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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Starter for 20

Posted: December 15, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, Planning | Tags: | 1 Comment

The government’s plan for starter homes with a 20 per cent discount begs all sorts of questions. Today we got some of the answers.

The scheme announced by David Cameron this morning was first trailed in his conference speech in October as an idea for after the election but has now apparently been brought forward to start early next year.

Some of the details of Dave’s Dream Homes seem to have changed along the way. According to a DCLG consultation also published today,  the starter homes initiative seems to amount to an extension of rural exceptions sites to urban areas. So how will it work?

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Housing: where’s the plan?

Posted: November 5, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Housebuilding, Planning, Tax | Tags: | Leave a comment

A new book by the economist whose work first established the 250,000 homes a year benchmark has to be worth reading – especially when she’s not convinced it’s possible anymore.

Kate Barker’s seminal report on housing for the Blair government nailed the idea that the UK and especially England need to build houses at a much faster rate. A decade, and a separate study of planning, later and it still the ultimate source for targets of 200,000, 250,000 and even 300,000 homes a year to cope with demand and make up for the shortfall.

Now she’s back with Housing: Where’s the Plan, a short book setting out the housing challenge and potential solutions to it. With the new homes deficit rising by the year, she starts with a sober assessment of the possibilities:

‘To create a fairer and less harmful housing market, a combination of strong central direction about housing supply and unpopular taxation changes would be required. But politicians find it hard to grasp these nettles: there is far too much short-term pain and the gain will go to their successors. It is easier for them to carry on with somewhat ineffective knee-jerk and populist help for first-time buyers.’

While a perfect market may not be possible the book suggests ‘criteria for what a better housing market might look like’. However, she injects a note of caution from the outset:

‘I have become less convinced that it will be possible to meet demand in much of southern England, given the strength of local opposition in many places. So building more housing will not be the only answer, we also need to ameliorate the consequences of demand continuing to exceed the available supply.’

In less than 100 pages, the book covers an immense amount of ground including the sort of outcomes we want, post-war housing and planning policy, the housing market and the wider economy, market risks and taxation. Read the rest of this entry »

Lyons made

Posted: October 16, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Garden cities, Housebuilding, Planning, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

The Lyons Review is the most significant report on new housing supply in years but it’s much more convincing on private sector housebuilding than social housing.

Lyons picks up where Barker left off on housing in 2004 (and on planning in 2007) but with two added bits of context. First, we’ve gone backwards in the last ten years: annual output is around half what we needed and the backlog of unmet need is mounting by the day. Second, any solutions have to operate under severe political and financial constraints.

So anyone reading the report whose priority is more social housing will come away disappointed with the recommendations for a future Labour government. There will be no change in the borrowing rules for council housing and no increase in the borrowing caps except for potential swapping between authorities. The case for continuing and increased grant subsidy is accepted but subject to overall constraints on public spending in which social housing will be an unspecified ‘priority’ for more money.

And anyone hoping for a shift in the political obsession with aspiration and ownership rather than homes will already have been disappointed by the advance coverage. The Labour Party’s spin has been all about first-time buyers and ‘homes for locals’ even though they get relatively minor mentions in the report itself.

However, as with the launch setting of Milton Keynes the report offers solid grounds for optimism too. Here at last is consensus on a long-term strategy in place of the short-term gimmicks we’ve seen ever since the financial crisis.

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

Home front

Posted: September 10, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Garden cities, Housebuilding, Planning | Leave a comment

With eight months to go until the general election the battle to influence the manifestos has begun in earnest.

Party conference season begins with Labour on September 21 but organisations from across the housing spectrum have been publishing manifestos of their own in a bid to reach the politicians.

Conservative Home (see my blog here) was early out of the blocks but the influential Tory website has been followed by the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) and Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in the last week. The Fabian Society has just published a report last week on the ‘silent majority’ in favour of more social housing. The National Housing Federation (NHF) is set to reveal its election plans at its conference next week.

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

About time

Posted: September 1, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Garden cities, Housing market, Mortgages | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Sellafield. Parental help. Mortgages lasting 40 years. Welcome to housing affordability in the 21st century.

Exhibit one is a survey by the TUC comparing median house prices and earnings in local authority areas across England. It finds that Copeland in Cumbria, home of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility, is the only one that is easily affordable on less than three times earnings. Nowhere in southern England is affordable at less than five times earnings.

Exhibit two is an opinion poll of parents conducted by the National Housing Federation. It finds that 81 per cent of parents are worried about the impact of rising house prices on the next generation, 69 per cent think their children will not be able to buy without their financial support and 25 per cent are already saving for their children’s first home.

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

Going the extra mile

Posted: August 4, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Garden cities, Housebuilding | Leave a comment

How far should the government go to buy off local opposition to new garden cities?

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said over the weekend that ministers would consider options including council tax reductions and house price guarantees to ensure that local communities do not lose out. He told the BBC’s Countryfile programme (watch from about eight minutes in): ‘What I’m saying is we’re actively looking at things like that to show that we will go the extra mile to allay those concerns of people who feel that their property, or the price of their home, might be affected. We don’t want people to lose out.’

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

Welcome shift

Posted: July 29, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning | Leave a comment

People seem to be getting the ‘Yes to Homes’ message at last but have the nimbys really had their day?

A survey of public attitudes to new housebuilding published by the DCLG on Saturday reveals a welcome shift when people are asked whether they support or oppose more homes being built in their local area.

New housing and planning minister Brandon Lewis welcomed the results as evidence that nimbyism is on the wane.

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

Closed doors

Posted: July 28, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, London, Planning | Tags: | Leave a comment

What is it about a ‘poor door’ that causes so much outrage?

The term has captured something on both sides of the Atlantic: first on an exclusive development in New York City last year and then applied to agrowing trend in London reported in Saturday’s Guardian.

The London building at the centre of that story – One Commerical Street on the eastern fringes of the City – was the same one that I blogged about last year when it was chosen by chancellor George Osborne as the venue for his speech arguing that the economy was ‘turning the corner’.

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

Shuffling the deck

Posted: July 16, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Civil service, Housebuilding, Planning, Universal credit | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

So housing seems to have kept the politicians who should have gone and lost the one who was making a difference.

Speculation ahead of the reshuffle suggested that Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith would leave their posts as part of the cull of middle aged men in the Cabinet. True, some of the stories seemed a bit thin (a woman with a posh accent overheard talking on the phone didn’t seem like much to go on) but I lived in hope. I also looked forward to the DWP press release arguing that it proved that universal credit is ‘on track and on schedule’.

Instead it’s business as usual at the top of their two departments with a shake-up lower down the ministerial scale. After just over nine months in the job, Kris Hopkins is now the former housing minister and is shunted sideways into local government. Brandon Lewis moves from that job and gets a promotion to minister of state for housing and planning. Penny Mordaunt comes in as junior minister responsible for coastal communities.

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

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