Fresh ideas
Posted: June 17, 2014 Filed under: Housing market, Private renting | Tags: Generation Rent Leave a commentA new manifesto for private renters published today highlights the new thinking on housing emerging ahead of the general election.
This is the first of two manifestos being launched this week by new organisations with different priorities and constituencies to the existing ones. We’ll hear from SHOUT, the campaign for social housing, tomorrow but today it’s the turn of Generation Rent.
And it’s about time. Since the creation of the assured shorthold tenancy and the invention of buy to let, the private rented sector has more than doubled in size. That’s great news for landlords and letting agents but not so great for tenants with minimal security of tenure and consumer rights.
To illustrate my point, here are three recent bits of news.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Dead air
Posted: June 12, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Private renting 1 CommentThere was a telling moment at the end of last night’s Radio 4 debate on housing: the sound of complete silence from the audience.
The dead air came in response to a question from presenter Mark Easton asking people at the debate at the London School of Economics (LSE) how many of them think our political leaders are doing their best to solve the housing crisis.
But I am not sure if what sounded like mostly a young audience was tremendously impressed by the answers from the panel either and that may have been down to the way the question was framed in Housing: Where Will We All Live?
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Rachman, rogues and renting
Posted: May 14, 2014 Filed under: History, Legal, Private renting | Tags: Rachman, Rachmanism 6 CommentsScandals hit private renting. With an election in the offing, the Labour opposition pledges help for tenants. There are definite parallels between now and the 1960s.
Everyone (especially those who oppose the party’s current modest reform plans) thinks they knows what happened in the wake of Rachmanism but the truth is far more complicated and so are the lessons for the future.
My interest in the period was first caught by a 2012 Radio 4 documentary called The Real Rachman – the Lord of the Slums. I thought I knew about Rachmanism but the programme told a much more nuanced and mysterious story that I blogged about shortly afterwards.
That blog prompted an email from Professor David Nelken, whose 1983 book on the aftermath of Rachmanism has just been reissued. The Limits of the Legal Process is a classic study of the sociology of the law that should be required reading for anyone involved in the current debates about regulating renting (or indeed regulating anything). The book is subtitled ‘a study of landlords, law and crime’ and it tells the story of the response to Rachmanism, first by the politicians with legislation, then by landlords with evasion and then by local authorities and the courts with implementation and enforcement.
Control speak
Posted: May 2, 2014 Filed under: Private renting | Tags: Ed Miliband, Grant Shapps 1 CommentLabour’s bold move on private renting seems to be working as politics. Will it work as policy?
I’ve never been to Venezuela or Vietnam but, with due deference to Grant Shapps’s expertise on their housing systems, I do have a few observations to offer.
The Conservative chairman compared Ed Miliband to Hugo Chavez in a ludicrously overblown reaction to the Labour leader’s speech yesterday. Free market think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and right-wing commentators like Fraser Nelson and Harry Phibbs joined him in condemning Labour’s supposed plans to introduce rent controls.
A quick glance at what Labour is actually proposing reveals that it owes far more to Ireland and Germany than Venezuela and Vietnam:
- A ban on the outrageous fees letting agents charge to tenants, which Labour says will save them an average of £350.
- A default three-year tenancy, from which tenants can give one month’s notice after the first six months
- The rent to be freely negotiated at the start of the tenancy with annual increases after that based on a benchmark such as average market rents.
Why registration is the key for private renters
Posted: March 30, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Private renting | Tags: Generation Rent, voter registration 1 CommentCan the votes of private renters swing the next election and move their concerns up the political agenda in the process?
The huge shift in housing tenure seen this century suggests they can. In 2000 just two million households in England were private tenants. According to the English Housing Survey, that had doubled to almost four million by 2012/13. Add another 500,000 in Wales and Scotland, allow for another two years of growth and, with 1.8 people of voting age per household, you have nine million potential private rented votes at the next election.
Polling by Generation Rent, the recently relaunched National Private Tenants Organisation, suggests that the votes of private renters could be decisive in 86 seats in England. Of these, 38 are currently held by the Conservatives, 32 by Labour, 15 by the Lib Dems and one by the Greens. The results here could be enough to deliver an overall majority for David Cameron, make Ed Miliband the leader of the largest party or give Nick Clegg a major say in a new coalition.
Budget 2014: the next five years
Posted: March 20, 2014 Filed under: Budget, Economics, Housing market, Private renting, Welfare state | Tags: housing benefit Leave a commentNever mind today and tomorrow: what does the Budget mean for housing over the longer term?
As usual, some of the most revealing information comes not in the speech or the Treasury’s background documents but in the Economic and Fiscal Outlook published by the Office for Budget Responsibility. This time around the detail and the forecasts for the next five years have a lot to say about housing benefit, the welfare cap and the housing market.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Making the move
Posted: March 13, 2014 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Legal, Local government, Private renting Leave a commentForced out of area moves are on the increase and they are not just happening in London.
The Oxford Times reports this week on cases of people being offered homes as far away in Cardiff, Cheltenham and Birmingham. The council blames the cuts in housing benefit and the benefit cap that make it impossible to find affordable private rented accommodation but a local solicitor has accused it of dumping people outside the area.
Elysha Britnell, a 22 year old mother of two children, was told she would have to move out of her temporary accommodation in Oxford and accept a home in Birmingham. She says she has no family and friends outside Oxford and has never lived anywhere else and is appealing against the decision:
‘I’m Oxford born and bred. If this appeal fails I’ll be completely homeless. I have got nowhere else to go. Even if I go to Birmingham, I may as well be homeless, because I have nobody there.’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 