A tale of three targets
Posted: January 9, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Housebuilding, Social housing, Temporary accommodation | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
What’s in a target? Angela Rayner faced questions at the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee this week and gave some illuminating answers to kick off 2025.
First up was the target that is a key milestone in the government’s mission on economic growth: the manifesto promise of 1.5 million additional homes over this parliament.
The deputy prime minister faced a series of questions about whether the target is achievable and what will have to happen in later years to make up the shortfall when fewer than 300,000 a year are built in the early years.
She ran through the measures the government is taking and summed it up in an unfortunate metaphor: ‘So there are a number of levers that we’re pulling at the moment which will hopefully start to turn the tide, but it’s a bit like the Titanic, it’s not like one of the Hackney cabs that can turn really quickly. It will take more time in the early stages before we start to see the shoots.’
It’s clear what she meant but it wasn’t a good start to conjure up images of icebergs ahead. Much better was her admission that: ‘Even If I achieve and this government achieves the 1.5 million homes target, it is a dent. It is a dent in what we need to achieve as a whole country, to deliver the houses we desperately need.’
It was also good that she acknowledged concerns about development by housing associations and Section 106 while promoting initiatives to accelerate new homes and remove blockages on stalled sites. So too her emphasis on the importance of land value capture, the grey belt and the balance that has to be struck with viability.
But 300,000 new homes a year has not been achieved since the heyday of council housing so I was intrigued to see what she would say about social housing in the present day.
Read the rest of this entry »Ireland blazes a trail on housing
Posted: December 19, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Ireland, Social housing | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
What would our politics look like if housing really were the most important issue in a general election?
After a week that’s seen the Labour government set out a series of bold planning reforms in pursuit of its ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes in England in this parliament, it’s a question that may seem to be moot or unrealistic depending on your point of view.
But it does not have to be either: take even a cursory glance at what’s happening in a country close to home and you will find an election where housing really was the number one issue at the polls.
The election in Ireland may not seem to have changed very much – the government will still be led by Fine Gael (FG) and Fianna Fáil (FF) as coalition negotiations continue – but housing could be set for a transformation.
On issues ranging from social housing investment to security of tenure for private renters, those parties of the centre right are well to the left of anything that Labour is proposing in England (or Wales).
On housebuilding numbers alone the contrast is staggering. That target for England works out at 300,000 a year and is widely seen as highly ambitious not to mention unachievable.
In Ireland, FF and FG plus the Progressive Democrats and Labour, the two centre-left parties that could form part of a coalition, are all promising 50,000 to 60,000 new homes a year. Adjust for England’s population (57.1 million) compared to Ireland’s 5.3 million and you get a range of 540,000 to 650,000 per year. That’s a level that really could make a difference to affordability rather than just slowing down the rate of house price growth.
Read the rest of this entry »Missions, targets and milestones
Posted: December 6, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Social housing | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Housing looked like an afterthought when Labour first set out what would be its missions and first steps in government.
Five months on from the election, though it is still a means to the end of the second mission of ‘kickstarting economic growth’, the manifesto target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament has moved centre stage as one of five milestones against which the progress of that government wants to be measured.
But Thursday’s big launch of the Plan for Change still begs some very big questions when it comes to housing.
For starters, it’s a funny kind of milestone that will only be visible after the end of the journey: we won’t know for certain whether 1.5 million homes have been delivered in this parliament until well after the next election.
Read the rest of this entry »Podcast review: The Trapped
Posted: November 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Social housing, Temporary accommodation, Tenants | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing
Few readers of Inside Housing will find the new podcast series The Trapped a comfortable listen but it is a necessary one.
You’d hope that politicians will find it an essential listen: surely few could hear its harrowing accounts of the conditions facing tenants in social housing, private renting and temporary accommodation and turn a deaf ear.
Trapped is based on the reporting of Daniel Hewitt of ITV News that began in 2021 with a story about tenants living in appalling and dangerous conditions in a tower block owned by Croydon Council.
That led to a flood of messages from tenants across the country complaining about disrepair and squalor and being ignored by their social landlord.
Among them were Kwajo Tweneboa, the ‘teenager with a Twitter account’ who held Clarion to account for appalling conditions on the Earlsfield estate in south London and became a national campaigner.
Most of the individual stories will be familiar from his TV news reports but they feel all the more powerful for being grouped together in the eight-part podcast.
Read the rest of this entry »The scale of the building safety crisis
Posted: November 5, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Social housing | Tags: National Audit Office | Leave a commentA forensic examination of the government’s building safety programme lays bare the scale of the task facing ministers when they set out further steps on remediation of unsafe homes shortly.
Open the report published by the National Audit Office (NAO) today virtually anywhere and a number will leap out at you:
- It could take until 2037 – a full 20 years after Grenfell and two years longer than implied by current government modelling– for all homes with dangerous cladding over 11m to be fixed.
- Some 4,771 residential mid- and high-rise buildings (with 258,000 homes) are in a remediation programme but work has only been completed on a third of them and is yet to start on half.
- Those 4,771 buildings represent less than half of the number of buildings (9,000 to 12,000) that the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) estimates will need remediating. The others have not been identified – and there is a risk that some may never be.
- £16.6 billion is MHCLG’s best estimate of the total cost (within a range of £12.6 billion to £22.4 billion).
Putting those numbers together gives some idea of the scale of a crisis in buildings over 11m that has consistently grown faster than the government’s attempts to resolve it.
Read the rest of this entry »Does the Budget shift the dial on housing?
Posted: October 31, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Budget, Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A final verdict will have to wait for the spending review in the Spring but how should we assess the first Labour Budget for 14 years?
