Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
‘Homes for social rent are a fundamental part of our housing stock—a lifeline for those who would struggle to obtain a home at market rates.’
It’s a sign of how much has changed in the last six years that statements like that from Conservative politicians (in this case housing minister Rachel Maclean in a Commons debate last week) have become almost routine. For good measure, she also reaffirmed ‘the unshakeable commitment of the government to drive up both the quality and the quantity of this nation’s housing stock’.
The comments are part of a steady conversion by ministers to the merits of a tenure that not so long ago they seemed intent on dismantling. Since Grenfell, there has been a steady softening in tone and relaxation in policy, with Theresa May as prime minister and Michael Gove as housing secretary prominent among the converts.
But all the fine words and tweaks to policy are not yet matched by results. As MPs from both sides of the house pointed out in the debate, the current output of 7,500 social rent homes a year fails to match the 21,600 a year lost to the Right to Buy and demolition, let alone the 90,000 a year that the all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee has consistently argued are needed.
All this in the same week as research by the National Housing Federation (NHF) showed that two million children are living in overcrowded homes with no personal space because they cannot access a suitable and affordable home.
Much of this is obviously down to the fact that the Treasury remains unconvinced about these arguments. True, £11.4 billion for the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) over four years represents huge progress on the days when it seemed like there would be no AHP at all. True, the government has titled the balance slightly more towards social rent and Right to Buy replacements. But this is still a fraction of what is required and the AHP been badly eroded by inflation.
And so much of the baleful legacy of 2010 to 2016 is still in operation and yet to be unravelled. As Inside Housing reported last week, affordable rent is now generating rents at double social rent levels in some areas. Pointedly, the biggest gap of all is in the Surrey Heath constituency of Michael Gove, where the rent on a three-bed affordable rent home is £1,125 a month compared to £557 a month at social rent.
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?
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
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.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
So where next? The publication of the UK Housing Review this week is a chance to take stock and ask where the housing system may be heading.
The sense is one of considerable flux, for home ownership as the housing market downturn continues, for private renting as the momentum behind increased regulation grows and for social housing as landlords face competing demands for scarce resources.
The paralysis of policy signalled by a Budget that mostly ignored housing could be just a temporary lull ahead of a UK general election.
As ever, the review puts all that into context. For starters, John Perry’s chapter on housing expenditure shows where total government support (in grants, loans and guarantees) for housing is going. The balance between the private market (59 per cent) and affordable housing (41 per cent) may not be quite as skewed as it was in the heyday of Help to Buy but it is still tilted in one direction.
The good news is that public spending on affordable homes has risen in real terms since the dark days of the coalition government. Investment under three Affordable Homes Programmes is set to peak this year – but the looming cliff edge is an indication of the big decisions that lie ahead:
Current spending plans (as in the Budget) rely on eye-watering (and unrealistic) austerity after the next election so that they comply with the chancellor’s fiscal rules. Key decisions lie ahead in the spending review after the next election regardless of who wins.
What is getting built is also skewed. There were 59,175 affordable housing completions in England in 2021/22, the highest for 11 years. However, more than 20,000 of those were for affordable home ownership and 28,000 for affordable rent, leaving just 7,528 for social rent (plus another 3,080 for similar London Affordable Rent).
Contrast that with Scotland, which managed 9,757 affordable completions in 2021/22 including almost as many social rent homes (7,306) despite having a population about a tenth of England’s.
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.
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.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Why has housing become so unaffordable over the last 40 years?
The answer, according to new report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), is cuts in housing subsidy that represent ‘a massive shift in who pays market housing costs, from government and landlords onto tenant’ since 1979.
It’s the scale of the shift, rather than the shift itself, that is striking.
Back at the start of Margaret Thatcher’s first term, social and private renters alike were paying around 10 per cent of their incomes on rent. By 2020 that had risen to 25 per cent for social renters and 30 per cent for private renters.
The shift is represented in a graph that Ian Mulheirn, who co-authored the report with colleagues James Browne and Christos Tsoukalis from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, calls ‘one of the most striking’ in public policy:
They calculate that if housing subsidies had been maintained at 1979 levels as a share of total housing costs they would have been worth £45 billion 2019/20 rather than the actual £31 billion.
