Labour’s plan for ‘a decade of renewal’

Posted: July 2, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Rents, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

The spending review may have given us the headlines but a flurry of announcements on Wednesday fills in much of the detail about what the government is calling ‘a decade of renewal for social and affordable housing’.

On new homes, a key question was how the £39 billion will be spent over the next 10 years and, in particular, what the trade-off will be between maximising total output of affordable homes and giving greater priority to social rent. 

That got an answer in an overnight press release: a renamed Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) is forecast to deliver 300,000 homes over the ten years (30,000 a year), of which at least 180,000 (18,000 a year or 60 per cent) will be for social rent. 

To put this in perspective, the current AHP was originally meant to produce 180,000 affordable homes over the five years from 2021 to 2026 (36,000 a year) but rising construction costs cut that to between 110,000 and 130,000 (22,000 to 26,000 a year. Of those, just 40,000 (8,000 a year) are forecast to be for social rent.

Importantly, strategic partnerships will be able to bid for funds over the lifetime of the programme, which should give at least some protection from the risk of cuts if a government more hostile to housing wins the next election.

Another trade-off is the split between London, where higher land prices and construction costs mean more grant per home is needed, and the rest of the country. 

Under the current AHP, the Greater London Authority (GLA) got £4.1 billion (36 per cent) and Homes England £7.4 billion (64 per cent) of the grant available. 

Under SAHP, the GLA’s share will be cut to 30 per cent or up to £11.7 billion. It’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that more than half of the 126,000 homeless households stuck in temporary accommodation waiting for a social home are from London. 

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Does the Budget shift the dial on housing?

Posted: October 31, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

A final verdict will have to wait for the spending review in the Spring but how should we assess the first Labour Budget for 14 years?

The answer of course depends on what you take as your starting point. Compared with the disastrous first Conservative Budget in 2010 or even the first Labour one in 1997, this one takes some definite steps in the right direction.

But does this Budget live up to Labour rhetoric about greater investment and long-term solutions. To what extent will it really ‘fix the foundations’ and deliver ‘the biggest boost to affordable and social housing for a generation’?

Here are 10 key areas that I was looking out for:

1) New social homes: The £500 million top-up to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) briefed in advanceis welcome news but it must only be a down-payment on a far bigger increase for the next AHP after 2026.

It is at the lower end of expectations of up to £1 billion extra and it will not be enough to make up for a shortfall in delivery caused by construction cost inflation and other pressures on social landlords. The current AHP is on course to deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 affordable homes over five years rather than the 180,000 originally expected while need is estimated at 90,000 social homes a year.

All of which puts the 5,000 the government says will be generated by the top-up into perspective.

Details of ‘future grant investment’ in the next AHP will be set out in the spending review and will support a mix of tenures ‘with a focus on delivering homes for social rent’.

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Pulling the policy levers

Posted: August 1, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, New towns, Planning, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing

The last day of term is traditionally a time when nothing much happens and we get set for the holidays to come.

Not so much for Angela Rayner. The deputy prime minister marked the last day in parliament before the summer recess this week with a flurry of announcements, guidance and consultation. 

Most of these – planning reforms including a new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), a new towns taskforce, changes to the right to buy – were foreshadowed in the election campaign and early days of the new government. 

However, both her written statement and what she outlined to MPs including some intriguing hints of changes that go well beyond supply and planning. 

And there was also an important piece of context: Rayner said the government now expects to deliver just 200,000 new homes in England in this financial year. That is 100,000 fewer than the annual average needed to meet its target of 1.5 million and will ramp up the pressure in the later years of this parliament.

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Housing’s brief appearance in the election spotlight

Posted: June 20, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, New towns, Planning, Private renting, Right to buy | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

The focus of the election finally turned to housing today (Thursday) but blink and you may have missed it.

The issue described as ‘the dog that hasn’t barked’ by Nick Ferrari on LBC was briefly across the airwaves with housing secretary Michael Gove leading for the Conservatives and shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook representing Labour in the wake of plans for renter reform launched overnight.

However, an anonymous quote in Politico Playbook did cause some howling, with a Labour official supposedly saying that ‘I don’t care if we flatten the whole green belt, we just need more houses in this country’.

Rishi Sunak took time off from preparing for tonight’s Question Time to tweet that it was ‘good to finally get Labour’s real views on Britain’s green belt’ while Keir Starmer flatly denied the whole thing on a visit to a housing development on the edge of York. ‘No, that wasn’t Labour party officials,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t Labour party policy.’

So what did we learn from election housing day? I dipped into the morning media round in a bid to find out.

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What’s gone wrong with our housing – and what could go right

Posted: April 4, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Private renting, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

As symbols of failure, take a former council house in south London chopped up into six bedsits, housing association tenants waiting in vain for repairs and private renters searching non-stop for homes

As a symbols of success, take Vienna’s century of genuinely affordable rents, Barcelona’s long-term housing strategy and Singapore’s melding of the market and public ownership.

The Rental Health series stretching across BBC radio and television had all of that and more, from lots of jobs but no homes in the Highlands to the dire state of the rental market in Yorkshire to the mechanics of local housing allowance and Section 21 to people looking for housing alternatives in vans, co-housing and boats.

Those symbols of failure don’t come much starker than the three-bedroom council house on the Bampton estate in Forest Hill featured in the brilliantly appalling BBC Panorama documentary What’s Gone Wrong With Our Housing?

