No votes in housing?
Posted: December 13, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Private renting, Social housing | Tags: Election 2019 | Leave a commentOriginally published as a blog for Inside Housing on December 13.
It would be very easy for the Conservatives to conclude after this election that they do not need to bother about housing.
The striking thing about their biggest victory since 1987 is that most of the places where various forms of the housing crisis are most acute voted for other parties. And it did not matter.
That’s most obviously true in London where Labour retained most of the seats with the highest levels of homelessness and families in temporary accommodation.
In London and other major cities where house prices have risen most and Generation Rent has grown fastest, gains for Labour from 2017 were consolidated in 2019, albeit with reduced majorities.
Labour’s only real victory last night was in Putney, which the Tories captured in the 1980s on the back of the right to buy, control of Wandsworth council and an influx of well-heeled professionals.
If there was a backlash against Tory inaction from leaseholders in thousands of apartment buildings around the country, most of them (a sweeping generalisation, I know) are in metropolitan, remain-voting constituencies that for the most part did not change hands last night.
As for housing supply as a whole, voters in affluent seats in the South East may not much like Brexit but they will probably have been reassured by the Tories’ downgrading of their ambitions on new homes and promises to protect the green belt. Ex-housing minister Dominic Raab fended off the Lib Dem challenge in Esher and Walton.
So maybe the Conservatives were right to conclude, as I argued in my blog on their performance at the pre-election housing hustings, that there were no votes in housing.
Tories out on a limb at housing hustings
Posted: December 5, 2019 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Fire safety, Social housing, Uncategorized | Tags: Election 2019 | Leave a commentOriginally published on December 5 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The most illuminating answer in Wednesday night’s housing hustings came with the final question.
Politicians at the event organised by a coalition of different housing organisations were asked: ‘How much of your income do you think it’s reasonable and right to spend on housing?’
They were asked for a quickfire answer to an affordability question that covers lots of complicated issues. What counts as income and what as housing costs? Do you include housing benefit? Do you account for differences in incomes and tenures?
The standard answer is a maximum of a third – and that was the one given by John Healey for Labour, Sian Berry for the Greens and Tom Brake (who said 30%) for the Lib Dems.
But Luke Hall, junior housing minister in the last Conservative government, went first and went out on a limb with 50%.
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.
Jules Birch 