The answer of course depends on what you take as your starting point. Compared with the disastrous first Conservative Budget in 2010 or even the first Labour one in 1997, this one takes some definite steps in the right direction.
But does this Budget live up to Labour rhetoric about greater investment and long-term solutions. To what extent will it really ‘fix the foundations’ and deliver ‘the biggest boost to affordable and social housing for a generation’?
Here are 10 key areas that I was looking out for:
1) New social homes: The £500 million top-up to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) briefed in advanceis welcome news but it must only be a down-payment on a far bigger increase for the next AHP after 2026.
It is at the lower end of expectations of up to £1 billion extra and it will not be enough to make up for a shortfall in delivery caused by construction cost inflation and other pressures on social landlords. The current AHP is on course to deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 affordable homes over five years rather than the 180,000 originally expected while need is estimated at 90,000 social homes a year.
All of which puts the 5,000 the government says will be generated by the top-up into perspective.
Details of ‘future grant investment’ in the next AHP will be set out in the spending review and will support a mix of tenures ‘with a focus on delivering homes for social rent’.
Read the rest of this entry »Time for a subsidy shift
Posted: October 21, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing
With the days counting down to the Budget and all eyes on the tax increases to come, you’d have to be quite an optimist to expect an immediate boost for housing.
There may be scope for redistribution of some existing budgets but the first fiscal event of the new government is taking place against a gloomy short-term backdrop, with cabinet ministers for unprotected departments reportedly protesting about the cuts they are being expected to take.
The real question for October 30 – and for the Spring spending review to come – is a more long-term one: a shift in thinking about the value of housing investment.
There have already been some hopeful signs on this, with chancellor Rachel Reeves said to be considering a shift in the measure of debt to take account of the value of the assets created by investment as well as the costs. This could create room for billions in extra public investment, but housing would have to join the queue alongside health, education, transport, prisons and all the other government priorities.
If you’re looking for reasons to invest in housing specifically, there is plenty of timely evidence in the new UK Housing Review Autumn briefing paper published this week.
Read the rest of this entry »Reeves raises expectations on investment
Posted: September 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Energy efficiency, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: Angela Rayner, Labour, Rachel Reeves | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For the most part, this was a Labour conference of nudges and winks rather than major announcements.
That is no coincidence because major decisions across government are being left to the Budget and one-year spending review next month and the multi-year spending review to follow in the Spring.
So for all the debate at what looked like an unprecedented number of fringe meetings on housing in Liverpool, for all the promises from the conference podium of brownfield passports and help for homeless veterans and care leavers, there was comparatively little that signalled the direction the new government intends to take.
The one exception was not a surprise: the reinstatement by net zero secretary Ed Miliband of the 2030 target to bring all rented homes up to a minimum level of Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C by 2030.
The announcement reinstates an earlier target for Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards that was scrapped by Rishi Sunak and extends it to social and private rented homes
That will have major implications given that the costs of retrofitting social housing alone far exceed Labour’s scaled-back plans for green grants and loans.
Without a boost, that could accelerate the sell-off of older private rented stock and encourage social landlords to consolidate theirs, at the same time as it focusses their attention even more on improving their existing homes rather than building new ones.
On new homes, the big question for me is the relationship between Labour’s target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament and its manifesto promise on affordable and social housing.’
Read the rest of this entry »The trouble with targets
Posted: September 20, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Section 106, Social housing, Wales | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The trouble with targets
Housing targets concentrate minds in government and drive delivery but they also come with trade-offs attached.
As Labour gears up for its first party conference since gaining power, much of the attention will be on announcements that fill in the blanks in how it is going to achieve its manifesto target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament.
Superficially unambitious – it’s no more than the 2019 Tory manifesto promise 300,000 of 300,000 new homes by the mid-2020s – it is actually a huge stretch, with ministers expecting no more than 200,000 net additional dwellings in this financial year as a starting point.
That will leave a growing shortfall to be made up in the later years of the parliament and could require more like 400,000 new homes a year to be built by the late 2020s.
Having a target in place is important because it drives activity within government, especially when it is backed by the rise of Labour yimbyism.
But a target does not guarantee delivery in itself, even with the magic added ingredient of planning reform.
Read the rest of this entry »The Grenfell Tower inquiry: truth, justice and change
Posted: September 11, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Social housing | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A week after the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry it’s time to focus on the responses so far and what happens next.
Sir Keir Starmer made a dignified statement in the Commons in which he spoke directly to the Grenfell community: ‘I want to start with an apology on behalf of the British state to each and every one of you, and indeed to all the families affected by this tragedy. It should never have happened. The country failed to discharge its most fundamental duty to protect you and your loved ones—the people we are here to serve—and I am deeply sorry.’
We’ve heard prime ministers say things like this many times over the decades, sometimes after disasters, sometimes after scandals. The difference is that Grenfell was both.
For Grenfell United, publication of the report is ‘a significant chapter in the journey to truth, justice and change. But justice has not been delivered. The inquiry report reveals that whenever there’s a clash between corporate interest and public safety, governments have done everything they can to avoid their responsibilities to keep people safe. The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.’
All disasters have an element of scandal about them too. There were basic operational failures that led to them, often compounded by a cavalier attitude to health and safety and establishment resistance to justice for the victims.
Similarly, scandals like the Post Office and infected blood were systemic failures but also disasters that cost victims their livelihoods and their lives.
Grenfell combines the two: not an accident but an entirely preventable disaster; and a scandal that does not just implicate local and central government and the entire construction industry but also raises fundamental questions about societal attitudes towards social housing and the safety of most of the blocks of flats built during this century.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jules Birch 