David Cameron and the £720,000 ‘affordable’ home
Posted: November 1, 2013 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Planning, Shared ownership Leave a commentA comment on my blog a couple of weeks ago alerted me to a contradiction in terms: a £720,000 ‘affordable’ home.
The two-bedroom flat in Pear Tree Street, Islington appears on the Share to Buy website, the official home of the Mayor of London’s FirstSteps scheme that comes complete with the strapline ‘making housing affordable’. It’s available under a shared ownership, part-rent, part-buy scheme. As Tracy Dover commented: ‘I’d love to know who is eligible for shared ownership and can afford this!’
It can be yours for a £9,000 deposit plus monthly payments of £2,444 for rent, service charge and mortgage. By my calculations that represents around half the take-home pay of a household with the maximum eligible income of £80,000.
Bonus culture
Posted: October 31, 2013 Filed under: Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentSo has what started out as ‘a Rolls Royce idea’ ended up ‘a Reliant Robin policy in practice’?
That’s not me describing the New Homes Bonus but Conservative MP Stewart Jackson. Now a member of the public accounts committee (PAC), he was speaking at an evidence session in June ahead of its report published this morning. He was also a shadow communities minister at the time the bonus became a Conservative flagship policy.
With scepticism like that on the Conservative side it’s little wonder that the PAC has more scathing criticism of the handling of the policy. It follows an embarrassing verdict (for the DLCG) delivered by the National Audit Office (NAO) in March.
2020 vision
Posted: September 24, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentEd Miliband’s conference speech was much vaguer about housing than the advance briefing but it still sounds like good news.
The Labour leader said that ‘we’ll have an aim that at the end of the parliament Britain will be building 200,000 homes a year, more than at any time in a generation’.
He said that in 2010 there were a million too few homes in Britain but that the shortfall would rise to two million – the equivalent of five cities the size of Birmingham – by 2020 if we carry on as we are.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Debating downsizing
Posted: April 24, 2013 Filed under: Housing market, Planning Leave a commentSo it turns out that the Daily Mash has the answer to the housing crisis: build more bungalows but make them stackable.
As ever, Policy Exchange has succeeded in identifying a problem – the distribution of housing between old and young – and coming up with a media-friendly solution that sees planning as the villain of the piece. The ‘return of the bungalow’ for elderly downsizers has duly made all the headlines this week.
The problem with bungalows – and the reason why so few are now built – is that they don’t make financial sense in areas with high land prices where the affordability crisis is most acute. No housebuilder or housing association in their right mind would use scarce and expensive land in such an inefficient way. Existing bungalows tend to cost more than bigger terraced homes but only because of the potential to knock them down and redevelop their large plots. As the RIBA revealed yesterday, the average new-build one-bedroom home is now not the size of a spacious bungalow with a garden but of a London tube train carriage.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Nudging the nimbys
Posted: January 10, 2013 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning 5 CommentsThe minister introduces a ‘powerful new incentive’ for local communities to approve new homes. Sound familiar?
I am of course not talking about planning minister Nick Boles and his scheme to give local communities a share of the community infrastructure levy but former housing minister Grant Shapps and the new homes bonus.
As quickly became clear, this wasn’t a bonus and it didn’t have much to do with new homes either. It was more a mechanism for creating winners and losers (affluent areas and deprived ones). In the year before the first payments were made, there were a miserable 113,000 housing starts in England. In the year after, there were 105,000.
So what’s the difference between the Shapps Sweeteners and the Boles Bungs? The planning minister could quite reasonably point out that his cash will get closer to local communities because it will go to parish and town councils whereas the bonus goes to local authorities. In theory at least that should cut out the middle man and make the bribe more persuasive.
Where’s the evidence on section 106?
Posted: November 7, 2012 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentThe government’s plans on section 106 and affordable housing came under fire from all sides of both houses of parliament this week – and no wonder.
In the Commons, communities secretary Eric Pickles said the Growth and Infrastructure Bill would cut red tape by allowing the renegotiation of ‘economically unrealistic’ section 106 agreements. ‘In our sights particularly are affordable housing requirements that were negotiated at the height of Labour’s unsustainable housing boom. Now that the Brown bubble has burst, bringing us back to reality with a bump, we recognise that 75,000 homes, with planning permission, are lying unbuilt.’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Backyard blues
Posted: October 11, 2012 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentIt’s great news that David Cameron used his conference speech to criticise nimbys and call for more homes but does he really get the problem?
In the week that has seen the launch of the pan-housing Homes for Britaincampaign it was significant that the prime minister went beyond the odd dutiful word in his leader’s speech at Birmingham. The bit that really struck me was this:
‘There are those who say “yes of course we need more housing”…but “no” to every development – and not in my backyard. Look – it’s OK for my generation. Many of us have got on the ladder. But you know the average age that someone buys their first home today, without any help for their parents? 33 years old. We are the party of home ownership – we cannot let this carry on. ’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Home delivery
Posted: September 5, 2012 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentIt’s still very early days but the appointments of the new ministerial team at the DCLG team are already raising some questions for me.
According the line being spun by the new Conservative chair Grant Shapps on the Today programme this morning, the government is now at the delivery stage. Within that context, new housing minister Mark Prisk’s previous job as construction minister should bode well for the top priority of building more homes. Meanwhile the appointment of Nick Boles as planning minister looks to signal a fresh emphasis on reforming the planning system to boost the economy.
However, a brief look at their track record suggests some intriguing possibilities on policy – as well as some potential tensions. Here are three initial questions that occur to me about the green belt, private rented sector regulation and housebuilding.
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.
Jules Birch 