Conservatives fail to rise to the housing challenge
Posted: November 25, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Housing market, Local housing allowance, Private renting, Social housing | Leave a commentOriginally posted on November 25 on my blog for Inside Housing.
A Conservative election manifesto with little new to offer signals that housing has moved a long way down the party’s list of priorities.
The contrast between the Labour manifesto plan for 150,000 council and housing association homes a year and the Lib Dem manifesto promise of 100,000 homes for social rent a year could hardly be starker.
The Tory document launched by Boris Johnson does have three pages on housing but the only new policies in it had already been launched in separate announcements earlier in the campaign.
These include encouraging a new market for long-term fixed-rate mortgages to slash the costs of deposits, a First Home scheme of homes at a 30% discount in perpetuity for local families and a stamp duty surcharge on overseas buyers to fund more help for rough sleepers.
Even these are not strictly speaking new: long-term fixed rates were encouraged by Gordon Brown but never took off; David Cameron promised 200,000 starter homes at a discount but none were ever built and the new scheme seems to involve only 19,000 homes by the mid-2020s; and Theresa May proposed exactly the same levy on overseas buyers last year before it was watered down.
The penny drops that homes are worth it
Posted: November 11, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Social housing | Tags: Election 2019, John McDonnell, Sajid Javid | Leave a commentOriginally posted on November 11 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Look behind the headlines about going back to the 1970s and the shift in the debate on public investment in the opening week of the election campaign could have a huge impact on housing.
On the surface Thursday’s speeches by chancellor Sajid Javid and shadow chancellor John McDonnell are about who will spend more on public services and who will be more responsible on borrowing.
But they are also about a more fundamental change in the fiscal targets and measures that the government sets itself.
Javid has abandoned the government’s previous fiscal rules and loosened his previous target of reducing net debt in favour of one that it should be flat or falling by the end of the next parliament.
By allowing investment in infrastructure of up to 3% of national output, he would create room for an extra £20 bn a year of investment – although he does not appear to see housing as part of his ‘infrastructure revolution’ and ‘decade of renewal’.
McDonnell would go much further by excluding borrowing for investment from his borrowing targets and looking instead for an improvement in the overall government balance sheet by the end of the next parliament.
He plans an extra £50 bn a year of investment via a National Transformation Fund overseen by the Treasury and based in the north of England.
This revolution involves a Green Transformation Fund and a Social Transformation Fund and it definitely does include housing – retrofitting existing homes and building new ones.
For all the political arguments about reckless borrowing and soaring debt, both plans are essentially about raising borrowing to increase investment.
The clock is still ticking on Grenfell response
Posted: November 1, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Construction industry, Fire safety, Grenfell Tower | Leave a commentOriginally posted on November 1 on my blog for Inside Housing.
For all the admirable clarity in Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s phase one report from the Grenfell Tower inquiry, 28 months on from the fire the official response is still running to catch up.
This week’s leaks and row about the role of the London Fire Brigade (LFB) only serve as reminders of how much else remains to be done.
The other major event of the week ensured that the building safety legislation promised in the Queen’s Speech to implement the Hackitt review will have to wait until after the election.
The same goes for the social housing white paper. It has now at least been promised by the prime minister and housing secretary but the clock is still ticking on regulation, fighting stigma and all the other fine words in the green paper published 14 months ago.
That too will have to wait until after December 12, probably with yet more new ministers who will need to get up to speed with the issues.
Sir Martin’s phase one report found that the cladding was the ‘primary cause of fire spread’ and the judge ruled that it breached the building regulations.
He had not intended to rule on this point in the first part of the inquiry focussing on what happened on the night of 14 June, 2017. But he says there is ‘compelling evidence’ that the external walls did not meet the requirement in the regulations to ‘adequately resist the spread of fire’ and adds that ‘on the contrary they promoted it’.
This may seem self-evident to anyone who has followed events since the fire but the fact that he has made the judgement clears the way for phase two and moves the inquiry closer to deciding on who was responsible for the actions and inactions that led to it.
The housing-shaped hole at the heart of the Queen’s Speech
Posted: October 15, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Section 21, Social housing | Tags: Queen's Speech | Leave a commentOriginally posted on October 15 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Granted, the Queen’s Speech was more pre-election political broadcast than genuine legislative programme for the year to come but it still sends some worrying signals about where the government’s priorities lie.
Given Boris Johnson’s Commons majority of -45, Her Majesty’s utterances could be voted down for the first time since 1924 and even if the government somehow stumbles through its own desire for an election only the most uncontroversial bits of it are likely to make any progress.
it’s still good news that the Queen’s Speech proposes building safety standards legislation that would implement the Hackitt review by establishing a new safety framework for high-rise residential buildings.
Although, as Jeremy Corbyn pointed out in his response, progress on blocks with Grenfell-style cladding has been so slow that ‘not a single private block has been made safe under this prime minister’.
While the details of the new system will be debated, few would doubt the central purpose of developing a new system to oversee the whole built environment or the principles of clearer accountability for building owners, designers and constructors, a stronger voice for residents in the system, stronger enforcement and sanctions and a clearer framework for national oversight of construction products.
And if many will doubt that a New Homes Ombudsman will be enough to bring developers into line, the fact that the proposal is tacked on to the new Bill means it can still be improved.
However, with one other small exception, housing was otherwise entirely missing from the Queen’s Speech.
That absence was felt not just in a lack of action on housing and homelessness in general but also in missing specific measures that had been anticipated across different parts of the housing system.
