Posted: October 2, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Greg Clark, National Housing Federation |
Originally posted on September 28 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
As the clock ticks down to 5pm on Friday, what should really count in the momentous decision to be taken by housing associations?
My first thought was this is like the ‘offer he can’t refuse’ scene in The Godfather. Vote No to the ‘voluntary’ deal on the Right to Buy and you may not wake up in bed next to the head of your favourite horse but you will be inviting Osborne to do his worst in the spending review in November.
Then I thought of the BBC. Looked at in terms of narrow self-interest it seems a no brainer. Better, surely, to strike a deal on the most generous terms you can now than wait for the government to impose the same thing on much worse terms later. That’s exactly what the BBC did before the Budget when it ‘voluntarily’ swallowed the cost of free TV licenses for the over-75s in return for an increase in the license fee.
My next thought was more cynical. Isn’t the NHF a bit like the Premier League when it signed the deal with Sky that excluded the rest of football from its TV billions? Even Sky didn’t make the other clubs sell their best players to pay for it.
And then I came back to the comparison that defenders of housing associations in the House of Lords spent the Spring and early Summer making: the complaint that this is the biggest seizure of charitable assets since the dissolution of the monasteries. Except that as far as I know the monastic orders did not voluntarily agree to the seizure provided they received full compensation paid for by the forcible sale of convents.
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Posted: September 15, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Home ownership, Private renting, Rent control, Social housing | Tags: Brandon Lewis, Greg Clark, John Healey |
Originally posted on September 15 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
The first Communities and Local Government questions with a new opposition brought some familiar faces – and issues – back into the limelight.
The Labour reshuffle following the election of Jeremy Corbyn gave the shadow DCLG team only a couple of hours to prepare so it was just as well that shadow communities secretary Jon Trickett had an experienced man beside him on the front bench.
John Healey was one of the most effective Labour housing ministers and continued to show a strong interest even after he moved on. His warning about the threat to social housing helped inspire the creation of SHOUT. He explained his continuing interest in an Inside Housing interview last year in which he supported lifting the borrowing cap on council housing.
In June he wrote to the National Audit Office to call for an investigation of the Right to Buy. It’s good news that he’s back and even better that he’s a member of the shadow cabinet.
His line of attack at Monday’s DCLG questions was declining home ownership. With George Osborne describing it as ‘a tragedy’, what did communities secretary Greg Clark have to say to millions of ‘middle England, middle-income young people and families’ with no hope of buying?
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Posted: September 11, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing associations, Local government, Shared ownership, Social housing | Tags: spending review |
Originally posted on September 11 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
With 11 weeks to go until the spending review, final efforts are being made to convince George Osborne of the case for housing.
The trouble is he’s already made it pretty clear he’s only interested in home ownership, may cannibalise what’s left of the housing budget to pay for it and he doesn’t seem to like housing associations much.
What we know so far is that the chancellor wants to cut departmental spending by £20bn and that departments have been told to model for two different scenarios: real terms cuts of 25% and 40%. If that is not bad enough, housing is an unprotected area and so bound to suffer when Osborne announces the details in November, potentially in multiple ways.
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Posted: September 9, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: George Osborne, spending review |
Originally posted on September 9 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Another week, another George Osborne attack on housing associations – but this one comes at a crucial time.
The chancellor’s comments yesterday at the House of Lords economic affairs committee are not the shock they would have been three months ago. In the wake of his hostile joint article with David Cameron and the decisions taken in the Budget and a summer of hostile media coverage including THAT Channel 4 News report, they may be seen as par for the course.
But nobody will need reminding of what is at stake. Ahead of publication of the Housing Bill next month, discussions continue with the National Housing Federation over implementation of the extension of the right to buy. Ahead of the spending review in November, we already know the government will look to ‘refocus’ the housing budget on home ownership and who knows if there will even be a housing budget after 2018.
So the nuances of what he said yesterday matter. And it’s probably no coincidence that he made them where he did: the revolt in the Lords over charitable associations remains the biggest obstacle to extending the right to buy. You can watch here from just after 16:02 for the section on housing but here are some extracts that give some interesting indications of his thinking.
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Posted: August 26, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Culture, Homelessness, London, Social housing | Tags: E15, Edinburgh Festival, Newham |
Originally posted on August 26 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Housing protests burst on to the stage at this year’s Edinburgh Festival.
One of the best shows I saw on the Fringe was E15, a play devised from verbatim accounts of what’s happened since 29 single mothers were told they would be evicted from the Focus E15 hostel in Newham in October 2013.
For a mainstream audience it shows the extremes of the housing crisis in a borough where severe homelessness and deprivation co-exist with the post-Olympics boom. It’s also the inspirational story of a group of people who in their own words knew nothing about politics and protesting but who refused to be marginalised.
