt’ while Keir Starmer flatly denied the whole thing on a visit to a housing development on the edge of York. ‘No, that wasn’t Labour party officials,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t Labour party policy.’
So what did we learn from election housing day? I dipped into the morning media round in a bid to find out.
Read the rest of this entry »Housing in the Tory leadership contest
Posted: June 21, 2019 Filed under: Housebuilding, Land, New towns, Right to buy, Section 21, Uncategorized | Tags: Boris Johnson, Conservative Party, Jeremy Hunt Leave a commentOriginally posted as a blog for Inside Housing on June 19 – updated June 21.
Beneath the surface of a Conservative leadership battle dominated by Brexit and Boris Johnson there is a battle of ideas about the future direction of Conservative housing policy.
Put at its simplest, the battle is about whether to continue in the pragmatic direction signalled by Theresa May since 2016 or go back to the more ideological one taken by David Cameron before then.
But scratch a little deeper there are more fundamental debates going on about how far to go in fixing a housing market that most Tories agree has turned into an electoral liability for them.
Key questions such as how far the government should go in borrowing to invest in new homes and intervening in the private rented sector and the land market are back on the Conservative agenda.
Parker Morris and Homes for Today and Tomorrow
Posted: February 19, 2019 Filed under: Council housing, Housebuilding, New towns, Regulation, Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally posted on February 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Listening to a new Radio 4 documentary about Parker Morris and space standards it is impossible not to feel a mix of nostalgia for an era of housing optimism and sadness that our ambitions have shrunk so much since.
As John Grindrod relates in Living Room, the title of the 1961 report was an indication that it was about much more than just a technical exercise in allocating space per person.
Work on Homes for Today and Tomorrow started 60 years ago this year but it was building on a 20th century council housing tradition that began 100 years ago and it was also looking to the future to ensure that homes were fit for it.
‘A good house or flat can never be made out of premises which are too small,’ said the report, which set out a much greater ambition for new homes:
‘An increasing proportion of people are coming to expect their home to do more than just fulfil the basic requirement. It must be something of which they can be proud and in which they can express the fulness of their lives.’
Happy birthday MK
Posted: January 25, 2017 Filed under: New towns, Planning | Tags: Milton Keynes Leave a commentOriginally posted on January 25 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Even if 50 is the new 40 (I rationalised that one long ago) this week’s anniversary of the birth of Milton Keynes is a significant moment in the history of housing – and what was once its future.
MK, as locals call it, has come a long way since it was designated a new town in January 1967 with a brief to become a city. The population is now 250,000 and rising and it has even imported its own football team.In much of the birthday coverage this week it’s called “Britain’s last new town”, probably because it was the biggest and the last to be finished.
In fact, it was the first of the third wave of post-War new towns to be designated: Peterborough celebrates its 50th birthday in July, with Northampton, Warrington, an expanded Telford, and Central Lancashire to follow over the next three years.
But in a week when Theresa May’s cabinet met in Warrington for the launch of her industrial strategy, it’s worth asking why no more have followed. After all, one of the key problems that all three waves of the new towns programme were partly designed to address – how to cope with population overspill from London and other major cities – has not gone away.
Jules Birch 