Posted: January 24, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Private renting, Welfare reform |
One of the first things that any child learns is that 1+1 = 2. Not any more it seems. In the world of austerity 1+1 = 0.5.
That was the thought that struck me after reading work and pensions minister Steve Webb sum up for the government in the committee stage of the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill this week. Thanks to his widely applauded work on pensions reform, Webb would come close to the top of many people’s lists of effective coalition ministers and he also knows his brief better than most people in Westminster. Yet for me he has always tried too hard to defend the latest piece of indefensible welfare ‘reform’.
And that’s exactly what happened on Monday as the Uprating Bill was rushed through its committee and third reading stages with debate severely limited and time to consider just one amendment.
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Posted: December 28, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
The first of a two-part look back at the issues and people that I was blogging about in a momentous year for housing.
1) Private renting: a year of growth
I predicted in January that 2012 would see the private rented sector overtake social renting. As things turned out, I was wrong – but not by much. Whether you judge it by the number of homes or the number of households or the answers given by people in the Census, a combination of growth in buy to let, shrinking home ownership and the slow decline of social housing mean it will happen sooner rather than later.
It was also a year that the boundary between the two sectors continue to blur: social housing responded to the tenure shift as a series of social landlords from Thames Valley to L&Q launched private renting initiatives; private landlords like Grainger registered social housing subsidiaries; and the government approved proposals in the Montague report to kick start institutional investment in private renting.
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Posted: December 17, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
The big shift from owning to renting revealed in the Census has potentially massive implications for government spending on housing costs.
The headline results revealed by the Office for National Statistics last week were that home ownership fell from 68.3 per cent of households if England and Wales in 2001 to 63.5 per cent in 2011. Private renting increased from 9 per cent to 15 per cent and social renting fell from 19.3 per cent to 17.6 per cent.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: December 14, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: Census |
This week’s Census reveals a historic shift from owning to renting as the nation adjusts to new housing realities. That much is obvious but there are some significant trends behind that headline number too.
The results for England and Wales show private renting has risen from 9 per cent of households in 2001 to 15 per cent in 2011 and that home ownership has fallen from 68 per cent to 64 per cent over the same period.
However, that simple two-way split misses what has happened beneath the surface. Tenure is now split roughly three ways between outright ownership, owning with a mortgage and renting (itself split evenly between social and private renting). Many people were watching to see whether private renting would overtake social renting (for the first time since 1961) but this did not happen unless you include all forms of private renting, including those who rent from an employer or live rent-free.
So the more significant change for me is the fact that there are now more renters (private and social) than people buying with a mortgage. Between 2001 and 2011, mortgaged home ownership fell from 39 per cent of all tenure to 33 per cent. The total number of households buying with a mortgage has fallen by 749,000 over the last ten years from 8.4 million to 7.6 million. However, if mortgaged ownership had maintained its 2001 share of a rising number of households, there would now be 1.4 million more home owners on the housing ladder.
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Posted: December 11, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Private renting |
I’d love to give three cheers for Labour’s new approach to the private rented sector but I can only manage two.
Yesterday it published a policy review paper on stability and affordability for renters and families. This is the second of three policy review papers on private renting: the first covered management and letting agents, the third will cover standards and rogue landlords.
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 26, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
The awful story of Malcolm Frost, who was evicted and found dead in his garden shed 10 days later, has implications that go beyond one individual tragedy.
The details as reported from the inquest by The Sentinel are these. The 61-year-old former painter and decorator was evicted from his home in Alsager, Cheshire in March for not paying the rent. Roy Edwards, a friend and neighbour, had called the council to register concern about his welfare three months before but staff took no action. He told the inquest that he had been buying Mr Frost food every day because he had no money. He found him living in his shed after he was evicted and the locks were changed and when he went to check on him a few days later he was dead.
The house from which Mr Frost was evicted was his childhood home. It emerged at the inquest that he had stopped working a few years before his death and money worries had prompted him to sell his house to a private landlord and pay rent to live there. Then he fell into arrears.
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 8, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting |
Donald Rumsfeld would call it an unknown unknown: how many people will be forced to move miles away from home as a result of the government’s housing and welfare reforms?
As a new law allowing local authorities to discharge their duty to homeless people into the private rented sector comes into force from this Friday (November 9) and the countdown continues to sweeping cuts in benefit from April 2013, it’s a question that will be asked over and over again.
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Posted: November 1, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Private renting |
There is good news, bad news and really bad news in figures out today on housing supply in England.
The good news first: net additional housing supply rose 11 per cent in 2011/12 to 134,900 in 2011. That follows three consecutive annual falls in the wake of the credit crunch and represents a return to the level seen in the early 2000s. Net additional supply is the government’s preferred measure since it includes not just new build homes but gains and losses from demolitions and conversions of buildings from one use to another too.
Net additional housing supply in England (source: DCLG)
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Posted: October 31, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Economics, Labour market, Mortgages, Private renting, Social housing |
Housing is the big thing missing from today’s major report on living standards from the Resolution Foundation.
The final report of its Commission on Living Standards looks at the plight of low and middle income families. Things were bad even before the crash with average incomes falling by £570 between 2003 and 2008 as growing inequality meant that prosperity was not shared around. The gap was only made up by a £730 a year increase in tax credits.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: October 24, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: History, Private renting | Tags: Landlords, Rachman |
It’s almost 50 years since Peter Rachman died and we still use Rachmanism as a shorthand term for everything that is bad about bad landlords. But is what we think we know wrong?
That is the premise of a fascinating documentary on BBC Radio 4 this week that set out to find The Real Rachman – the Lord of the Slums (listen again on iplayer here). The legend it investigated was of the evil vice racketeer who owned slum properties in Notting Hill packed full of tenants with working girls ‘bending the basement’ below them. In 1963 the People exposed an ‘empire based on vice and drugs, violence and blackmail, extortion and slum landlordism the like of which this country has never seen and let us hope never will again’. The same year Panorama exposed a ‘big time 20th century racketeer’ who sent men round with dogs to evict his tenants.
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Jules Birch 