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Posted: August 17, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Private renting, Right to buy, Social housing |
Originally posted on August 17 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Can the government afford to be complacent about the rate at which right to buy homes are falling into the hands of private landlords?
Pete Apps’s freedom of information investigation for Inside Housing revealed that 38 per cent of former council houses in 91 local authorities are now rented privately. The proportion is as high as 65 per cent in places like Milton Keynes and Stevenage. This figure is for leasehold council flats but there seems no reason to think that the rate for freehold houses will be significantly different, given that many were originally sold longer ago.
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Posted: July 16, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: English Housing Survey |
Originally published on July 16 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Results from the latest English Housing Survey reveal some fascinating details about where and how we live and how much we pay for it.
Headline findings from the survey for 2013/14 were published in February. As I blogged at the time, they revealed the full scale of the shift in tenure: this was not just about private renting overtaking social renting but outright ownership overtaking buying with a mortgage.
The results published on Thursday provide much more detail on that and much more besides. Here are some details that caught my eye:
100 years of changing tenure
Most of the 20th century was all about the decline of private renting from a tenure that housed three-quarters of us in 1918 to less than 10% of us by the 1980s. Until then, social renting was expanding almost as quickly as home ownership but it retreated again in the wake of the right to buy. But the 21st century has seen a big decline in home ownership too and the rebirth of private renting:
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Posted: June 30, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Housing benefit, Poverty, Social housing | Tags: Joseph Rowntree Foundation |
(Originally posted on June 30 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing)
What does the evidence say about the links between housing and poverty?
In an age of austerity, food banks and the bedroom tax, the links may seem obvious. A housing policy based on letting housing benefit take the strain – relying on private renting and rising affordable rents – at the same time as it is being cut looks like a pretty good mechanism for creating poverty.
But evidence emerging from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s housing and poverty research programme (see my summary here) shows a relationship that is both more complex and more troubling. The housing system can act as a defence against poverty and deprivation (as it has in the past through social housing, housing benefit and the homelessness safety net) but it can also be a cause of them (as it did before through high housing costs and poor conditions).
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Posted: June 23, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Benefit cap, Social housing, Tax credits, Universal credit | Tags: Iain Duncan Smith |
Worried about the impact of the benefit cap, social landlords? You should be because what happens next seems to be your responsibility.
As housing organisations slowly wake up to the dire implications of reducing the cap to £23,000, Iain Duncan Smith was asked about it at work and pensions questions on Monday. Labour’s Clive Betts asked what consultations the DWP had done with social landlords on the effects of the introduction of universal credit and the benefit cap on direct rent payments to landlords. After the usual guff about roll-outs from IDS, Betts pressed him with a points raised by Tony Stacey of South Yorkshire Housing Association (and Placeshapers):
‘Currently, if a household is in rent arrears and gets housing benefit, the benefit can be paid directly to the social landlord. When universal credit is introduced, if the family also gets a welfare cap, it is the housing cost element that is squeezed by the cap. No longer will the amount of universal credit be paid directly to the social landlord to cover the rent. Can the Secretary of State not see that that could lead to a rise in evictions? Is he aware of the problem, and what will he do about it?’
The context for this was highlighted ahead of this week’s CIH conference in Manchester in a UK Housing Review briefing on Monday. After allowing for other benefits and tax credits, the £23,000 cap will leave a couple with four children just £33 a week to spend on their rent and a couple with three children just £110 a week. Here are the impacts by family size:
Effectively that means larger families will be priced out of even social housing throughout the UK and a couple with three children will not be able to afford the average housing association rent anywhere in the Midlands or South of England. The impact will be felt far beyond inner London and the CIH estimates that four times more households could be affected than under the current £26,000 cap.
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Posted: June 18, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Social housing | Tags: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Living Rent, Living Wage, National Housing Federation |
If we have a Living Wage, why not a Living Rent? Well, now we do.
With due respect to the Scottish campaign of the same name, the report launched this week by Savills, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and National Housing Federation addresses directly what I’ve long thought to be perhaps the most important question in housing policy: how to make homes genuinely affordable to people on low incomes.
Current policy gets nowhere near that. Employment may be at a record high but millions of people are trapped in low paid work, in part-time jobs and zero hours contracts, and average earnings have only just begun to rise again after years of decline.
Yet private sector rents are too high, leaving families reliant on housing benefit whether they are in or out of work and vulnerable to cuts to come: projections by Savills suggest that one in four of us will be private renters by 2019. ‘Affordable’ rents are only affordable in relation to a market artificially inflated by speculative investment and the aftermath of the financial crisis. Even social rents rise by an inflation-plus formula regardless of what’s happening to earnings.
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Jules Birch 