Posted: October 24, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Culture, Homelessness, Local government, Poverty, Temporary accommodation, Welfare reform | Tags: I Daniel Blake, No Place to Call Home |
Originally published on October 24 on my blog for Inside Housing
Whether we are talking about benefits or housing, a new Ken Loach film and a BBC documentary expose a system that’s failing. In the face of growing demand and shrinking provision, the safety net has gaping holes. Rising homelessness and the queues at foodbanks are the symbols of this. The basics of life – shelter, food and warmth – can no longer be taken for granted.
Seen from the outside this is obvious and so are the answers. Return to provision based on need. Build more social housing. Abandon the divisive rhetoric of strivers and scroungers. Follow the founding principles of the welfare state.
Most people working on the inside will agree with this. But they also have to work within the system as it is and they know that there is little chance of real political change any time soon. This dual reality is perhaps most obvious in the social/business divide within housing associations but it exists right across the public and voluntary sectors too.
Watching I, Daniel Blake and No Place to Call Home over the last few days, these divides were obvious. One is a documentary, the other a film, but both would claim to be revealing truths about life when the safety net fails. But they also beg a less obvious question for people working within the system: how do you know when you’ve crossed the line between doing your best in an impossible situation and making that situation worse? One answer, I’d suggest, lies in the language we use.
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Posted: December 31, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Local government, Pay to stay, Poverty, Right to buy, Scotland, Social housing, Tax credits, Wales |
Originally published on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
My look back at the year in housing on my blog concludes with five more big issues including the future of social landlords, welfare reform and poverty. For Part 1 go here.
6) Wrong or right to buy
Nothing sums up how just much turned on the election result as what happened with the Right to Buy. In February I blogged about the clarification that meant even fewer homes sold under the existing policy were being replaced than previously thought. April brought a buccaneering Tory pledge to extend it to housing association tenants and fund it by forcing councils the sell their ‘expensive’ stock. It was hard to see how it could possibly stack up except as a political gimmick but that was pretty much the point. It was an eye-catching election promise by a party desperate for victory and it seemed designed as a manifesto commitment that could be traded away in coalition negotiations.
Except that it worked. The Tories were unexpectedly elected with an overall majority and the mash-up of think tank proposals written on the back of an envelope somehow had to be implemented. The results would be disastrous for local authorities and the government faced a long battle in the House of Lords. And then everything changed all over again as the most vociferous opponents of the policy decided to accept it voluntarily.
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Posted: October 14, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Poverty, Right to buy, Section 106, Social housing, Starter homes | Tags: Conservatives, David Cameron, Generation Rent |
Originally posted on October 7 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Forget social housing, any kind of affordable rented housing is living on borrowed time in the wake of this year’s Conservative conference.
In his speech on Wednesday David Cameron announced ‘a national crusade to get homes built’ and go from ‘Generation Rent into Generation Buy’.
The headline policy of starter homes does not look any better than it did the first two times he announced it (in December 2014 and again when he doubled the target in March). The original policy had potential because it offered the prospect of additional homes on sites that would not have got planning permission before. Though there were potential problems, what would amount to urban exception sites looked like a good idea, especially if the uplift in land values could be captured to pay for infrastructure.
But the idea has looked worse and worse the more it has evolved. Research by Shelter has shown that even at a 20 per cent discount the homes will not be affordable in most of the country. Despite an advisory committee on design, there’s not much to stop housebuilders cutting costs by making them starter hutches rather than homes and no mechanism has been suggested so far to check that the discount really is a discount. And even if there is a deal to be had for Generation Rent some of the benefits will go to people who could have afforded to buy at the undiscounted price.
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Posted: July 22, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Benefit cap, Budget, Housing benefit, Poverty, Private renting | Tags: DWP |
Originally posted on July 22 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Looking to gauge the effects of the latest benefit cuts on housing? The official impact assessments are at best a starting point.
Documents published for the second reading of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill on Monday evening (available here) do give the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) view on what to expect, but there are several reasons why it is a severely blinkered one.
First, they only cover what is actually in the Bill and many of the main housing benefit changes in the Budget do not require primary legislation.
So there is an impact assessment of the five-year freeze on most working age benefits but it does not include the freeze of the local housing allowance. Similarly, we do not get the DWP view on ending automatic entitlement to housing benefit for 18 to 21-year-olds because that will be done by regulation rather than primary legislation.
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Posted: July 6, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Budget, Economics, Housing benefit, Labour market, Poverty, Tax credits | Tags: Speenhamland |
Where do the Conservatives really stand when it comes to supporting workers on low wages?
