Ominous signs ahead of the spending review
Posted: July 9, 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
The government’s refusal to extend the £20 a week uplift in Universal Credit has ominous overtones for housing’s prospects in the spending review to come in the Autumn.
Consider the evidence. Unemployment-related benefits in the UK are among the least generous in Europe, not least because of cuts made in the original plans for Universal Credit. Removing the uplift means benefits will fall to their lowest ever level as a proportion of earnings.
For all the government’s arguments about levelling up, the cut will hit a third or more of working age households in Wales, the North and Midlands against a fifth in the South East.
For all the government’s arguments about work being the route out of poverty, almost as many people on Universal Credit (2.2m) are in work as unemployed and looking for work (2.3m). The remaining 1.6m are not required to work because of ill-health or having a child under 1. All will become £1,000 a year poorer.
Of course there is still time for ministers to change their mind, but for the moment they look set to go ahead despite lobbying from the last six Conservative work and pensions secretaries to keep the uplift.
But can you imagine the last six housing ministers, or communities secretaries, doing the same as their colleagues at the Department of Work and Pensions? And, even if they did, do you think that the chancellor would be more or less likely to listen to them?
So Matthew Bailes is surely right to warn that the housing sector should be on a ‘war footing’ ahead of a spending review being conducted in the context of long-term structural pressures on the public finances.
Read the rest of this entry »MPs call for action on rough sleeping and renting
Posted: May 22, 2020 Filed under: Coronavirus, Legal, Private renting, Rough sleeping, Section 21, Uncategorized Leave a commentThe government will miss a ‘golden opportunity’ to end rough sleeping once and for all if it fails to turn temporary measures into something more permanent.
And ministers must beef up ‘toothless’ plans to protect renters in the wake of the Coronavirus crisis or risk a new wave of homelessness.
Those are the top-line messages from an all-party group of MPs today. But an interim report on protecting rough sleepers and renters from the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee also goes much further in endorsing calls by campaigners for wider changes to the housing system.
They recommend:
- A dedicated funding stream to end rough sleeping, likely to be at least £100 million a year
- Improved support for councils to help people with no recourse to public funds who will otherwise end up back on the streets
- Boosting the supply of suitable housing by re-establishing the National Clearing House Scheme set up after the financial crisis for unsold homes and giving councils more flexibility to buy them
- Turning the increase in the Local Housing Allowance to the 30th percentile from a temporary into a long-term measure and looking at the impact of raising rents further.
‘Stay alert’ proves to be good advice
Posted: May 14, 2020 Filed under: Coronavirus, Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on May 14.
So it turns out that the change in prime ministerial messaging was more finely tuned than we thought.
When Boris Johnson told us to ‘stay alert’ rather than ‘stay at home’ in his broadcast on Sunday, the sense was of a change of emphasis that signalled a slow release from the lockdown in England.
Most immediately that seemed to mean builders returning to work on construction sites on Monday, which it then turned out meant Wednesday.
By Wednesday, with only a few hours’ notice, the government was reopening the housing market in England with profound implications for anyone buying, selling or renting a home.
In a country in which we are still prevented from visiting our elderly parents or friends there was detailed guidance for any number of strangers working in other people’s homes.
In a sales market caught on the hop, we will now start to find out the impact of the crisis on prices as buyers decide whether to go ahead with deals they agreed before March 23, lenders decide whether to revise their mortgage offers and developers find out whether they can sell stock they can now work till 9pm to complete.
The sense in housing secretary Robert Jenrick’s statement to parliament on Wednesday was of a government desperate to restart a key part of the economy, as home sales feed into construction and all the other industries that follow in its wake.
Beyond the good news on new homes
Posted: November 14, 2019 Filed under: Fire safety, Housebuilding, Temporary accommodation, Uncategorized | Tags: John Healey, Robert Jenrick Leave a commentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on November 14.
There was good news and bad news for the government in a new housing statistics out this week that illustrate the scale of the issues it still needs to address.
The good news is that housebuilding in England is up again: there were 241,000 net additional dwellings in 2018/19, an increase of 9% in the last 12 months and 93% in the last six years.
Net additional dwellings make up the government’s preferred measure of housing output and add together new build completions, conversions and change of use less demolitions.
That total is not just higher than at the previous peak of output before the financial crisis and credit crunch – it is also the highest total recorded since the government started collecting the data in this way in 1991/92.
Significantly, for the first time total net additions are higher than the 240,000 a year target that the last Labour government set in the wake of Kate Barker’s landmark review of housing supply in 2004
True, the big increase over the last six years also reflects just how low output had sunk in the wake of the credit crunch, and true a housing market downturn and recession in the building industry could yet derail progress.
However, with more recent council tax data indicating that annual output may now be over 250,000, the government’s target of 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s no longer looks completely outlandish.
