Posted: April 19, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Legal, Pay to stay, Social housing, Tenants | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on April 19 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
It was another day, another session of watering down the Housing and Planning Bill in the Lords. Peers reached sections of the Bill including Pay to Stay and security of tenure in the latest Report stage debate on Monday.
On Pay to Stay for ‘high income’ council tenants, they inflicted three more defeats on the government and they also forced some interesting clarifications of the detail out of ministers. As the Bill now stands, local authorities will have discretion about whether to apply Pay to Stay, the thresholds will be increased to £40,000 outside London and £50,000 in London, and the taper for higher rents will be 10p.
Obviously it remains to be seen how much of this the government will look to reverse in the Commons, perhaps citing financial privilege because the money raised by the policy goes back to the Treasury.
The government version of the policy – set out in an email to peers an hour before the debate – is that it will be compulsory for councils, the thresholds will be £31,000 and £40,000 and the taper will be 20p. That means tenants would pay an extra £200 a year in rent for each £1,000 they earn above the thresholds. (It’s not clear to me why the out-of-London threshold has been increased from the previous £30,000).
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Posted: April 11, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Scotland, Social housing | Tags: Housing Studies Association, Policy Exchange |
Originally posted on April 11 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
What does the future hold for housing? That was a question that generated three contrasting answers and lots of debate in a session I chaired at the Housing Studies Association conference in York last week.
If you’re from Scotland, the future looks bright. Robert Black, chair of the independent Housing and Wellbeing Commission, spoke about the extraordinary impact of its work ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections. The SNP and Labour are vying with each other to accept its target of 9,000 affordable homes a year, including 7,000 actually affordable homes for social rent. In English terms, once you scale up for a far larger population, that’s the equivalent of Brandon Lewis pledging 100,000 social rented homes a year.
In England’s dreams, of course, but which dreams? Competing visions were on offer from Chris Walker of Policy Exchange and Anna Minton of the University of East London.
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Posted: April 10, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing market, London, Pay to stay, Private renting, Tax | Tags: David Cameron, Panama Papers |
Next time you read about ‘fat cats’ earning more than the prime minister here’s something to bear in mind: so does his house.
The summarised tax returns released by David Cameron this weekend show that he had a total taxable income of just over £200,000 in 2014/15. The first £141,000 of that were his earnings as prime minister: he has not taken a pay rise since 2010 and has also voluntarily waived a £20,000 prime ministerial expenses deduction since 2011.
Most of the Panama Papers coverage has concentrated on Cameron’s links to his father’s offshore fund and an inheritance gift from his mother. However, he is also the first prime minister to rent out his existing home while living tax-free in Downing Street. The accounts show that he had a net rental income of £47,000 from letting out his house in Notting Hill, an amount that notes to the accounts confirm is his 50 per cent share of the proceeds:
So the total rent (after expenses) received by the Camerons last year was £94,000 and in the first five years since he became prime minister they gained a total of £432,000 in rent.
However, that is not the total amount they will have ‘earned’ from their house as London house prices have also soared over the same period. The exact value of the Cameron house is hard to pin down, since they are reported to have spent £600,000 on renovations after buying it in 2006. Some reports put the value at £2 million in 2010, others £2.7 million.
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Posted: March 22, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Housing associations, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally published on March 22 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
This concluding part of my blog on Pay to Stay follows up more clues on how the government wants the policy to work. Part 1 focuses on how the tapers will work plus issues about the assessment of incomes and market rents.
Just to confuse things even further, a statutory instrument on social housing rents published on Friday stipulates that the four-year 1% rent cut that applies from April 2016 does not apply to households with incomes of more than £60,000 (in the current or previous year). This is a reference to the existing voluntary Pay to Stay and I assumed at first it simply meant that the relatively few landlords who have implemented it would not reduce the rents of ‘high income’ tenants who are already paying higher rents. However, it seems that as drafted it means that landlords would have to exclude all tenants with an income of more than £60,000 from the cut – even though there is currently no obvious way for them to find them all. Appropriately enough the regulations come into force on April 1.
The Housing and Planning Bill makes Pay to Stay compulsory for local authorities but reduces the household income thresholds to £30,000 outside London and £40,000 in London. Any increased rental income has to be paid to the Treasury. It remains voluntary for housing associations. Here are five more issues raised in the Lords.
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Posted: March 18, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Housing benefit, Pay to stay, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on March 18 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Thanks to the persistence of a group of peers, we now know a little bit more about how the government wants higher Pay to Stay rents to work for tenants.
The details emerged on the sixth day of the committee stage of the Housing and Planning Bill on Monday (see Hansard here).
