Posted: August 31, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Benefit cap, Pay to stay |
Government resumes this week after a summer in limbo following the Brexit vote and change of prime minister. The unanswered questions for housing are stacking up.
The Cabinet met to discuss Brexit and parliament returns on Monday for two weeks before MPs take another break for the party conferences.
And the next few months should bring answers to some of the questions that have been hanging over housing ever since the referendum result and change of government.
What part will housing investment play in the fiscal ‘reset’ expected in the Autumn Statement? Will the new government offer any flexibility in the spending review settlement?
Is Theresa May’s vision of ‘a country that works for everyone’ and ‘giving people more opportunity’ just rhetoric or does she want a housing system that works for everyone too?
Will Sajid Javid and Gavin Barwell offer a change of approach at the DCLG? Will they be any less obsessed with home ownership? Or any less willing to devolve funding and decision making? Will they give full government backing to the private member’s Homelessness Reduction Bill?
But the more you look beyond the big picture and look at the detail the fuller the ministerial Pending and In trays become.
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Posted: April 4, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Benefit cap, Housing benefit, Private renting, Supported housing, Tax credits, Universal credit | Tags: UK Housing Review |
Originally posted on April 4 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
You’d never guess it from the sound of the violins playing for Buy to Let but there were other significant changes to benefits and tax on housing this month.
As ‘investors’ rushed to beat the April 1 deadline for higher rates of stamp duty on second homes, the orchestra reached a crescendo after new affordability tests were proposed by the Bank of England.
All that noise meant much less was heard about their tenants facing up to the first year of an unprecedented four-year freeze in their local housing allowance and other benefits and tax credits.
After three years in which LHA increases were restricted to 1 per cent, housing benefit rates for private tenants will now stay the same until 2020. Whatever the problems faced by their landlords, that means tenants will inevitably see rising shortfalls between their benefit and their rent. Equally inevitably, you would think, evictions will rise.
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Posted: March 20, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Conservatives, Iain Duncan Smith |
You go away for the weekend and suddenly everything goes mad: it turns out that Iain Duncan Smith was really a Socialist or a Liberal Democrat all along.
The Great Social Reformer (this is what the many ‘friends of’ IDS speaking to journalists call him) has not just resigned, not just skewered George Osborne, he’s also questioned the fundamentals of the post-2010 Conservatives narrative. We are not ‘all in this together’, the most vulnerable will not be ‘protected’ and the deficit reduction target is ‘more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest’.
Yet this (apparent) modern day heir to Tory Great Social Reformers like Shaftesbury and Wilberforce is also the same Iain Duncan Smith responsible for punitive benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax, the £30 a week ESA cut and all the other salami slices taken out of the social security system in the last six years that were not ‘compromises too far’. The man who took the moral high ground about cuts that benefit the better-off is the same one who stood on a manifesto of cutting inheritance tax and £12 billion from benefits.
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Posted: February 8, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Budget, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: IFS |
Originally posted on February 8 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
If you feel like you’ve been banging your head against a brick wall making the case for greater investment in rented homes, take heart. Someone is listening.
The Green Budget from the Institute for Fiscal Studies appears every year a month before the real thing and gives an impeccably independent and influential assessment of the chancellor’s options.
The 2016 version was published on Monday and it includes two chapters written for the IFS by the Institute for Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Yes, I know the mention of chartered accountants may have you asking yourself why you started reading this blog, but please try to contain your excitement – because there is an important point to this.
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Posted: December 31, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Local government, Pay to stay, Poverty, Right to buy, Scotland, Social housing, Tax credits, Wales |
Originally published on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
My look back at the year in housing on my blog concludes with five more big issues including the future of social landlords, welfare reform and poverty. For Part 1 go here.
6) Wrong or right to buy
Nothing sums up how just much turned on the election result as what happened with the Right to Buy. In February I blogged about the clarification that meant even fewer homes sold under the existing policy were being replaced than previously thought. April brought a buccaneering Tory pledge to extend it to housing association tenants and fund it by forcing councils the sell their ‘expensive’ stock. It was hard to see how it could possibly stack up except as a political gimmick but that was pretty much the point. It was an eye-catching election promise by a party desperate for victory and it seemed designed as a manifesto commitment that could be traded away in coalition negotiations.
Except that it worked. The Tories were unexpectedly elected with an overall majority and the mash-up of think tank proposals written on the back of an envelope somehow had to be implemented. The results would be disastrous for local authorities and the government faced a long battle in the House of Lords. And then everything changed all over again as the most vociferous opponents of the policy decided to accept it voluntarily.
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Posted: December 17, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Social housing |
Originally posted on December 17 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
So here it is, sneaked out on the last day of the parliamentary year: the independent evaluation of the bedroom tax (or removal of the spare room subsidy).
This is the final report to complement the interim evaluation that the DWP just happened to publish on the day of the Cabinet reshuffle in July 2014. Its conclusions were subsequently used by the Liberal Democrats to withdraw their support from the controversial policy under the coalition.
The evaluation was only commissioned in the first place to comply with a House of Lords amendment to the Welfare Reform Act. This final report covers the first 20 months of the policy up to November 2014, making me wonder just how long the DWP has been sitting on it.
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Posted: November 17, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing, Tax credits | Tags: George Osborne, spending review |
Originally posted on November 17 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Two separate reports over the weekend claimed that housing benefit is being targeted by George Osborne for £2bn worth of savings to fix his tax credits debacle.
Iain Duncan Smith famously responded to Osborne’s July Budget ‘triumph’ with a fist-pumping celebration. The triumph soon began to crumble it became clear that the Budget really amounted to a message to work hard, do the right thing – and get screwed. As that realisation dawned, the scene was set for a struggle between the two Cabinet ministers played out in media briefings over an apparent raid on universal credit to pay for mitigation.
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