Bedtime stories
Posted: February 21, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Legal, Scotland, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a commentIt seems remarkable that with less than 40 days to go until we start taxing them we still don’t really know for certain what a bedroom is.
So it’s not surprising that the move by Knowsley Housing Trust to reclassify 566 of its two- and three-bed homes as one- and two-bed has attracted so much attention. Chief executive Bob Taylor told Inside Housing that a stock review showed some homes are currently classified as having more bedrooms than they actually have, because tenants are not using the extra rooms as bedrooms and were therefore paying too much rent.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Under pressure
Posted: February 7, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a commentThe government’s arguments for the bedroom tax are continuing to unravel under intense media and political scrutiny. Will the pressure finally tell?
For the first time in years that I can remember, a social housing issue led prime minister’s questions yesterday as Labour leader Ed Miliband used the plight of people facing the tax to put David Cameron on the spot.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Going spare
Posted: January 29, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a commentWith just 62 days left the bedroom tax has gone mainstream in parliament and the national press.
The last week alone has seen three different debates in the Commons, a DWP questions in which it was the main issue, and stories in the Sun and Mail as well as, more predictably, the Guardian, Daily Record and Mirror.
Meanwhile virtually every local paper in the UK seems to be finding families affected by the tax that few of their readers would consider to have a ‘spare room’. From Bute to Torfaen and from King’s Lynn to Northampton to Hartlepool the bedroom tax is big news. In Hull, a family of seven in a four-bed house say they face losing £20 a week because of the rules on how old children have to be to get their own room.
But will any of it make any difference to what happens from April 1?
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Tall story
Posted: January 24, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Regeneration, Social housing | Leave a commentYou don’t have to look very hard for the hidden agenda in a report from the Conservatives’ favourite think-tank calling for the demolition of high-rise social housing in London.
Create Streets is a joint report from Policy Exchange and a company of the same name which campaigns for low-rise development in streets and against multi-storey developments. As usual in a Policy Exchange report it starts with a grain of truth and then adds a range of questionable assertions to advance a political agenda.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Ignoring the obvious
Posted: January 15, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Economics, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Local government, Social housing | Leave a commentWithout local authorities, England has only seen more than 200,000 housing starts three times since the war. So why is council housing being ignored now?
As John Perry argues in Inside Housing, councils are currently building around 3,000 homes a year but they could build 15,000 if they were given more freedom to borrow. ‘A government that is desperate for house building shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth,’ he says.
Desperate is exactly the right word for our current performance on housebuilding: just 105,000 starts in England in 2011/12, down from a miserable 112,000 in 2010/11 and less than half the level needed to meet demand and prevent an ever-increasing spiral of rising prices and rents.
Best-laid plans
Posted: January 7, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a commentThe launch of the coalition’s mid-term report later today got me thinking back to its original Programme for Government – and how much it did not say about what followed.
According to reports this morning, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, mortgages and housebulding will feature in a package of policies including a new flat rate state pension and help with long-term care. They will say in their foreword: ‘We will build more houses and make the dream of home ownership a reality for more people’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
10 things about 2012 – part 2
Posted: December 31, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, Social housing | Leave a commentThe conclusion of my two-part review of the issues and people I was blogging about in 2012 looks at bullding, owning and affording homes – and a year of anniversaries.
6) Housebuilding: talking a good game
If you measure the importance of an issue by its media profile, 2012 was certainly the year of housebuilding. The first half of the year saw momentum building behind the idea that investment in new homes would be good for the economy as well as people who need a roof over their heads. Support came from economists and politicians (increasingly from the Lib Dem side of the coalition) and even the director-general of the DCLG was talking about a ‘decade of housebuilding’ at the CIH conference in June. Hopes were genuinely high that the case for housing was winning support at the highest levels of government and David Cameron’s party conference speech in October was heavy on anti-nimby rhetotric.
10 things about 2012: part 1
Posted: December 28, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a commentThe first of a two-part look back at the issues and people that I was blogging about in a momentous year for housing.
1) Private renting: a year of growth
I predicted in January that 2012 would see the private rented sector overtake social renting. As things turned out, I was wrong – but not by much. Whether you judge it by the number of homes or the number of households or the answers given by people in the Census, a combination of growth in buy to let, shrinking home ownership and the slow decline of social housing mean it will happen sooner rather than later.
It was also a year that the boundary between the two sectors continue to blur: social housing responded to the tenure shift as a series of social landlords from Thames Valley to L&Q launched private renting initiatives; private landlords like Grainger registered social housing subsidiaries; and the government approved proposals in the Montague report to kick start institutional investment in private renting.
Flying blind
Posted: December 19, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a commentIt seems about as realistic to expect clear answers from the direct payment demonstration projects as it does to expect them from senior civil servants at a select committee hearing – and that’s exactly how things turned out this week.
As the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was publishing the first data from the projects, witnesses including its permanent secretary Robert Devereux and head of housing policy division Andrew Parfitt were appearing before MPs at the public accounts committee (watch again here). The two things happened so simultaneously that the officials told the MPs that there was ‘no data on arrears so far’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
A housing timebomb
Posted: December 17, 2012 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a commentThe big shift from owning to renting revealed in the Census has potentially massive implications for government spending on housing costs.
The headline results revealed by the Office for National Statistics last week were that home ownership fell from 68.3 per cent of households if England and Wales in 2001 to 63.5 per cent in 2011. Private renting increased from 9 per cent to 15 per cent and social renting fell from 19.3 per cent to 17.6 per cent.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 