That followed confirmation in a government consultation response last week that there will be a taper and that tenants on housing benefit claimants will be exempt. As I blogged the next day, this was presented as a climbdown. The government says tenants on incomes just above the thresholds ‘will see their rent rise by only a few pounds each week’. However, it also begged yet more questions. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: March 10, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill, National Audit Office |
Originally posted on March 10 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Key elements of the Housing and Planning Bill have faced serious scrutiny in the last couple of days but we’re still not much nearer to knowing how or if they will work.
The frustration of MPs and peers is palpable as they repeatedly ask for more detail and are just as repeatedly told that it will be available shortly. It was all too much even for a Conservative MP on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Wednesday afternoon. ‘You’re treating the parliamentarians around this table with contempt,’ Stephen Phillips told two senior Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) civil servants. ‘You’re asking us to take this on faith. Why not do the work first and then bring the legislation forward?’
The answer is of course that it’s much easier for ministers if it works the other way around. Under current plans, the crucial detail will appear in secondary legislation only after the bill has Royal Assent.
The PAC was investigating the value-for-money aspects of the extension of the Right to Buy to housing associations and the levy on forced sales of council houses that is meant to fund it. But members didn’t get far asking for detail. ‘The timings have yet to be determined,’ ran one senior civil servant answer. ‘The amounts have yet to be determined. The formulae have yet to be determined.’
The National Audit Office (NAO) is not impressed either. Here’s its assessment of the government’s impact assessment of the bill:
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Posted: March 1, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Starter homes, Tenants | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally published on March 1 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
For a piece of legislation that’s already faced hours of scrutiny from MPs and peers, there are still gaping holes at the heart of a Housing and Planning Bill that started life on the back of a fag packet and hasn’t moved much beyond it in several important respects.
Opposition demands for more detail about legislation are nothing new of course, but I’ve argued before that the lack of clarity here is deliberate in a bill that is designed to allow the government to do what it wants in future. To take one example, after stretching the definition of ‘affordable’ to breaking point to include £450,000 Starter Homes, the bill adds that the secretary of state ‘may by regulations amend this section so as to modify the definition of affordable housing’.
Many of the gaps were highlighted in the Commons late last year. The last two months have brought little further detail but now it’s crunch time: as peers debate a series of amendments, ministers are bound to come under increased pressures to say exactly what they mean.
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Posted: February 18, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Social housing, Tenure change | Tags: Brandon Lewis, English Housing Survey |
Originally posted on February 18 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
At first sight, headline results from the English Housing Survey published on Thursday are very good news for Brandon Lewis.
As the housing minister was quick to point out, the survey shows 2014/15 was the first year since 2003 when the home ownership rate in England did not fall. And, as this graph also shows, private renting fell for the first time since 1999:
He might also have pointed to this graph showing a surprise turnaround in the tenure prospects of Generation Rent:
The fall in ownership over the last 10 years has been most marked among young people, so this increase in ownership among the 25-34s in 2014/15 and decline in private renting is a marked reversal of that trend.
On the face of it then it’s good news for ministers in their quest to revive the property-owning democracy and bad news for doom-mongers (like me). Perhaps all those dire predictions that we are on course to become a nation of private renters are wrong? Maybe Help to Buy really is working? Did Labour commission the Redfern Review into the decline of home ownership to look at a problem that no longer exists?
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Posted: February 10, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Legal, Local government, Right to buy, Rural housing, Section 106, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on February 10 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Start with a fundamental change to the funding mechanism for the right to buy, stir in more changes to key elements of the Housing and Planning Bill, then add criticism of the lack of detail and you have a recipe that shoud give ministers indigestion.
The report of the all-party Communities and Local Government Committee does support both the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants and the voluntary deal between the government and the NHF is ‘the best way forward’.
But that’s as good as it gets for ministers from a committee that has a Labour chair but a Tory majority. Here is the headline recommendation:
‘The Government proposes to fund the right to buy discounts for housing association tenants with the proceeds from the sale of high value council homes. However we believe that public policy should usually be funded by central Government, rather than through a levy on local authorities.’
This would undermine one of the central elements of the Bill and the government’s method of paying for right to buy discounts and the promised replacement homes. And the MPs are not finished.
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Posted: February 8, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Budget, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: IFS |
Originally posted on February 8 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
If you feel like you’ve been banging your head against a brick wall making the case for greater investment in rented homes, take heart. Someone is listening.
The Green Budget from the Institute for Fiscal Studies appears every year a month before the real thing and gives an impeccably independent and influential assessment of the chancellor’s options.
The 2016 version was published on Monday and it includes two chapters written for the IFS by the Institute for Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Yes, I know the mention of chartered accountants may have you asking yourself why you started reading this blog, but please try to contain your excitement – because there is an important point to this.
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Jules Birch 