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 »Labour’s cautious manifesto offers hints of real ‘change’
Posted: June 13, 2024 Filed under: Affordable housing, Fire safety, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Given a backdrop of grim economic times and successive election defeats, this was always going to be a cautious Labour manifesto.
So the good news is that housing features much more prominently than it did in the plans that the party has laid out in the last few months. It had only a walk on part in Labour’s five missions, six first steps and 10 ‘policies to change Britain’ –
The tone was set by one of the four speakers who introduced Keir Starmer. Daniel rents a one-bedroom flat in east London with his partner and two children and said he was backing Labour because of its plans to build more homes and support first-time buyers.
The manifesto itself contains few new policies and no new money but there are some interesting hints about what Labour might do in office.
The promise of 1.5 million new homes in the next parliament forms a key part of the section on kickstarting economic growth, with the party arguing that: ‘Britain is hampered by a planning regime that means we struggle to build either the infrastructure or housing the country needs.
And Labour directly challenges the Conservatives by arguing that ‘the dream of homeownership is now out of reach for too many young people’.
However, the manifesto does not mention the target of 70 per cent home ownership that Starmer set in his party conference speech only 18 months ago.
Read the rest of this entry »Did the election kill off housing bills?
Posted: May 23, 2024 Filed under: Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act, Renters (Reform) Bill Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
And they’re off – but as the election campaign begins it’s easy to lose sight of what could get left at the starting gate.
An immediate consequence of Rishi Sunak’s decision to go for July 4 rather than an Autumn election is that two of the most important pieces of housing legislation in years look like they will run out of parliamentary time.
The Renters (Reform) Bill and Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill have passed all their stages in the Commons and most of them in the Lords.
In theory they could still be passed in stripped-down form as part of the wash-up process before parliament is dissolved on Friday provided both parties agree. However, as I’m writing this neither is currently listed in Lords business for today or tomorrow so the signs are not good.
Read the rest of this entry »The state of the housing nation 2023
Posted: December 18, 2023 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Energy efficiency, Private renting, Tenants, Tenure change | Tags: English Housing Survey Leave a commentAs 2023 draws to a close, what is the state of the housing nation?
As always, the best place to start is the English Housing Survey, which has just published headline results for 2022/23. Here are five things that caught my attention.
1 The tenure and wealth gap
The results of the survey need to be treated with more caution than usual when comparing the results this year thanks to the impact of the pandemic, but the general trend on housing tenure is pretty clear.
Thanks in part to Help to Buy and other government schemes, the proportion of households who own their own home (64 per cent) has stabilised while the relentless growth of the private rented sector (18 per cent) has slowed. The social housing sector is still in slow decline but there is a significant difference between London (where it is home to 21 per cent of households) and England as a whole (16 per cent).
There were 874,000 recent first-time buyers in 2022/23 and they had an average (mean) deposit of just over £50,000.
Given that, it’s not surprising that family wealth has become increasingly important to people’s chances of buying. A growing proportion received help from family or friends (36 per cent, up from 27% in 2021/22 and 22 per cent in 2003/04) while 9 per cent used an inheritance for a deposit.
They were also higher earners: the majority of successful first-time buyers (58 per cent) came from the top two income quintiles and only a small minority (16 per cent) came from the bottom two.
A reshuffle that beggars belief
Posted: November 14, 2023 Filed under: Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: DLUHC, Rachel Maclean Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
I’m not sure what Karl Marx would have made of the sixth housing minister in two years and the 16th in 13 years but it seems safe to say he would have run out of comparisons long ago.
The sacking of Rachel Maclean on Monday beggars belief not so much in itself – after nine months she was a relative veteran in the role – but in its timing.
Because the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has not just one but two important pieces of legislation on its immediate agenda.
As she tweeted herself, she was due to start piloting the first of these, the Renters (Reform) Bill, through its committee stage in the House of Commons today (Tuesday).
The Bill delivers on the 2019 Conservative manifesto pledge of scrapping Section 21 and represents a delicate balancing act between the interests of landlords and tenants.
You might have thought, then, that it would benefit from a minister who knows her brief and is sufficiently across the detail to debate it with the opposition, both on the Labour side and among her own backbenchers. You might – but not Rishi Sunak.
Read the rest of this entry »A King’s Speech fit for a government running out of time
Posted: November 7, 2023 Filed under: Energy efficiency, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Private renting, Rough sleeping Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The good news is that the King’s Speech does promise a Leasehold and Freehold Bill. The less good is that this is not yet the end, and maybe not the beginning of the end either, for the tenure that Michael Gove described as ‘indefensible in the 21st century’.
As first reported by the Sunday Times last month, leasehold reform will be part of the legislative programme for the next parliamentary session, confounding fears that it would be left in the pending tray until the next election.
But it will still be a race against time to get a complex piece of legislation through parliament in little over a year and its most far-reaching proposal is only a consultation for now.
The other major housing measure in the speech is confirmation that the government will continue with the Renters (Reform) Bill and abolition of Section 21 after introducing them in the last session.
There was no mention in the speech or the background documents of criminalising tents, despite home secretary Suella Braverman’s controversial comments about rough sleeping being a ‘lifestyle choice’.
Something like it could yet appear in the Criminal Justice Bill as the government looks to replace the Vagrancy Act but for the moment it looks as though the leak over the weekend was designed to kill the idea.
More surprisingly, neither the speech nor the background briefing document mention rules on nutrient neutrality that the government claims are blocking 100,000 new homes. An attempt to do this in the Levelling Up Act foundered in the House of Lords but ministers had vowed they would try again as soon as possible.
There is also a glaring contradiction between comments about the importance of energy efficiency in homes in the briefing on the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill and boasts about measures to support landlords by scrapping the requirement to bring their properties up to EPC C in the background to the Renters (Reform) Bill.
Read the rest of this entry »Housing confined to the fringes at Conservative conference
Posted: October 5, 2023 Filed under: Housebuilding, Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: Conservatives Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of a Conservative conference at which housing was – quite literally – a fringe issue.
The only mention of housing in the prime minister’s speech was a reference to ‘thousands of homes for the next generation of home owners’ that will be built at the new Euston terminus of HS2.
Thousands of homes were already going to be built under the existing plan but that is now set to be ramped up under a Euston Development Corporation that seems all about maximising developer contributions from luxury flats rather than meeting local housing need.
Even levelling up secretary Michael Gove had little fresh to say about the H part of his portfolio from the main stage and made no reference to plans for renter and leasehold reform.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 