What’s gone wrong with our housing – and what could go right
Posted: April 4, 2023 Filed under: Private renting, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Barcelona, Singapore, Vienna Leave a commentAs 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Reading the Tory leadership tea leaves
Posted: August 22, 2022 Filed under: Housebuilding, Mortgages, Right to buy | Tags: Conservatives Leave a commentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Political chaos leaves big housing questions
Posted: July 8, 2022 Filed under: Fire safety, Levelling up, Mortgages, Private renting, Right to buy | Tags: Conservatives, Michael Gove Leave a commentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Johnson’s lame cover version
Posted: June 10, 2022 Filed under: Home ownership, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Mortgages, Right to buy 1 CommentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Two symbolic results in the politics of housing
Posted: May 6, 2022 Filed under: Council housing, Local government, politics, Right to buy | Tags: Wandsworth, Westminster Leave a commentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »An encore all over again for Right to Buy
Posted: May 3, 2022 Filed under: Housing associations, Housing benefit, Right to buy Leave a commentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Winners and losers in the hunt for A Home of Our Own
Posted: October 20, 2021 Filed under: Home ownership, Leasehold, Radio, Right to buy 1 CommentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on October 20.
A young couple living in a caravan because they can’t find anywhere to rent let alone buy wait for winter and cold weather.
It might be an everyday story from the housing crisis except for two things. First, this is the final episode in an excellent 10-part Radio 4 series that shows that there are many different local crises not just a single national one. Second, one of them works as a housing officer for the local council.
A Home of Our Own finished on Friday but is well worth catching on BBC Sounds over the next few weeks. Presented by Lynsey Hanley, it’s a journey right around the UK that begins in Cornwall and ends in Pembrokeshire via London, Belfast, Glasgow, Middlesbrough and most points in between.
Read the rest of this entry »The cake and the crumbs
Posted: April 15, 2021 Filed under: Affordable housing, First Homes, Planning, Right to buy Leave a commentOriginally published as a column on insidehousing.co.uk on April 15.
From Brexit to just about anything else you care to mention, Boris Johnson is known for wanting to ‘have his cake and eat it’. Why should it be any different for housing?
That was the first thought that sprung to mind reading through a raft of recent government responses to consultations. Much like the social housing green and white papers, they try to face in two different directions at once.
One points towards the more tenure-neutral territory staked out under Theresa May. The other points backwards to the promised land of home ownership staked out by David Cameron, the former prime minister turned PR man for failed bankers.
Both are evident in the outcome of consultations on the new model for shared ownership, changes to the current planning system and First Homes, supporting housing delivery and public service infrastructure and use of receipts from Right to Buy sales in the run-up to Easter.
So we get the expansion of permitted development to cover the conversion of most empty commercial buildings, not just offices, into residential. This may mean more ‘units’ but with too few constraints on quality to be regarded as ‘homes’.
Plans for reform of shared ownership include confirmation that landlords will be liable for repairs for the first 10 years on new homes but no acknowledgement that this leaves existing tenant-owners living in devalued assets.
There are plans to give existing as well as new shared owners the statutory right to a lease of 990 rather than 99 years but no fresh solutions for those left out of government help for fire safety costs or forced to take out £50 a month loans.
Reductions in the minimum initial stake and staircasing threshold meet commitments previously made by housing secretary Robert Jenrick without any real evidence supporting them.
Changes to the current planning system include a welcome u-turn on a proposal to increase the threshold at which small sites are exempt from affordable housing requirements from 10 homes to up to 50. That could rescue up to 30,000 affordable homes over the next five years.
However, that’s trumped by confirmation of plans to require a minimum of 25 per cent of homes delivered through developer contributions to be First Homes. Mr Jenrick is therefore diverting a sizeable chunk of the funding mechanism that accounts for more than half of affordable homes into his pet project.
On the Right to Buy, local authorities get five years rather than three to use receipts to build new homes and receipts can account for 40 rather than 30 per cent of the total cost. These are improvements to the scarcely credible ‘one-for-one replacement’ pledge made when discounts were increased in 2012.
But that could still leave them forced to sell homes for less than it cost to build them and it does not address the parallel question of ‘like-for-like’ replacement.
Far from responding to concerns raised in the consultation about broadening the definition, the government suggests that ‘affordable’ replacements for social rent homes sold could include not just affordable rent and shared ownership but also (you guessed it) First Homes.
All of which suggests that the loss of social rent homes – 210,000 in England in the last eight years, according to the latest UK Housing Review – will continue even as ministers make rhetorical nods to the tenure.
It’s as though one part of government wants to shift the balance of policy in favour of social and affordable housing only for another to tilt it back towards home ownership and the free market.
With crucial choices looming as society reopens and the economy moves off life support, which will get the cake and which will be left with the crumbs?
Jules Birch 