Temporary costs and permanent solutions
Posted: October 14, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Local government, London, Social housing, Temporary accommodation | 1 CommentOriginally posted on October 14 on my blog for Inside Housing.
As fast as homelessness is rising, the costs of homelessness are rising even faster.
The more that central government claims to be providing extra money, the more local authorities seem to be left to pick up the bill.
Those are the conclusions of two reports over the weekend that highlight the scale of the problems at the sharp end of the housing crisis.
The first comes from analysis for the Local Government Association (LGA) that found that that the number of families in bed and breakfast has risen 187% in less than a decade, from 2,450 in 2008/09 to 7,040 in 2017/18.
Shocking though that is, it’s hardly a big surprise given the impact of austerity and welfare ‘reform’ over the same period.
What’s really shocking is the rise in the cost of keeping them in the worst form of temporary accommodation – an incredible 780% from £10.6m in 2009/10 to £93.3m in 2017/18.
Getting ready for decarbonisation
Posted: September 26, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Climate change, Decarbonisation, Social housing, Wales | Tags: Green New Deal | Leave a commentOriginally posted on September 26 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Decarbonisation took two more important steps up the housing agenda this week as the UK Labour conference endorsed radical plans for a Green New Deal and the Welsh Government accepted in principle all of the recommendations of a landmark independent review.
There is still some way to go before all of this starts impacting on housing organisations, tenants and home owners but the general direction seems clear and prepare to hear a lot more about what could become the dominant housing issue of the next decade.
In Scotland, meanwhile, a Climate Change Bill passed this week that set targets of reducing carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 and becoming a net zero society by 2045.
A new mindset on decarbonisation
Posted: August 13, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Climate change, Environment, Social housing, Tenure change, Wales, Zero carbon homes | Leave a commentOriginally posted on August 9 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Decarbonisation is set to be one of the biggest housing issues of the next decade but the debate about how to do it and how to pay for it is only just getting started.
If the need for dramatic action has long been clear, so too has a tendency to put off doing anything meaningful – witness the way that England’s ambition to make all new homes zero carbon by 2016 was watered down and then dropped by the self-styled ‘greenest government ever’.
But as extreme weather and Extinction Rebellion bring the climate emergency to the top of the agenda the issue is back with a vengeance.
Enter Esther McVey
Posted: July 25, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Home ownership, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: Esther McVey, Robert Jenrick | Leave a commentOriginally posted on July 25 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Whichever way you look at it this reshuffle looks like a disaster for social housing and social tenants.
On Monday I predicted that government regime change would shift the focus back to home ownership and joked that the worst nightmare would be Jacob Rees-Mogg as housing secretary.
Wednesday saw Boris Johnson make his first speech as prime minister and lay out a long and expensive list of priorities that did not include housing.
That was followed by an extensive reshuffle that saw junior Treasury minister Robert Jenrick become housing secretary and my worst nightmare trumped by the appointment of Esther McVey as housing minister.
And this morning Inside Housing reports that the Johnson government is indeed considering a switch back from the cautious return to social rent with a new programme of part rent-part buy.
May’s mix of good intentions and unfinished business
Posted: June 27, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Housebuilding, Section 21, Social housing | Tags: Theresa May | Leave a commentOriginally published on June 27 on my blog for Inside Housing.
You wait more than 100 years for a prime minister to address your conference and you get one with less than a month left in the job.
It’s tempting to dismiss Wednesday’s speech by Theresa May to the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) conference on the basis that it was made by a lame duck leader whose decisions could all be overturned by her successor on July 24.
Even the sight of a premier hot-footing it straight from prime minister’s questions in London to the conference in Manchester can be seen less as a reflection of housing’s importance than of how much time she has on her hands during the Tory leadership contest.
As she said herself, even the venue was a reminder of one of her worst moments: the disastrous leader’s speech in the same hall at the Conservative conference in 2017 that ended with her losing her voice and the set falling apart around her.
Yet that same conference saw her dedicate her premiership to fixing housing and it was part of a journey since Grenfell that has seen May’s government move away from the policies of David Cameron, George Osborne and Policy Exchange and re-embrace the ‘our first social service’ traditions of Churchill and Macmillan.
Two years on from Grenfell but still ‘only a matter of time’
Posted: June 10, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Construction industry, Fire safety, Grenfell Tower | Tags: Barking | 1 CommentOriginally published as a blog for Inside Housing on June 10.
Almost two years on from Grenfell, Sunday’s huge fire at a block of flats in Barking is a horrifying reminder of how much there is still to do to keep residents safe.
Thankfully, everyone seems to have got out but the parallels are all too clear in the terrifying speed at which the fire spread and previous safety concerns raised by residents of the mixed-tenure block that appear to have been brushed aside.
Fire on the Barking Riverside estate. Huge!!! Serious!!! Only a couple of weeks after the residents association specifically asked the builders @Bellway_Homes who said the wood cladding was fire retardant and perfectly safe @barkingriver @barkingriver @CllrDRodwell pic.twitter.com/nVeuy0xAXq
— Venilia Batista Amorim (@vbatistaamorim) June 9, 2019
Attention will inevitably focus on the safety of timber balconies and the apparent failure of fire retardant treatment of the materials used as well as the actions of those responsible for the block.
More broadly it underlines a whole series of questions about regulation and the construction industry and relationships between developers, freeholders and leaseholders that have still not had adequate answers.
Jules Birch 