A system under strain
Posted: August 17, 2017 Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Social housing Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on August 17.
Beneath the immediate crisis about a lack of new homes lies a long-running one about the homes that we have already built.
It’s hard to look much beyond the stat in a report published on Friday by the Local Government Association (LGA) that new homes built today will have to last 2,000 years at current rates of demolition and replacement.
Unless the output of the likes of Barratt and Taylor Wimpey is really going to stand for as long as some of the glories of Ancient Rome, something clearly does not add up. This graph shows the age of the stock broken down by tenure:
The report by Residential Analysts finds that large numbers of homes across all tenures are not of appropriate quality, with the private rented sector representing the biggest cause for concern, with problems such as damp and poor energy efficiency concentrated in the oldest stock.
The number of homes failing to meet the Decent Homes standard has been improving in recent years total cost of bringing them up to scratch is still estimated at £27 billion, of which just £2 billlion is for social housing.
The state of private renting
Posted: August 2, 2017 Filed under: Private renting | Tags: English Housing Survey Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on August 2.
As home ownership and social renting continue to decline, the astonishing rise and rise of the private rented sector continues.
But who is the sector housing and what are the consequences for tenants? Here are a dozen key points that I picked out from the English Housing Survey for 2015/16.
1) Overall growth
One in five of us – 4.5 million households – now rent from a private landlord. That is 2.5 million more than in 2000.
2) Age
Growth continues to be fastest among young people as high house prices stop them buying and social housing is in short supply.
The proportion of 25 to 34 year olds renting from a private landlord has increased from 24% to 46% in the last ten years. As recently as 1991, just 12.9% of 25-34 year olds were private tenants.
That figure is for households, so it could well mask an even stronger growth in the number of individual young people renting as more of them share.
The average private renter household reference person (HRP – the oldest or highest-earning person in the households) is 40, making them much younger than social renters (52) and owner-occupiers (57).
However, since the financial crisis private renting has grown among all age groups, with sharp increases also seen among the 35-44s, 45-54s and 55-64s.
Housing insecurity takes centre stage
Posted: July 24, 2017 Filed under: Homelessness, Private renting, Temporary accommodation, Universal credit Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on July 24.
Two reports over the weekend put housing insecurity firmly under the spotlight.
On Saturday the Local Government Association (LGA) made all the headlines when it highlighted the 120,000 children currently in temporary accommodation.
That’s not a new figure (it comes from homelessness statistics published a month ago) but that does not make it any less shocking. And the LGA puts it into real perspective by pointing out that the increase since 2014 is the equivalent of one secondary school full of children every month.
On Sunday, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) published research looking at where much of that demand for temporary accommodation is coming from: evictions and forced moves from rented homes.
The report found that 40,000 tenants were evicted from their homes by landlords in 2015 and that private landlords are now carrying out more evictions than councils and housing associations.
That may not be much of a claim to fame for ‘social’ landlords but the rise in evictions reflects both the growth of the private rented sector and increasing use of Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions by private landlords.
A look ahead to the manifestos
Posted: May 11, 2017 Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Tax | Tags: General Election 2017 Leave a commentOriginally posted on May 11 on my blog for Inside Housing.
As we await the manifestos, what are the chances of real change in housing over the next five years?
Give or take the odd leak, there are some positive signs. First, this election has one of the two major parties pinning its election hopes on housing reform and members of the other saying that ‘building more homes‘ is a bigger priority than it has been for years.
Second, a clutch of select committee reports, which were published just before parliament shut down for the election, set down some useful all-party markers for future policy.
Third, in Gavin Barwell and John Healey the two main parties have their best housing spokespeople in years. That may be damning them with faint praise but both seem to be politicians who get the case for housing.
