Posted: April 12, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Planning, Regulation, Social housing, Tenants |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If it’s broken, who broke it? If there were mistakes and errors, who made them?
It was quite an Easter week for Michael Gove as he moved into confessional mode first in a think tank report and then in a Today programme interview.
‘That the current housing model– from supply to standards and the mortgage market – is broken, we can all agree,’ the housing secretary wrote in an introduction to the report from Bright Blue and Shelter. ‘That change is necessary is undeniable. We are bringing about change – and we are determined to see it through.’
And, asked on the Today programme on Thursday (listen from 08:12), if he had gone through ‘an awakening’ on housing, he said that: ‘The thing that affected me most was the Grenfell fire. What the Grenfell inquiry, in particular, has subsequently brought to light were a chain of errors. I’m very happy to reiterate that there were some mistakes and errors that were made not just by the coalition government but by governments before which contributed to social tenants not getting the support that they deserve, not having their voices heard. And so change had to come and we are delivering that change.’
Note that Mr Gove leaves us with the same key message: others made the mistakes that broke the housing model and now he is here to fix things.
Some of what he’s saying is quite true – he has reversed much of the deregulation of the past – but the interview still begged more questions.
What exactly was he admitting to – and how much of the blame was he really taking for himself and his Conservative colleagues?
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Posted: March 13, 2023 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Private renting, Regulation, Social housing, Temporary accommodation |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
‘Making things right’ is the government’s theme of the month for housing and two new pieces of legislation represent significant steps in that direction.
Unfortunately they also beg some real questions about what’s happening, and not happening, elsewhere.
The Social Housing (Regulation) Bill passed its final hurdle before Royal Assent with its third reading in the Commons on March 1. The proactive consumer regulation regime and inspections that were dropped in 2010 will now be restored.
While its long-term impact remains to be seen, the Bill was considerably strengthened by last-minute government amendments to implement ‘Awaab’s Law’ time limits for landlords to investigate and fix damp and mould problems and to mandate professional standards for social housing staff.
On March 3, the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill got its third reading in the Commons before moving on to the Lords.
The private member’s bill introduced by Conservative MP Bob Blackman (also the architect of the Homelessness Reduction Act in 2017) aims to stop the exploitation of vulnerable tenants by rogue landlords in the exempt accommodation sector.
The two Bills, and the spirt of cooperation in the debates on them, highlight a significant change in attitudes within government since Grenfell.
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Posted: December 13, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Regulation, Social housing | Tags: Better Social Housing Review |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
At first glance there is nothing especially radical about the Better Social Housing Review – as the independent panel says, ‘there is nothing revelatory in our findings’ and ‘it may seem to housing associations that our recommendations are already central to their approach’.
And indeed much of what the review commissioned by the National Housing Federation and Chartered Institute of Housing says about engaging tenants, improving repairs services, handling complaints better and tackling stigma and discrimination are things that landlords could, and should, already be doing.
But take a second look and the key messages about organisations focussing on their core purpose and about it being ‘time to get back to basics’ are profoundly radical. They represent a challenge to the way that the sector has developed in the three decades since housing associations became the alternative to what the Conservative government called the ‘municipal monopoly’.
Because that same government was also making associations the vehicle for private finance and stock transfer and steadily squeezing the grant rate for new development to encourage them to ‘sweat their assets’.
That drive for ever greater efficiency and value for money worked in the sense that it delivered more new homes for less public money but it also created a remorseless logic for merger and the creation of landlords that became even bigger than the giant council housing departments of the past.
And that was only reinforced by regulatory changes in 2010 that overwhelmingly prioritised financial concerns over consumer ones and encouraged landlords to focus accordingly.
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Posted: May 11, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Leasehold, Planning, Private renting, Regulation, Section 21, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It certainly looks like Her Majesty’s Government is doing something on housing – but is that the limit of the ambitions expressed in the Queen’s Speech?
As ever, background briefing notes provide more detail than the speech delivered this year by the future King.
Two promised headline Bills fulfil commitments to reform private renting and the regulation of social housing but both are long overdue.
A third pointedly does not include plans announced in the 2021 Queen’s Speech to reform the planning system to deliver more homes.
And there are vague promises of further ‘housing reform’ but no specifics or commitments to legislation to back them up.
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Posted: April 13, 2022 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Private renting, Regulation, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
This is shaping up to be a significant year for the regulation of rented housing, with the Social Housing Regulation Bill set to be followed by a white paper on the private rented sector.
While there are still clear differences between the two sectors, there are also similarities in terms of landlords who are unaccountable and tenants who lack a say. In a hybrid world, social housing has become more business focussed and private renting has become by default home to many of those in the greatest housing need.
Yet while the government’s stance on the regulation of social housing has come into focus – the details remain to be seen but creating a national tenant forum and giving the regulator a consumer focus look like a reversal of the light-touch regulation introduced after 2010 – regulation of private renting consists of ‘piecemeal legislative changes’ and the government lacks the data even to evaluate their impact.
