Posted: September 17, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Legal |
Whether it’s the UN, the Lib Dem conference or tribunals in Fife, the cracks in the bedroom ceiling are growing by the day.
As Pete Apps reports for Inside Housing, only two members of the junior coalition party voted against a grassroots motion at the conference in Glasgow yesterday calling for an immediate evaluation of the controversial policy.
The motion condemned the policy that Lib Dem MPs were instructed to call the ‘spare room subsidy’ for ‘discriminating against the most vulnerable in society’. Richard Kemp, former leader of Liverpool Council, called it ‘reprehensible and evil’ and Baroness Shirley Williams, probably the party’s senior figure, called it a ‘big mistake’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: September 11, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Private renting |
Just when you were beginning to miss him, Grant Shapps is back with a bang and a complaint to the United Nations about that ‘woman from Brazil’.
The Conservative Party chairman brought an international twist to his old housing stomping ground in a Today programme interview that pitted him against Raquel Rolnik, the UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing. Readers will need no reminding that in a preliminary statement following a two-week visit to the UK she is calling for the bedroom tax to be suspended immediately and fully re-evaluated.
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Posted: September 5, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Civil service, Universal credit |
Take your pick of today’s official criticisms of the universal credit. It was over-ambitious and high risk, it had no clear plan and it has offered poor value for money.
Has the National Audit Office (NA0) ever delivered a more damning verdict on a key government policy than the one it has just published?
Think of just about every rumour you’ve heard about the IT system, every assumption about the chaos behind the scenes and every time you reacted sceptically to DWP assurances that the latest changes to the timetable were all part of the original plan, and you will find them all in the report published today.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: August 10, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Social housing |
How to Get a Council House broke free of its dodgy title and format last night. The same cannot be said for the reaction on Twitter.
The second episode in the series was set in Manchester and followed tenants and staff of Northwards Housing as the bedroom tax loomed earlier this year (watch again here). It gave some real insights into the way the system works and the good job that housing officers do in very difficult circumstances.
As I blogged last week, I felt the first episode also did well at showing the impossible situation in Tower Hamlets, where just 40 properties a week become available but 60 new families join the 24,000 families others on the waiting list. But I criticised the trivialising commentary and the lack of any context that might have explained why.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: August 2, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Welfare reform |
This week’s court ruling on the bedroom tax and BBC Trust verdict on the John Humphrys welfare reform documentary got me thinking again about the importance of language in the debate on both.
Language matters. You don’t have to be familiar with discourse analysis to know that there is a difference between ‘the bedroom tax’ and ‘the spare room subsidy’ or ‘welfare’ and ‘social security’. The words we use to frame ideas have a power that goes beyond themselves because of the associations, conscious or otherwise, that they bring with them. The battle of language is also a battle of ideas and of ideology.
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Posted: July 31, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Legal, Social housing |
If you take even a cursory glance at the circumstances of the 10 families involved in the legal challenge to the bedroom tax you’ll be left wondering how discretionary housing payments can possibly resolve their problems.
I read the High Court ruling painfully aware that I lack the legal expertise to interpret the finer points of the European Convention on Human Rights and Public Sector Equality Duty but with enough experience to know that what is lawful is not necessarily the same as what is fair.
The background to the case has already been covered in detail elsewhere. As Inside Housing reports, although the judges said that new measures must be introduced to protect disabled children who need their own room, housing groups were left bitterly disappointed by the dismissal of the other part of the judicial review and lawyers plan to appeal. Read this excellent blog by Kate Webb of Shelter or see statements by the solicitors involved here and here if you haven’t already for the background.
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Posted: July 25, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Social housing |
Every time I think I’ve got my head around the pernicious impacts of the bedroom tax something new emerges to make me think again.
The trigger this time is an excellent report from Aragon Housing Association on the first 100 days of what the government calls the spare room subsidy. But that also sent me back to several conversations I had at the CIH conference in Manchester and reports published while I was on holiday from the National Housing Federation (twice), Chartered Institute of Housing and Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.
Even before that the evidence was accumulating from around the country that the effects are at least as bad, and probably worse, than most people expected or feared. From rent arrears in Newcastle and Ayrshire to fears of more suicides in Birmingham to criticism of the Labour leadership’s stance on the issue in Liverpool, the effects of the bedroom tax continue to be felt emotionally, financially and politically.
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Posted: July 15, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform |
Returning from holiday this morning to hear Iain Duncan Smith mouth half-truths and dodgy stats about benefits on the Today programme it felt like I had never been away.
The work and pensions secretary was speaking as the overall benefit cap was introduced in another 335 local authority areas from today. The remaining 40 most affected areas will follow next month.
In an astonishing interview IDS packed in so many questionable claims that it seemed he was determined to establish a decisive lead in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) game of dodgy stats bingo.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: June 28, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
So now we know: 10 years of certainty on rents, five years on grant and who knows how many more years of welfare ‘reform’.
The future has come into much clearer focus this week following the spending round on Wednesday and the investment announcement on Thursday. And, as luck would have it, all of this coincided with the biggest housing conference of the year.
Read the rest of my thoughts on the implications of the spending round for housing on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: June 24, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Energy efficiency, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform |
A stark warning of the consequences of market failure in the housing system comes from an independent commission today.
The broad-based group set up by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors(RICS) is chaired by Michael Newey, RICS president elect and chief executive of Broadland Housing Group, and also includes Mark Clare of Barratt, Nick Jopling of Grainger, James Pargeter of Deloitte Real Estate, Paul Tennant of Orbit and Duncan Maclennan of University of St Andrews.
They argue that: ‘High house prices, complemented with high levels of housing unaffordability are the greatest signs of market failure. This in turn has an adverse effect on labour mobility, commuting, productivity and job creation. This commission recognises the negative impact that a poor housing system has on the wider economy and hopes to see it elevated still higher on government agendas.
In other words, what the commission argues are ‘clear signs of market failure’ include negative externalities that go far beyond housing and require a switch away from the ‘short-termism’ that has characterised policy for the last 50 years.
However, in an illustration of just how difficult it is to break away from a short-term approach, the commission seems to face both ways on current government policies.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 