Indeed, a separate report from the Home Builders Federation (HBF) estimates that planning permissions were issued for 380,000 new homes in England in the year to June.
Housing secretary Robert Jenrick was quick to welcome the figures and make a campaigning point for the general election:
One more bit of good news is that the bulk of the net additions came from new build completions (213,660) rather than conversions of questionable quality (14,107 were delivered via permitted development, which was only a slight increase on 2017/18).
However, focussing purely on how many new homes were delivered does not tell us much about how the government is doing on other housing issues.
Loans, homes and infrastructure
Posted: October 25, 2019 Filed under: Council housing, Housing finance, Uncategorized | Tags: Public Works Loans Board, Treasury Leave a commentOriginally posted on October 25 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The row over the hike in the interest rate for borrowing from the Public Works Loans Board (PWLB) is important in itself but it also raises a more fundamental point about social housing investment.
The rate increase imposed by the Treasury earlier this month seems to have been sparked by concern about councils investing in shopping centres rather than homes, which is ironic given that their rationale is to find new revenue streams to compensate for Treasury-imposed austerity.
However, it reinforces the impression that the government still does not trust councils to invest wisely in housing or anything else.
That view goes way back to 1979, of course, and the borrowing and spending controls that the Thatcher government imposed on council housing along with the right to buy.
But it also recalls the way that the government finally introduced self-financing in April 2012 but accompanied it with caps on borrowing and then undermined their business plans by imposing the 1% a year rent cut from April 2016.
Now, just at the point when research by Inside Housing reveals that councils are ready to scale up their housebuilding, the beancounters have struck again.
Help to Buy and wider housing policy
Posted: September 18, 2019 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally posted as a blog for Inside Housing.
So much has been written about Help to Buy that by now everyone knows what they think.
If you’re a housebuilder the equity loan scheme introduced in 2013 has meant more new homes and more buyers.
If you unable to get a mortgage, the scheme may have offered a first step on to the housing ladder that would not otherwise have been available but you may be wondering about the quality of your new build.
If you’re a critic, even if you concede the first two points, the biggest impact has been on housebuilder share prices, dividends and executive bonuses.
Evaluations published so far have provided evidence to back up both sides of the argument. On the positive side, 37% of borrowers said they could not have afforded to buy without it; on the negative, that could also mean 63% did not need help.
The new feature of a report published yesterday by the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is that it takes a step back and considers the impact on the government and on wider housing policy.
Bigger questions lie behind public land failure
Posted: July 24, 2019 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Land, Public land, Uncategorized | Tags: Public accounts committee Leave a commentOriginally published on July 24 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The government has wasted a ‘once-in-a generation opportunity’ to tackle the housing crisis by failing to develop a strategy for disposing of public land.
That’s the damning verdict on the much-vaunted Public Land for Housing Programme from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) this morning (Wednesday).
The MPs find that by 2020 the government will have sold land for just 69,000 of the 160,000 homes it promised in England between 2015 and 2020 – and even that estimate relies on some heroic assumptions about progress over the next 12 months.
A second target to deliver £5 billion of receipts from the sale of surplus public land over the same period will be met – but only because of the £1.5 bn sale of Network Rail’s railway arches in February that was not part of the original programme.
When you consider that is happening in the middle of a housing crisis and in the wake of an austerity drive that has been closing public services around the country, that is an abject failure.
And those headline figures only tell part of a story that has an ever bigger failure to deliver affordable housing at the heart of it.
The betrayal of the Addison Act
Posted: July 22, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally published on July 22 as a blog for Inside Housing.
As we celebrate the centenary of what was effectively the birth of council housing in 1919, it’s also worth remembering what happened just two years later.
Christopher Addison was the minister of health in the post-war coalition government of 1919 and it fell to him to deliver on the promise made by the prime minister, David Lloyd George of ‘a country fit for heroes to live in’.
The Housing and Town Planning (or Addison) Act that received Royal Assent 100 years ago this month (I started the celebrations early) was the landmark legislation that established the principles of council housing and also set out housing’s role in the wider health and wellbeing of the country.
As the King’s Speech put it in April 1919: ‘It is not too much to say that an adequate solution of the housing question is the foundation of all social progress.’
As seen at the time, especially by Addison himself as a surgeon before he became an MP, that housing question started with the consequences for health of the insanitary conditions and overcrowding suffered by millions of people.
The Addison Act provided generous subsidies for new council homes but it also set a framework that ensured that slum landlords did not profit from slum clearance.
Yet just two years later, in July 1921, the housing programme was abruptly scrapped. Only 213,000 of the promised 500,000 homes were delivered and central government assistance to replace and improve slums was reduced to a grant of just £200,000 (around £11m in today’s money) for the whole of Great Britain.
