What’s in the Budget small print?
Posted: October 30, 2018 Filed under: Council housing, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Planning, Shared ownership, Uncategorized | Tags: Budget 2018, Letwin review Leave a commentOriginally published on November 30 on my blog for Inside Housing.
If you listened to the chancellor’s speech you may have thought this was a Budget that did not mean much for housing. As ever you may think again after reading the small print.
As I live blogged for Inside Housing yesterday, the big news in the speech was the extra money for universal credit that makes up for many of the cuts imposed in universal credit and delays the roll-out yet again and sounds like it will be enough to avoid a backbench Tory rebellion.
Elsewhere, Philip Hammond found £2.8 bn to bring forward cuts in income tax allowances by a year but he failed to find roughly half that to scrap the final year of the freeze in most working age benefits including the local housing allowance.
This was a clear political choice to go for tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the better-off over benefits that go to the poorest households.
Ahead of the next spending review, numbers crunched by the Resolution Foundation overnight suggest that the squeeze on everything apart from health will continue well into the 2020s.
However, the most interesting developments for housing came in the background documents published as Mr Hammond sat down.
Six things to look out for in the Budget
Posted: October 26, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally published on October 26 on my blog for Inside Housing.
What might have been the Budget’s headline announcements on housing were made by the prime minister last month at the National Housing Summit and Conservative Party conference.
But the chancellor’s big moment will still set the context for the end of the borrowing cap for council housing from next week that ‘extra’ £2 bn for housing associations in the 2020s.
And it will also reveal the total spending envelope for the 2019 Spending Review, teeing up a race to calculate whether austerity really is as ‘over’ as Theresa May promised.
With Brexit and the NHS to pay for and crises in local government and social care as well as in housing that could be a tall order.
In the meantime, here are six areas to look out for on Monday.
- The borrowing cap
When the prime minister made her surprise announcement, the concern was that it would come with strings attached when the detail was revealed in the Budget.
That could still happen but one big fear – a long delay before implementation – has already been allayed by last week’s announcement by housing secretary James Brokenshire that the cap will be lifted from Tuesday.
However, the impact of the rent cut, the Right to Buy and welfare reform still loom large and are seen as more important than the borrowing cap by some councils.
And the suspicion remains that the Treasury is not exactly enthusiastic about a move that will increase public borrowing under current rules.
In which case, as John Perry argues, why not bring the UK into line with other countries and give council housing the same financial independence as housing associations?
And why not, as the Local Government Association (LGA) argues in its Budget submission, allow councils to reinvest 100% of Right to Buy receipts and decide discounts locally?
To signal their intent, more than 60 council leaders have signed an open letter pledging an immediate drive to build more homes. Read the rest of this entry »
Squaring the circle of regeneration
Posted: October 22, 2018 Filed under: Council housing, Housing associations, London, Regeneration, Uncategorized | Tags: Kensington and Chelsea Leave a commentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on October 22.
When England’s most high-profile local authority calls the behaviour of the country’s largest housing association ‘morally wrong’ you sit up and take notice.
Clashes between the local priorities of a council and the organisational ones of an association are nothing new of course but this week’s statement by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) seems different.
Clarion is in its sights over rejected proposals for the regeneration of the Sutton Estate in Chelsea.
Council leader Kim Taylor-Smith told a council meeting last week:
‘HAs in the borough are, in some cases turning away from their core purpose and in some cases becoming all but private developers.
‘You will all know I am talking about Clarion Housing, the owners of my local and cherished Sutton Estate which they wish to knock down the estate with a loss of affordable homes We stand shoulder to shoulder with local residents in opposing this
‘I think we all in the chamber are untied. This is wrong.’
Turning tenants into owners
Posted: October 11, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally posted on October 11 on my blog for Inside Housing.
For all the government’s new-found enthusiasm for social housing and local authorities, the politics of the housing crisis are still fundamentally about home ownership.
Anyone pleasantly surprised by the change of tune in the green paper will still have found two particularly discordant notes: the convictions that welfare reform is ‘empowering tenants as consumers’ and that social housing should be a ‘springboard to home ownership’.
Housing may have been the dominant issue at fringe meetings at the Conservative party conference but two reports out this week highlight the fact that the frustrated aspirations of young private renters are still the dominant concern.
The new Tory think-tank Onward brought forward publication of a proposal for new tax incentives for landlords to sell to long-term tenants following reports over the weekend that the government is considering it as a new form of Help to Buy.
And a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies put the problem of frustrated ownership into perspective.
Over the last 20 years owner-occupation among the 25-34s has fallen from 55% to 35%. Their incomes are up by 19% in real terms but rents have risen 38% and house prices 173%.
What the English Housing Survey says about owner-occupation
Posted: August 13, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 CommentsThe third in a series of blogs looking at the latest English Housing Survey considers the state of home ownership in 2016/17.
Home ownership has stopped shrinking
The survey says 62.6% of households owned their home in England in 2016/17, down from 62.9% the previous year. Coming after a 10-year decline from a peak of 71% in 2004, that represents relative stability and the rate is now little changed since 2013/14.
The last time home ownership was lower was in 1984, just as the Thatcher right to buy boom was at its peak.
Or has it?
However, some more profound changes are going on beneath the surface. First, it depends whether you are talking about owner-occupation or home ownership – many more of us now own more than one home thanks to buy to let.
Second, it conceals the widening divide within ownership. Traditionally owner-occupation has been about first-time buyers getting on to the housing ladder but the tenure has matured as baby boomers get older and there are now more outright owners (34%) than people buying with a mortgage (28%).
In line with that, the proportion of owners who are under 35 has halved in the last two decades from 18% to 9% and even buyers with a mortgage are older than they once were (only 46% are under 45). By contrast, 61% of outright owners are over 65.
The latest new housing minister takes his turn
Posted: July 10, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Dominic Raab, Kit Malthouse Leave a commentSo it’s farewell to Mr Buggins – many thanks for all you’ve achieved in your 181 days as housing minister.
And it’s hello to Mr Buggins – you appear not to know (or care) very much about housing as you take your turn in the job but then neither did most of your predecessors.
Housing felt the knock-on effects of the latest round of the Great British Brexit Farce as Theresa May decided that Dominic Buggins would be the replacement for David Davis as Brexit secretary.
That Mr Buggins was appointed to the housing job because he was a prominent Eurosceptic and he spent half of his interviews as minister talking about Brexit.
On the assumption that he has decided he believes in the Chequers compromise and can cheerlead for it, this looks like a good appointment for the government.
Which is more than can be said for his previous post. Thinking back over those 181 days, I can remember him using his position to generate publicity about immigration and offering lawyerly denials that the government’s approach to regulation was in any way to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire.
But his major achievement must surely be to have dodged publication of the social housing green paper.
