Posted: April 7, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market, Right to buy, Starter homes | Tags: George Osborne |
So the Conservatives will pledge a ‘housing revolution’ at the election. Sound familiar?
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph over the weekend, George Osborne outlined a Tory plan to help a million more people into home ownership in the next parliament thanks to schemes like Help to Buy, Right to Buy and the Starter Home scheme.
‘I would like to see us double the number of first time buyers, up to half a million. That is the kind of level we saw in the 1980s. There is no reason why our country can’t achieve that again. That’s a goal we set ourselves today.
‘I think we can deliver a revolution in home ownership and make this the home-owning democracy, the home-owning society that I think is one of the Conservatives’ core beliefs.’
The chancellor says that visiting building sites is ‘the best part of my job’, not to mention donning high-vis jackets and being pictured with happy first-time buyers. ‘It reminds me of why we are doing this. Ultimately this is about people’s aspirations, their futures and their dreams.’
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Posted: February 24, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Right to buy, Social housing |
Oops. The final Right to Buy stats before the election show that the reinvigorated policy is delivering less than half the new homes the government previously claimed: one for every 11 sold.
Up to now, the ratio was running at one start on site for every five homes sold compared to an apparent pledge of 1-for-1 replacement when discounts were increased in April 2012. The chances of achieving that always seemed somewhere between slim and zero given that the Treasury still takes a cut of the receipts and the fine print meant that the pledge only applied only to additional sales on top of those already expected, even though the replacements would not be like for like.
However, as Pete Apps reports, today’s figures for replacement starts on site have been revised downwards substantially. The apparent 4,795 starts between April 2012 and September 2013 turn out to be just 2,298. That compares with more than 26,000 homes sold off since April 2012.
The graph below shows the comparison quarter by quarter:
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Posted: February 12, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Housing market, Right to buy | Tags: Iain Duncan Smith |
Could housing hold the key to the Conservatives’ chances of winning the general election?
I’d assumed till now that the fact David Cameron made housing (or rather home ownership) one of his six priorities for speeches signalled no more than a desire to put aspiration at the heart of the Tory campaign. Mixing a few dubious claims about Help to Buy with some boasts about the Starter Home Initiative might mean some extra votes but housing would remain a secondary issue behind the economy, the NHS and immigration.
But two tweets this week by influential Conservative Tim Montgomerie made me wonder about this. Montgomerie is a Times columnist but that understates his influence in the party as the co-founder of the Centre for Social Justice, creator of the Conservative Home website and speechwriter for two Tory leaders.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: August 28, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Right to buy, Social housing |
As sales pass 20,000, what’s been the impact of England’s ‘reinviograted’ right to buy so far?
Figures released by the DCLG last week show 20,027 sales since April 2012, when the maximum discount was increased to £75,000. This followed David Cameron’s Conservative Party conference speech in October 2011, when he said the proceeds would be reinvested in new affordable homes.
The government continues to introduce extra sales incentives. These include a new maximum discount for London of £100,000 from April 2013, £100 million to improve access to mortgage finance plus right to buy sales agents, annual inflation uprating of discounts and an increase in the maximum percentage discount on a house. Finally, the Deregulation Bill will reduce the qualifying period from five years as a tenant to three once it completes remaining stages in the Lords and gets Royal Assent.
That’s the context. But what are the numbers? And what about the wider impacts warned about by critics? Here’s an assessment so far:
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: June 26, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Energy efficiency, Environment, London, Private renting, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Deregulation Bill |
Blink and you may have missed it but significant housing legislation you may never have heard of passed its final stages in the Commons on Monday night.
Scant discussion in the housing press (including by me) of the Deregulation Bill is perhaps understandable when you consider that it is huge and it covers everything from the right to buy to outer space*. Several of the clauses involving housing were also not in the original Bill and have been added later.
However, here’s what will become law in England this summer as a result of Monday’s votes (there are other minor changes I don’t have room for):
- The qualifying period for the right to buy will be reduced from five years to three
- Local authorities will no longer be able to impose standards for new homes that go beyond the building regulations (mainly on energy efficiency)
- Legislation banning short-term lets of homes in London will be repealed
- The secretary of state will no longer have the power to require local authorities to produce housing strategies.
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Posted: January 2, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Housing market, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: David Cameron, government guidance, House of Commons, housing market, housing supply, James Meek |
Not everything stops for Christmas and New Year. I’ve just written a post for Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing, on what’s happened in housing over the break.
The post features government guidance on housing allocations for local people, a House of Commons Library note on housing supply, an FT report on David Cameron’s fading interest in garden cities, a 5 Live programme on the housing market in 2014, James Meek’s London Review of Books essay on housing plus the latest on the bedroom tax.
Read more here.
Posted: July 29, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Right to buy, Social housing |
All those high earners with social tenancies seem to be slowly melting away ahead of the government’s plan to implement ‘pay to stay’ market rents.
I’m not just talking about the impact of the policy itself and the incentive for tenants to declare an income of £59,999 or even to cut the number of hours they work to get out of paying a market rent for their homes.
Rather I’m talking about the government’s own estimates of the number of high earners. When the policy was first floated at the Conservative Party conference in October 2011, the Telegraph was briefed that there were 6,000 ‘fat cat’ tenants earning more than £100,000 a year.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: April 9, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing market, Right to buy |
The first part of my analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s housing legacy looks at the right to buy and the property-owning democracy.
The death of the former prime minister got me thinking in what I hope is a dispassionate way about what her time in office meant to housing.
What seems to be undeniable is that the right to buy represented a sea change. Many people would nominate British Gas or British Airways or BT as her greatest privatisation but council housing was bigger than any of them. Some 1.5 million homes were sold between 1979 and 1990 (500,000 of those between 1979 and 1983). Capital receipts from the right to buy totalled £17.6 billion between 1979 and 1989 compared to £23.5 billion from all the other privatisations put together.
It is the one housing policy that is being mentioned in all of the obituaries and hagiographies in the national media but the truth about Thatcher and the right to buy is more complex that you might think.
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Posted: March 25, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Right to buy, Social housing |
David Cameron’s speech about social housing and immigration today demonstates yet again the gap between perception and reality on the issue.
The prime minister says he wants to introduce an ‘expectation’ that local authorities will introduce a local residency test determining who should qualify for social housing:
‘New migrants should not expect to be given a home on arrival. And yet at present almost one in ten new social lettings go to foreign nationals. So I am going to introduce new statutory housing allocations guidance this spring to create a local residence test. This should mean that local people rightly get priority in the social housing system. And migrants will need to have lived here and contributed to this country for at least two years before they can qualify.’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: March 21, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Housing finance, Housing market, Right to buy, Social housing |
Here’s my take on the four key questions for housing coming out of the Budget so far.
1) Is Osborne just blowing bubbles? There are sound reasons why the government might want to help people buy new homes or help first-time buyers get mortgages. The equity loan and mortgage guarantee schemes under Help to Buy are extensions of the existing FirstBuy and NewBuy schemes.
However, put them together and you have new schemes that will go to more people and go further up the income scale (a mortgage of up to £600,000 would suggest a household income of getting on for £200,000) without any guarantees that they will result in any more new homes being built. The equity loan option will be available on all homes but is designed to exclude second home owners and buy to let landlords. However, where NewBuy only applied to new homes, the mortgage guarantee will apply to the whole market. And on the Today programme this morning George Osborne repeatedly ducked questions about whether second and multiple home owners would be able to apply. It seems that any attempt at targeting new supply or first-time buyers has been abandoned in a desperate attempt to get the housing market moving before the next election.
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Jules Birch 