The Housing Question

If you follow my blog here, you might be interested in my new newsletter published on Substack.

The Housing Question is a newsletter about housing, but not just housing… politics, social policy, economics, history and anything else that helps makes sense of how we got here.

I’ll still be posting blogs here but mainly as an archive of articles I’ve published elsewhere. The Housing Question will explore issues in more depth, with more of a sideways look and with a bit more context and evolve over time.

You can read the first issue of The Housing Question here and more about the thinking behind it here. If you’d like to subscribe (it’s free for now) go here.

Crazy lending v insane housing system

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

It sounds crazy and it is. New mortgages at up to seven times a person’s income look like a reminder of the excessively loose lending seen before the financial crisis and the collapse of Northern Rock.

At the end of a year in which house prices have risen at their fastest rate since 2006 and interest rates began to rise from record lows, and at the start of one in which household incomes face a squeeze, the timing of the new deal from online broker Habito looks, shall we say, interesting.

Take that seven times income and add five times a partner’s salary and a couple each earning £25,000 could borrow £300,000 to buy a £330,000 home, well above the Nationwide’s new UK average of £255,000. Take out the loan for 40 years rather than the traditional 25 and they can reduce their monthly payments too.

Ominous signs ahead of the spending review

Originally 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.