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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Posted: March 8, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Labour market, Private renting, Right to buy |
If you had to think of one article of faith for the Conservative Party, a property-owning democracy would come pretty close to the top of the list.
David Cameron reached back to the idea in his ‘magic money tree’ speech yesterday:
‘It is important that people who work hard and do the right thing are able to buy a home. As I said in my party conference speech – it is a rebuke to those of us who believe in property owning democracy that the average age for someone buying their first home today, without any help from their parents is 33 years old. And we are determined to tackle that.’
The prime minister was clearly hinting at something to come either in the Budget or the housing announcement he’s planning just before it. Whether that’s a new stamp duty holiday, or an extension to FirstBuy or even perhaps making existing homes eligible for NewBuy remains to be seen.
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Posted: February 26, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Right to buy, Social housing |
So how is it going so far for two ‘ambitious schemes’ that we were told would ‘unlock the aspirations of a new generation of home buyers’?
It was March 2012 when David Cameron and Grant Shapps launched NewBuy and the ‘reinvigorated’ Right to Buy 2. ‘This government doesn’t just talk about expanding home ownership: we’re making it happen,’ said the prime minister.
Even as he was speaking it all seemed a tad ambitious. No wonder, when theEnglish Housing Survey has just shown that home ownership fell again in 2011/12.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: June 15, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Planning, Regeneration, Right to buy, Social housing |
One of the stats most often quoted by Grant Shapps is that the social rented housing stock shrank by 421,000 homes under Labour. The real question is how much it will shrink under him.
The housing minister quoted the figure again this week when he was interviewed on the Today programme on Wednesday about the affordable housing figures (for more on them see my blog for Inside Housing here). His use of statistics is much discussed but on this particular one he’s right: social housing disappeared under Labour as right to buy and demolitions outnumbered construction of new homes. What he did not mention was that roughly twice as many homes disappeared under the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997.
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Posted: April 4, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Right to buy, Social housing |
First it was a revolution, then a reboot. Now it is a relaunch and a revamp.
The language has shifted considerably since David Cameron made the right to buy a key part of the ‘housing revolution’ he pledged in his Conservative conference speech in October.
Last month the policy was styled as a ‘reboot’. This month it’s so 21stcentury it’s even got it’s own Facebook page. The good news for the government is that it has 225 likes and news of happy council house buyers Mr and Mrs Watkins from Whitburn, South Tyneside. The bad news is that mixed in with some enthusiastic comments are a series of negative comments questioning the ‘back of a fag packet calculations’ and who is going to lend the money. Oh, and the fact that the Watkinses are actually £1 million lottery winners.
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Posted: March 15, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Right to buy |
I’m never quite sure about those ‘buy one, get one free’ offers in the supermarket. So can I really believe in ‘buy one, build one free’?
My local Shapps & Cameron hyperstore is offering me a ‘rebooted’ right to buy. Is it like it sounds – a desperate attempt of a 21st century marketeer to rebrand a tired old product from the 1980s as something exciting and new – or is there something in it?
Read the rest of this post on my blog at Inside Housing.
Posted: March 13, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Mortgages, Right to buy |
Yesterday should have been a day of triumph for Grant Shapps and the DCLG. Instead it was the day when the chickens began to come home to roost.
The day began so well too. Well-placed leaks in the Sunday and morning papers prepared the ground for TV and radio saturation for the launch of two key parts of the housing revolution promised by David Cameron in his party conference speech and first outlined in last year’s housing strategy: the new build indemnity guarantee and the expansion of the right to buy.
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Jules Birch 