Posted: June 6, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Poverty, Social housing | Tags: General Election 2017 |
Originally published on June 6 on my blog for Inside Housing.
What will the main political parties do to improve the housing system for the poorest people?
The answer ranges from something to not much at all, according to a study of their manifestos launched by a group of experts this week.
Academics Stand Against Poverty conducted a poverty audit of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat plans on their policies on everything from disability to international development and education to health. Each of these was marked out of five, with 5 representing very high confidence that the policies on offer would tackle poverty and 1 very low confidence.
As the graphic shows, Labour came out best overall with an average score of 3.6, including 5 for its plans for disability and 4 for other areas including health, education and social security.
The Lib Dems came a close second with 3.2, matching Labour on education and ranked as the best party on the environment and sustainability.
The Conservatives scored worst on every topic, with no individual mark higher than 2 and an overall mark of 1.5.
That represents a significant improvement for Labour on its score in 2015, when more parties were assessed. Back then the Greens led the way with 3.9, followed by the Lib Dems with 3.2, Labour in third with 2.6, the Conservatives in fourth on 1.7 and UKIP trailing in last with 1.4.
Looking at housing specifically in the 2017 audit, Labour leads with 3, followed by the Lib Dems with 2 and the Tories with 1. That mostly applies to England given that housing policy is largely devolved but the combined score of 6 out of 15 is the lowest for the 11 different policy areas assessed.
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Posted: June 1, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Compulsory purchase, History, Local government, Social housing | Tags: Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain, Nick Timothy |
Originally published on June 1 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Ever since the advance reports of what would be in the Conservative manifesto, I’ve been wondering where the party’s new housing agenda comes from.
As I blogged at the time, the manifesto programme seems to go well beyond the Housing White Paper. It involves not just ‘a new generation of social housing’ but also enhanced compulsory purchase powers for councils and land value capture.
The obvious answer – one that all governing parties do in their manifesto – is to take what is already on the stocks in the relevant department and spin it into a more visionary-sounding idea.
That seems to be what happened with the discussions already underway between the DCLG and three councils – Stoke, Sheffield and Newark and Sheffield – about a package of measures that would enable them to build more homes.
As Inside Housing reported last month, the deals with those pilot authorities involve not just flexibility on borrowing caps but potentially new deals on rents and land assembly too.
That is important because councils have identified a range of barriers to them building new homes, including the caps, the way Right to Buy receipts are treated and (especially) the rent cut. Funding would come from the £1.4 bn allocated in the Autumn Statement
But the manifesto seems to be about more than just a few pilots and some existing money.
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Posted: May 16, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Social housing | Tags: General Election 2017, John Healey, Labour |
Originally posted on May 16 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Anyone caught up in the narrative about Labour’s radical manifesto will be left disappointed and a little bit puzzled by the party’s proposals on housing.
They will not be surprised given last week’s leak of the draft but they will find a sensible and pragmatic set of policies that move closer to what is desperately needed to tackle the housing crisis and are actually open to criticism for being too timid.
To give one example, the 2017 manifesto is routinely compared in the media to 1983’s ‘longest suicide note in history’.
But where Michael Foot’s Labour proposed a publicly-owned housebuilder and nationalisation of key parts of the building materials industry, Jeremy Corbyn’s party wants to extend Help to Buy for another seven years.
The equity loan part of the scheme is currently due to end in 2020 but Labour would guarantee funding until 2027 ‘to give long-term certainty to both first-time buyers and the housebuilding industry’.
That goes well beyond necessary action to avoid a cliff edge and abrupt fall in output after 2020.
It should be cause for celebration in the boardrooms of the big housebuilders because Help to Buy would continue to underpin their completions, profit margins, dividends and share options.
Or at least it might be if housebuilder executives were not also going to be hit personally by tax increases on higher earners and corporately by an excessive pay levy on employees paid over £500,000 a year.
But it’s still a surprising move from Labour. As Theresa May found out yesterday, Help to Buy is by no means universally popular and critics argue that too many of the benefits go to the big firms, their shareholders and people who can afford to buy anyway.
Whether you agree or disagree with it, extending Help to Buy until 2027 is evidence that on housing Labour’s approach would be pragmatic rather than ideological.
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Posted: May 15, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Compulsory purchase, Land, Social housing |
Originally posted on May 15 on my blog for Inside Houisng.
The reality may not match the rhetoric but it is still good news that a housing pledge is set to be the centrepiece of the Conservative manifesto. Even better, this one seems to involve building social housing rather than selling it off.
The Tories are calling it ‘a new generation of social housing’ for England and the Sunday Times a ‘council housing revolution’ but within a few hours of the policy being announced it was starting to unravel.
Senior Conservatives appearing on Sunday TV, including former housing minister Brandon Lewis, confirmed that there is no new money, just £1.4bn already announced in the 2016 Autumn Statement.
They also refused to confirm how many homes the initiative would generate but look back at the Autumn Statement though and the chancellor was claiming that the £1.4bn would fund 40,000 homes. However, this was part of a relaxation in grant funding and the statement said the money would enable housing associations ‘to deliver a mix of homes for affordable rent and low cost ownership’.
