Getting real

Posted: February 2, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Private renting | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

A technical change to an official index undermines everything that ministers have been telling us about private rents.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its latest Index of Private Housing Rental Prices on Friday using improved methodology that puts the annual rent inflation rate at 2.1 per cent since January 2011.

That may not sound like much compared to soaring house prices but that is 75 per cent higher than the 1.2 per cent annual increase for the last four years derived from the old methodology. That had always seemed on the low side given the increases that tenants said they were paying, especially in London.

Here’s an ONS graph showing the difference it makes since January 2012:

index

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing

Winners and losers

Posted: January 12, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting | Tags: | 2 Comments

So buy to let landlords made £177 billion from rising house prices over the last five years – and that does not include rental income.

A series of linked stories in the Financial Times this morning make clear who the beneficiaries of booming property market have been since 2009, when interest rates fell to a record low. In addition to buy to letters, they are home owners in London (prices up by £563 billion in the last five years) and in Conservative constituencies outside the capital (prices up eight times faster than in Labour seats). Even social landlords get in on the act, with a 20 per cent increase in the value of their stock since 2009.

Yet all the research by Savills and impressive FT data visualisation beg some far bigger questions about what it calls the politics of British housing. Why has this happened? If those are the winners, who are the losers?

Read the rest of this entry »

The return of rent control?

Posted: January 6, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Private renting, Rent control | Tags: , | 2 Comments

An idea that was supposedly buried a generation ago is rising rapidly up the housing policy agenda.

Last year saw modest proposals by Labour for rent regulation within three-year tenancies in the private rented sector. Now there are calls for something that goes much further.

The conjunction of two news items last Friday put the issue into sharp relief. The first was an opinion poll for the private tenants campaign Generation Rent that asked ‘would you support or oppose proposals for the government to introduce a “rent control” system in the UK’. The result was 59 per cent to support, 6.8 per cent to oppose and 34 per cent with no opinion. Levels of support rose to 77 per cent among private renters, 69 per cent of Labour voters and 64.5 per cent of Londoners. However, rent control also had the support of a majority of Conservatives (55 per cent) and homeowners (56 per cent).

Read the rest of this entry »

10 things about 2014: part 2

Posted: December 30, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Garden cities, Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Housing market, Poverty, Private renting, Social housing | 1 Comment

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Beyond coping

Posted: December 8, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing market, Mortgages, Poverty, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: , | 1 Comment

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

Treating renters as imbeciles

Posted: December 1, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Private renting | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

In the last week parliament has had the chance to tackle two of the most glaring injustices for private tenants and flunked both of them.

After debates in the Lords on Monday and Commons on Friday, letting agents are free to carry on charging outrageous fees to tenants and landlords can continue to evict tenants in retaliation for complaining about unsafe conditions.

The last word on Friday afternoon went to one of the villains of the week proved to be ironically apt. ‘We must not treat the people who enter into these contracts as imbeciles,’ was the very last sentence uttered by Christopher Chope before the debate was terminated and he and Conservative backbench colleague Philip Davies completed their successful attempt to talk out the Tenancies (Reform) Bill.

Read the rest of this entry »

Housing 2040

Posted: November 17, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Poverty, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: | 1 Comment

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

Mirror image

Posted: September 16, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Labour market, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform | 1 Comment

Nobody pretends that reform of housing benefit will be easy but a report out today underlines the scale of the task.

The report by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) does a great job of making the links between policies on housing, welfare and the labour market. The sobering conclusion for the government is that everything it has done so far has only succeeded in reducing the rate of growth of the housing benefit bill rather than reducing it.

So as fast as the government introduces cuts like the bedroom tax the bill keeps rising faster because of inflationary factors built into the system. Between 1997/98 and 2012/13 the total bill rose by 48 per cent in real terms.

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

Crisis? Quelle crise?

Posted: August 20, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Private renting, Regulation | Leave a comment

The French housing market is ‘in meltdown’ after housing starts plunged to the crisis level of double what we are managing on this side of the Channel.

President Francois Hollande reconvenes his Cabinet today after returning from holiday with ministers working on a recovery package topped by measures to stimulate the construction industry.

Syria rather than housebuilding may be the reason why David Cameron cut short his holiday in Cornwall but the economic mood here could hardly be more different. House prices are up 10.2 per cent in the last year and ministers claim that their ‘long-term economic plan is getting Britain building again’.

There are no prizes for guessing which of the two countries saw 306,654 housing starts in the year to June and which will be lucky to manage 160,000 over the same period.

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

Survey story – part two

Posted: July 24, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing market, Private renting, Social housing, Television | 1 Comment

Here’s the second part of my blog on some key themes emerging from the latest English Housing Survey.

Part one looked at changing trends in tenure, the impact of the financial crisis and the true nature of under-occupation. This final part looks at three more trends that caught my eye: private renters are not as satisfied as they seem; affordability may not be what you think; and social renters do not conform to TV stereotypes.

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

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →