Enter Esther McVey

Posted: July 25, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Home ownership, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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Social housing reforms let down tenants

Posted: December 4, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Benefit cap, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally posted on December 4 on my blog for Inside Housing.

Go back to the days when the government’s confidence in its marketising agenda for social housing was at its greatest and one consistent justification was made by ministers for their policies.

The introduction of affordable rent would mean more new homes for the same money, fixed-term tenancies in the Localism Act would ‘end the lazy consensus’ and free up more lettings for people on the waiting list and Welfare Reform Act measures to remove the spare room subsidy would free up larger properties for overcrowded families.

Figures released last week show the combined impact of the policies and the results are not pretty. Read the rest of this entry »

Manifestly without reason

Posted: November 8, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Legal | Leave a comment

Originally published on November 8 on my blog for Inside Housing

On a day when it was badly needed the judges of the Supreme Court obliged with some good news.

Yes, it was mixed with bad news in the judgement on the bedroom tax, as two claimants won their case and others were refused, but it was still a welcome vindication of the case put forward by the Carmichaels, the Rutherfords and their lawyers. In the words of the judgement, the decisions on their housing benefit were ‘manifestly without reason’.

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The turn of the screw

Posted: April 4, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Benefit cap, Housing benefit, Private renting, Supported housing, Tax credits, Universal credit | Tags: | Leave a comment

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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10 things about 2015: part 2

Posted: December 31, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing associations, Housing benefit, Local government, Pay to stay, Poverty, Right to buy, Scotland, Social housing, Tax credits, Wales | Leave a comment

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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The grim reality of the bedroom tax

Posted: December 17, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Social housing | Leave a comment

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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Give and take: the spending review and housing benefit

Posted: November 17, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing, Tax credits | Tags: , | Leave a comment

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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Fly in the ointment

Posted: June 10, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Could the Conservatives really admit they got it wrong on the bedroom tax? Hard as it is to imagine Iain Duncan Smith admitting he was wrong about anything, pressure is growing for a rethink.

In the Times yesterday, David Cameron’s former speechwriter Clare Foges offered her ex-boss some advice a series of options on how to break with the party’s image as the nasty party, including this one:

‘Move on from the bedroom tax. It is not working as had been hoped and will remain a fly in the one-nation ointment. Have a mea culpa moment and move on.’

Note the lack of pretence that it’s really the removal of the spare room subsidy and that it’s all working brilliantly to save money and use social housing more fairly.

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Blue skies: Part two

Posted: May 27, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Benefit cap, Garden cities, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Local government, Planning, Starter homes, Welfare reform | Tags: | Leave a comment

Is One Nation Conservatism anything more than PR puff? The conclusion of my blog sets out 12 tests of what it could and should mean in housing.

In the wake of the unexpected election result influential voices within the Conservative Party talked about the need for a new appeal to the aspirational working classes. Whether it’s called Blue Collar or One Nation Conservatism, the idea is to shake off the negativity of the nasty party, steal Labour’s clothes and lock in another majority for 2020.

Part one of this blog featured calls by people like Tim Montgomerie, David Green, Nick de Bois and Christian Guy not just for a radical new approach to housebuilding to spread the benefits of home ownership but also a new approach to housing to meet the needs of renters. Guy called housing ‘one of the social justice issues of our time’. There was more of this over the weekend, with Chris Walker of Policy Exchange calling housing ‘key to a Conservative vision for working people’.

But what does all this Tory philosophising amount to? The desire to appeal to aspirational workers (and for power in 2020) is certainly genuine enough but is the party really ready for its implications? The suspicion remains that this is as much about redefining the meaning of ‘One Nation’ as it is about changing course: one nation for those able to Work Hard and Do the Right Thing that looks the other way when it comes to those who cannot and ignores the fact that many of them will still not be able to pay their rent.

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Housing at the hustings

Posted: April 21, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Cornwall, Housing benefit, Second homes | Leave a comment

So is housing finally cutting through as an issue at this election? Yesterday has convinced me that it is.

The day started with housing featuring as the election issue of the day on Today on Radio 4 – good news in itself but just an indication of the programme’s agenda. The report by John Humphrys was about Shepherd’s Bush and how it’s changed from the setting for Steptoe & Son to a place where a couple on a joint income of over £100,000 cannot afford a deposit, let alone a home, and foreign investors are buying new apartments eight at a time.

An interview with Brandon Lewis and Emma Reynolds followed (listen again here at about 8.30). But it quickly degenerated into bald men squabbling over a comb mode as they traded statistics about who has the worst record in government. Lewis trotted out the usual lines about Help to Buy while Reynolds repeated her better ones about Lyons. Maybe I’ve heard it too many times before, maybe they’ve said the same thing too many times before, but it hardly seemed like housing was at the centre of the election. Depressingly, the focus was entirely on first-time buyers. They do face huge problems but this is an indication I think that the main parties still see home ownership as the issue on which elections are won and lost. It’s a sense of aspiration, rather than housing as such, that is the real issue.

That was enough to lower my expectations for my local hustings. BBC Cornwall is organising them across the county and last night it was the turn of St Ives. The Lib Dems held off the Conservatives by just 1,700 votes in 2010 and it’s one of the 23 seats the Tories need to win to form an overall majority.

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