If the funding is uncertain at best, the weekend manifesto announcement sounds like a new idea and there could hardly be a bigger contrast with the Tory headline promise at the last election to extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants and fund it by forcing councils to sell their most valuable stock as it falls vacant.
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Posted: April 28, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Private renting, Right to buy, Social housing |
Originally published on April 28 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The housing crisis could persist ‘for decades to come’ unless the government shows more urgency and ambition on supply.
That’s the verdict* from an all-party committee of MPs on Friday in one of a series of reports due to be rushed out in the next few days as Westminster clears the decks for the election.
The Public Accounts Committee says:
‘
We are highly concerned by this lack of urgency and ambition, most of all in view of the rising costs, both human and financial, of homelessness. Not only does becoming homeless people represent a terrible blight on people’s lives, it also places additional strain on public spending: councils’ spending on temporary accommodation amounted to £840 million in 2015–16, a real-terms rise of nearly half (46%) in just five years.’
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Posted: April 21, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: LHA cap, Social housing, Wales |
Originally posted on April 21 on my blog for Inside Housing.
If you were looking to design a policy to penalise the poorest families paying the cheapest rents, it would be very hard to come up with something better than the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap.
My feature in Inside Housing looks at the situation in Wales. I already knew that the impact would be severe in deprived areas like the South Wales Valleys because of their very low LHA rates but the more people I talked to the worse the implications seemed to be.
Even in areas with higher LHA rates there are growing worries about the long-term impact. Ask people what the number one threat to their business plan is and everyone will say welfare reform: for some universal credit is the biggest worry but others say the LHA cap because of its effect not just on tenants and business plans but also future development.
I’m talking here about the cap as it applies to general needs housing when the cap is introduced in 2019. There are three main problems: the impact on the under-35s who are single with no children; areas where social rents are already above or close to LHA rates; and the effect on pensioners.
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Posted: March 13, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Right to buy, Social housing, Wales |
Originally published on March 13 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Wales is set to join Scotland in consigning the Right to Buy to history.
Readers in that country east of Offa’s Dyke and south of Hadrian’s Wall may want to look away as the Welsh Government introduces a bill into the National Assembly on Monday to abolish the Right to Buy, Right to Acquire and Preserved Right to Buy.
The aim is to protect social housing from further reduction and encourage the development of new social rented homes.
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Posted: March 2, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: English Housing Survey |
Originally published on March 2 on my blog for Inside Housing.
So what have we learned from the new English Housing Survey? The largest annual survey of households and housing conditions is just out for 2015/16 and here’s what caught my eye.
1) ‘The fall in owner-occupation has abated’
The official story is one of relatively little change this year: the number of owner-occupiers seems to have stabilised at 14.3m and there were still 3.9m social renters. The survey says that ‘the rate of owner occupation has not changed since 2013-14, indicating that the fall in owner occupation has abated’. Here’s the graph summing up the trend:
However, that’s not the full story. First, a note of caution: the 2013/14 survey had sampling issues that probably exaggerated the fall in home ownership and rise in private renting in that year. As a result last year’s survey showed a surprise fall in private renting and slight rise in owner-occupation that was hailed as a turning point by the government. Private renting resumed its rise in 2015/16, with the number of private renters up 250,000 at 4.5m.
2) But mortgaged ownership falls below 30%
The picture changes again if you look at the proportion of households in each tenure rather than the number. The survey shows that the owner-occupation rate fell to 62.9%, the lowest it’s been since 1985, while private renting rose from 19.0% to 19.9% and social renting fell slightly to 17.2%. Decline abated? Not so much.
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Posted: February 10, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Build to let, Housebuilding, Prefabrication, Social housing, Tax, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Housing White Paper |
Originally published on February 10 on my blog for Inside Housing.
So have Gavin Barwell and Sajid Javid finally grapsed the nettle on the housing crisis?
Critics lined up to call the white paper a damp squib, a white flag and (my personal favourite) like a wet Tuesday in Bognor. Some had even read it first.
Supporters called it a pragmatic shift away from policy under David Cameron and ‘a blueprint for change’. And there was the inevitable ‘cautious welcome’ from housing organisations.
In some ways, the responses of two of the architects of previous Conservative housing policies were the most interesting ones. Former housing minister Grant Shapps said previous plans had not made much difference and this one probably wouldn’t either. Former No 10 adviser Alex Morton revealed the cynical political calculation at the heart of previous policy when he warned that ‘if you get dragged into an argument about renting versus owning, it will quickly become about the need for more council homes’.
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Posted: January 19, 2017 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Social housing, Tax | Tags: NAO |
Originally posted on January 19 on my blog for Inside Housing.
A new overview of housing in England from the National Audit Office (NAO) provides some revealing insights on the state of the nation ahead of the Housing White Paper. Here are some highlights.
Moving the goalposts
The NAO estimates that 174,000 net additional homes a year are needed to meet the government’s target of a million new homes by 2020.
That’s fewer than the 190,000 delivered in 2015/16, the first of the five years covered by the target.
Confused? How on earth can the government meet such an ambitious target by building fewer homes? The answer is that it has moved the goalposts twice.
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Jules Birch 