This ‘generational housing costs squeeze’ is the result of massive change in three elements of housing subsidy: social housing; housing benefit; and rent controls.
That is the result of the accumulation of many different policies over time: cuts in investment in council housing and higher council rents; private finance and higher housing association rents; the deregulation of the private rented sector; and rapid increases in housing benefit to ‘take the strain’ of all that followed by the cuts imposed under austerity.
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.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Eight weeks after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng shrank the economy with their growth plan, chancellor Jeremy Hunt completed his reversal of almost all of their plans in his Autumn Statement.
He was speaking against a backdrop of dire forecasts of recession, unemployment, falling living standards and rising taxes that spoke of bad news to come for housing and tenants and landlords alike.
The complete rewrite of the Autumn Statement leaves a long list of tax increases and spending cuts in its wake, even if many of them will not take effect until after the next election and so may not happen. However, there was still a little hope amidst the gloom.
Here are five points I picked up from the statement itself and the background documents.
The cap and the freeze
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the statement – with a nod to expectations management by the Treasury – is that there is also some good news. The announcement that the government will stick to previous pledges to increase benefits (and pensions and the minimum wage) in line with prices was not completely unexpected but will still come as a relief to tenants and landlords alike.
But Jeremy Hunt’s decision to increase the overall benefit caps by the same amount is much more of a surprise. Without this, thousands more households faced being capped as their benefits rose to hit thresholds that have been frozen since they were cut in 2016. The main thresholds for families will now increase to £22,020 a year outside London and £25,323 in the capital. The cost is estimated at £315 million in 2023/24 and almost £2 billion over the next five years.
And yet… these are still far below the average earnings figures that were misleadingly used to justify the cap in the first place. And they leave people who are already capped facing rent increases with no extra income to pay for them.
Finally, buried deep in the background documents is more gloom: the assumption that Local Housing Allowance rates for private renters will remain at 2022/23 levels, which have themselves been frozen since April 2020. This despite rapidly rising rents. If confirmed, the result will inevitably be rising rent arrears and homelessness.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The UK Housing Review Autumn Briefing Paper is published this week and as usual provides an invaluable guide to the state of the housing nation. Here are five graphs that illustrate key points about five different parts of the housing system:
Shifting rules on rents
What everyone wants to know, of course, is what will come in place of that purple line on the right but the graph is a reminder that so-called long-term deals on social housing rents can quickly disappear. The four-year rent reduction at the end of the 2020s that ended the previous one is now set to be succeeded by an annual increase significantly below the 11.1 per cent implied by the CPI plus 1 formula.
The Briefing Paper quotes estimates by Savills that a 5 per cent cap on rents in England (the government’s favoured option) would cost councils £500 million and housing associations up to £1 billion. One association says that even a 7 per cent cap would mean a 21 per cent reduction in new build and there are also major concerns about the impact on investment in existing stock and on supported housing.
A cap would help tenants not on housing benefit but the major beneficiary would be the Department for Work and Pensions unless its savings are reinvested in housing.
That point was really brought home to me when I interviewed the Welsh housing minister recently. She was only too aware that the more she restricts next year’s rent increase, as might be her instinct, the more savings will go straight back to Westminster, with zero chance of them coming back to Wales.
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.
Austerity is back. The mess left by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng will have to be cleaned up, constraining the options for Rishi Sunak and for whoever wins the next general election.
But there is nothing that says Austerity 2.0 has to be a repeat of the 2010s. Treasury orthodoxy is in charge again but there are always political choices.
David Cameron and George Osborne chose to prioritise cuts in public services and benefits over tax rises but that will be more difficult for a prime minister taking office at a time when those services are collapsing and benefits are already close to destitution levels.
And there is one more crucial difference this time around: in the 2010s austerity was accompanied by record low interest rates that slashed mortgage payments for millions of home owners and buy-to-let landlords.
The benefits flowing to anyone with a mortgage – and to existing owners as house prices rose – help to explain why the Conservatives have won four elections in a row.
But Austerity 2.0 arrives just as mortgage rates are rising and just as the prospects of a housing market downturn are shifting from likely to inevitable.
Jules Birch 