Are the Tories the One Nation ‘workers party’, cutting tax, increasing the minimum wage and reforming welfare to make sure that work always pays? Or are they the one that’s set to cut spending on tax credits by £5 billion and cost those same workers up to £1,690 per year?
Ahead of Wednesday’s Budget, the rhetoric and the reality simply do not match. In David Cameron’s ‘speech on opportunity’ in Runcorn last month, he contrasted the ‘right track’ of economic opportunity with the ‘wrong track’ of ‘people capable of work, written off to a lifetime on benefits’ and policies that ‘ignore the causes and simply treat the symptoms of the social and economic problems we face’. Rather than redistributing money through the benefits system we have to tackle the ‘real causes’ of child poverty. And our approach to low pay is complacent:
‘There is what I would call a merry-go-round. People working on the minimum wage having that money taxed by the government and then the government giving them that money back – and more – in welfare. Again, it’s dealing with the symptoms of the problem: topping up low pay rather than extending the drivers of opportunity – helping to create well paid jobs in the first place. So this is the change we need. We need to move from a low wage, high tax, high welfare society to a higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare society.’
Needless to say he did not explain how. The key Conservative policy of increasing the income tax threshold to the level of the minimum wage sounds like it benefits low-paid workers most. In fact, anyone paid below the current threshold of £10,600 a year will receive no benefit at all while most of the gains will go to people on higher earnings. It’s the same story with tax credits and housing benefit, both of which are essential to people who are in work but on low pay. All the tax cuts in the world do little to make up for the cuts in the last parliament and the cuts to come in this. As Gavin Kelly argues, the notion that higher wages will somehow fill the gap is fanciful.
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Posted: June 30, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Housing benefit, Poverty, Social housing | Tags: Joseph Rowntree Foundation |
(Originally posted on June 30 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing)
What does the evidence say about the links between housing and poverty?
In an age of austerity, food banks and the bedroom tax, the links may seem obvious. A housing policy based on letting housing benefit take the strain – relying on private renting and rising affordable rents – at the same time as it is being cut looks like a pretty good mechanism for creating poverty.
But evidence emerging from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s housing and poverty research programme (see my summary here) shows a relationship that is both more complex and more troubling. The housing system can act as a defence against poverty and deprivation (as it has in the past through social housing, housing benefit and the homelessness safety net) but it can also be a cause of them (as it did before through high housing costs and poor conditions).
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Posted: March 19, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Poverty, Welfare reform | Tags: David Gauke, George Osborne |
Question of the day: why won’t George Osborne say where he will find another £10 billion of cuts in welfare?
The obvious answer is that he doesn’t want us to find out before the election but there is a more immediate one too: because he can get away with it.
I found myself shouting at the radio twice today as interviewers failed to pin down first Osborne and then financial secretary David Gauke. The £10 billion figure is the so-far unexplained bit of the total £12 billion of welfare cuts Osborne is planning after the election. It matters both in its own right and because it enables him to deflect the Office for Budget Responsibility’s point about ‘rollercoaster’ cuts in public services.
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Posted: December 30, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Garden cities, Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Housing market, Poverty, Private renting, Social housing |
The final part of my look back at the issues I’ve been blogging about this year also looks forward to 2015.
6) Maybe to homes
If words were bricks the housing crisis would have been over long ago. Instead housebuilding continued to flatline in 2014 even as the political rhetoric soared.
In January I compared politicians arguing about who had the worst record since the 1920s to bald men squabbling over a comb. A month later Eric Pickles perfected his combover by claiming that in 2013 the coalition had built the most homes since 2007. He’d chosen to emphasise housing starts rather than housing completions. That was understandable but you can’t live in a start and completions were lower than in 2012, 2011, 2009 and 2008 and still less than half the level needed to meet demand.
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Posted: December 8, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing market, Mortgages, Poverty, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: Food banks, Housing costs |
Housing costs have already stretched many people to the limit. What will happen if and when they rise again?
That’s the question raised in two reports out today on the plight of home owners and renters who have found ways to cope with current costs but may not be able to for much longer. A third report shows how the poorest households are only coping with help from food banks.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 17, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Poverty, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: Joseph Rowntree Foundation |
Where are we heading on housing over the next 25 years? That’s the question posed by a new study – and the answer may make you may want to look away now.
The study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) takes existing trends in the relationship between housing and poverty between 1991 and 2008 and projects how it will change up to 2040.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 