That’s the verdict of MPs on the all-party Public Accounts Committee in a report published today [Wednesday] on the regulation of a sector that has doubled in size in the last 20 years and is now home to 11 million people.
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Posted: December 11, 2020 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Regulation, Social housing |
Originally published as a column in the December issue of Inside Housing.
What’s the difference between a ‘new deal for social housing’ and a ‘charter for social housing residents’?
The shift in language between the green and white papers certainly seems to signal a change in emphasis – and not in a good way if you are old enough to remember John Major’s Citizens’ Charter and Cones Hotline from the 1990s.
White paper plans to strengthen consumer regulation, make it easier for tenants to complain to the ombudsman and introduce independent inspection of landlords look generally positive – even the Conservatives are essentially recreating the system they scrapped so confidently in 2010. The regulator will also get new powers over for-profit landlords.
But for me what’s really telling is what has gone missing between the green paper and the white paper and what that says about the government’s wider vision for social housing.
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Posted: February 19, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Housebuilding, New towns, Regulation, Uncategorized |
Originally posted on February 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Listening to a new Radio 4 documentary about Parker Morris and space standards it is impossible not to feel a mix of nostalgia for an era of housing optimism and sadness that our ambitions have shrunk so much since.
As John Grindrod relates in Living Room, the title of the 1961 report was an indication that it was about much more than just a technical exercise in allocating space per person.
Work on Homes for Today and Tomorrow started 60 years ago this year but it was building on a 20th century council housing tradition that began 100 years ago and it was also looking to the future to ensure that homes were fit for it.
‘A good house or flat can never be made out of premises which are too small,’ said the report, which set out a much greater ambition for new homes:
‘An increasing proportion of people are coming to expect their home to do more than just fulfil the basic requirement. It must be something of which they can be proud and in which they can express the fulness of their lives.’
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Posted: December 21, 2018 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Homelessness, Regulation, Rough sleeping, Temporary accommodation, Tenants, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Dominic Raab, James Brokenshire, Kit Malthouse, Philip Alston, Sajid Javid |
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on December 21.
It was the year of three housing ministers and two secretaries of states (so far), the year that the department went back to being a ministry and a new government agency promised to ‘disrupt’ the housing market.
It was also the year of the social housing green paper and the end of the borrowing cap, of Sir Oliver Letwin and Lord Porter and of some significant anniversaries.
Above all, it was the year after Grenfell and the year before Brexit. Here is the first of my two-part review of what I was writing about in 2018.
1. New names, new ministers
January had barely begun when the Department for Communities and Local Government became the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government. The name harked back to the glory days when housing was ‘our first social service’ and housing secretary Sajid Javid became the first full member of the cabinet with housing in his title since 1970.
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Posted: November 13, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Financialisation, Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting, Regulation, Social housing | Tags: Manuel Aalbers |
The Global Financial Crisis was a wake-up call to the world about the dangers posed by a toxic mix of finance and housing, one that has still not been properly heeded.
The mortgage-backed securities, collaterialised debt obligations and other financial instruments that financed the expansion of sub-prime and predatory lending were the result of a wave of innovation by a finance industry that had been deregulated over the previous 20 years. Britain marked the 30th anniversary of the Big Bang in the City last month but similar things happened around the developed world.
All that innovation and securitisation led to exponential increases in the amount of credit circulating within the financial system but it still needed something to be secured against. Which is where housing came in: a mortgage finance system that had been based on long-term mortgage lending funded from savings was transformed into a vehicle for the expansion of credit. And the relationship between the price of homes and the earnings of people buying them was also transformed.
The Financializaton of Housing: A Political Economy Approach, a new book by Manuel Aalbers, is the most comprehensive attempt I’ve seen to outline this process and its consequences. It’s part of a multinational research project based at the University of Leuven in Belgium on what he calls the Real Estate/Financial Complex in 12 different countries around the world. The metaphor is a deliberate echo of the military/industrial complex and serves to emphasise the connections not just between the real estate and financial sectors but also between each of them and the state.
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Posted: March 27, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Private renting, Regulation, Tenants |
How did we end up with a housing system dependent on at least 1.5 million small-scale private landlords offering millions of tenants little or no security and costing billions in housing benefit?
You couldn’t do much better if you set out to design the worst possible way of housing the nation in general and young people in particular. But the changes that now seem set in stone – a private rented sector that’s grown so fast it is now bigger than the social sector and home ownership shrinking back to the levels last seen in the 1980s – have happened in the space of one generation.
The Rent Trap, a new book by Samir Jeraj and Rosie Walker, is the best attempt I’ve yet read to explain how and why this has happened to a general audience. The subtitle – How We Fell Into It And How We Get Out Of It – reflects an even more ambitious aim.
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Jules Birch 