The first tenant moved into the home in 1971, bought it under the right to buy for £15,000 in 1984 and sold it for £85,000 in 1988. It is now owned by a private landlord who has converted it into six bedsits rented out for £960 a month each.

Most of what amounts to £60,000 a year in rent is paid in housing benefit by the government that sold it for a quarter of that.

As if that was not enough to make the point, the same private landlord has done the same thing to three other houses in the same terrace and is pocketing £250,000 a year.

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Reading the Tory leadership tea leaves

Posted: August 22, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Mortgages, Right to buy | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.

On the surface the two Tory leadership candidates have had little new to say about housing – when they’ve even bothered to discuss it.

Liz Truss would cut red tape for housebuilding at the same time as she would scrap the ‘Stalinist housing targets’ introduced by her own party and boost community rights to object to homes that create the red tape in the first place.

Sunak would put a stop to building on the green belt, highlighting the 60 square miles lost to development since 2014 while ignoring the 60,000 square miles that are left and the fact the green belt has doubled in size since 2014.

Those contradictory ideas reveal next to nothing beyond a need to appeal to well-housed Tory members but neither candidate has said anything so far about social housing, affordable housing or private renting.

Yet there are issues and ideas bubbling away beneath the surface of the leadership contest that could still have a profound impact on housing.

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Political chaos leaves big housing questions

Posted: July 8, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Fire safety, Levelling up, Mortgages, Private renting, Right to buy | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.

So it’s back to the future and all change at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) as the dust begins to settle from the political chaos of the last two weeks.

It was a scandal involving one ex-housing minister (Chris Pincher) that triggered the revolt against Boris Johnson. Many Tories want another (Dominic Raab) to take over as temporary prime minister. And two more (Grant Shapps and ex-housing secretary Sajid Javid) could run as candidates for the permanent job.

Over at the department that keeps changing its name, Michael Gove has been sacked as ‘a snake’ and most of the more junior ministers have resigned. Stuart Andrew set a new record for a housing minister with just 148 days in the job and no time even for an Inside Housing interview to be published.

Coming in as temporary secretary of state is the familiar figure of Greg Clark, who according to some reports this morning has told civil servants that Gove will be back soon.

Confused? Significant new policy announcements are by convention ruled out until there is a new permanent leader and cabinet – but this did not stop Theresa May enshrining the net zero by 2050 commitment in law before she left office and Boris Johnson is not noted for following convention.  

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Johnson’s lame cover version

Posted: June 10, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Mortgages, Right to buy | 1 Comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.

How exactly should we take Boris Johnson’s plans to ‘bring back Right to Buy’ and ‘turn Generation Rent into Generation Own’?

Many housing association tenants will welcome the chance to own their own home and private renters may welcome official recognition that they are stuck paying more in rent than for the mortgage they can’t get.

Equally, most social landlords will feel that they have no choice but to take very seriously a major change for housing associations and what could be yet another threat to council housing.

And anyone with even the vaguest interest in seeing more genuinely affordable homes will greet the latest guff about one for one replacements with a groan. 

But it’s also very hard not to be cynical about this latest cover version of Margaret Thatcher’s number one from the 1980s. The suspicion is that this is all about a lame duck prime minister having something catchy to announce regardless of how  – or even if – it will work out in practice.

Even so it’s impossible not to wonder about the practicalities of a plan to finance mortgages from housing benefit in the middle of a cost of living crisis, with interest rates about to rise at the peak of a housing market bubble that could be about to burst.

And it’s hard not to contrast Boris Johnson’s tired old rhetoric about social tenants on housing benefit being ‘dependent on the state’ with the plans announced just 24 hours earlier for a Social Housing Regulation Bill that will ‘mean more people living in decent, well looked-after homes enjoying the quality of life they deserve’.

Calling the plan ‘benefits to bricks’ looks like trolling of those who have genuinely attempted to find ways to shift subsidy to new homes.

And all of these reactions are subject to the politics of a wounded prime minister desperate to send the right signals to his party after 41 per cent of his own MPs said they have no confidence in him.

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Two symbolic results in the politics of housing

Posted: May 6, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Council housing, Local government, politics, Right to buy | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.

The overall results may be more mixed but the Conservative loss of its flagship councils Wandsworth and Westminster could hardly be more symbolic in terms of the politics of housing.

Westminster has been Conservative-controlled since its creation in 1964 while Wandsworth has been run by the Tories since 1978.

Both were retained by the party at the height of Mrs Thatcher’s unpopularity in 1990 and throughout the Blair and Brown Labour governments between 1997 and 2010 but not anymore.

Together with Barnet, which also went Labour for the first time, they represent a sea change in politics in London, as former housing minister Lord Barwell noted in a tweet this morning:

That gives some idea of the resonance of the results for the Conservatives, but Wandsworth and Westminster are possibly even more significant in the history of the politics of housing.

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An encore all over again for Right to Buy

Posted: May 3, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Housing associations, Housing benefit, Right to buy | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

It is the idea that is so superficially attractive that Conservatives cannot help forgetting all the other times it proved to be hopelessly impractical.

In a story helpfully briefed to the Telegraph a few days before the local elections, Boris Johnson is planning to ‘bring back Right to Buy’.

The prime minister has reportedly ordered officials to draw up plans to give the Right to Buy to housing association tenants ‘in a major shake-up inspired by Margaret Thatcher’.

Coming just over a week after levelling up secretary Michael Gove appealed to ‘Thatcher worshipping’ Tories to want more homes for social rent, the timing does not look like a total coincidence.

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