Conference calls

Posted: October 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

Another week, another party conference that seems longer on talk than action on the housing crisis. Like the Liberal Democrats in Brighton, the Labour party in Manchester made all the right noises. It even advocated many of the same policies – if you can call carefully crafted aspirations policies.

As I noted in my blog for Inside Housing on Monday, the headline commitment by Ed Balls to funding 100,000 affordable homes and a stamp duty holiday from the proceeds of the 4G mobile phone auction is not actually a policy commitment at all, just a call for the government to do something in the next two years. If Labour wins the 2015 election, George Osborne will have already spent the money (almost certainly on something else) and in the absence of another one-off windfall housing will have to take its place in the queue for the zero-based spending review planned by Balls. His speech this week is a promising signal that housing could be a priority but no more than that.

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Runaway train

Posted: September 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Welfare reform | Leave a comment

The universal credit was meant to be the great prize that would make up for all the pain of welfare cuts but what if it just adds to it?

A range of evidence about the past, present and future of welfare is published today and the results suggest a system that is cracking under the strain even before the big wave of cuts due next April and the phased introduction of the universal credit starting at the same time.

Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

The Victorian values of Octavia Hill

Posted: August 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: History, Poverty, Social housing, Welfare reform | 1 Comment

Octavia Hill retains an extraordinary ability to inspire and infuriate. The ideas of this pioneer of housing management, social work and environmental protection almost seem more influential (and more contradictory) now than they did when she died 100 years ago this week.

She was a high-achieving woman in a society dominated by men but she was not by any stretch of the imagination a feminist. Her housing managers were women because, ‘ladies must do it, for it is detailed work; ladies must do it, for it is household work; it needs, moreover, persistent patience, gentleness, hope’. Yet she was opposed to women’s suffrage on the grounds that, as Kathryn Hughes puts it, ‘women were unsuited to thinking about the big issues of finance and foreign policy’.

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Credit crunch

Posted: August 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

If the Devil is in the detail then he is dancing a jig around the regulations for the universal credit and the benefit cap.

Ok, I am exaggerating for effect but by how much? Take a look at the response (PDF here) from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) to the consultation by the Social Security Advisory committee that closed on the opening day of the Olympics and you decide.

Many of the same points are being made by the CIH, NHF and others but they have an added impact coming from the organisation representing lenders that have invested £60 billion in social housing and cannot be easily dismissed by ministers as coming from the ‘housing industry’. Read the rest of this entry »

Speech marks

Posted: June 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

It would be easy to criticise the ideas in David Cameron’s speech on welfare reform as half-baked and impractical. They are both but that is not the main point.

One paragraph is missing from the transcript of the speech he gave in Kent today. This is a reference by Cameron to the way that the last Labour government allegedly ran up ‘a huge income transfer industry that they ran from the Treasury pushing tax credits and benefits around in a bid to try hit the poverty targets they’d set up’. This is marked as ‘political content excised’.

It’s a label that might as well apply to the whole speech, given that it’s a vision of what the welfare system would look like under a Conservative, Liberal Democrat-free government. You don’t have to look very far today to find Lib Dem bloggers calling on Nick Clegg to condemn Cameron’s ideas in the strongest language imaginable’ and Lib Dem think-tanks calling them ‘daft’ and ‘unworkable’.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.

Welfare reform Mark 2

Posted: May 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | 3 Comments

With (depending on your point of view) neat or cruel irony the number of part-time employees hit a record high within hours of them being identified as a major target for a second round of welfare reform.

Official figures published on Wednesday morning confirmed that unemployment fell by 45,000 to 2.63 million people and the number of people in work rose by 105,000. However, within that total the number of people working part-time because they cannot find full-time work rose to a record high of 1.4 million. There are now eight million part-time employees and 4.2 million self-employed people – both the highest numbers since records began in 1992.

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Silent speech

Posted: May 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

It’s hard to know whether it’s good news or bad news that there is so little legislation affecting housing in the new parliamentary session.

The Care and Support Bill will have implications for the sector but it’s effectively another delay to the government’s response to the Dilnot Commission’s funding proposals because it’s only a draft bill. See this from Rachael Byrne of Home Group and this from Simon Parker of the New Local Government Network for a flavour of the reaction to that.

Apart from that the Queen’s Speech had nothing on housing. The only piece of legislation from the Communities and Local Government (CLG) department is another draft Bill dealing with the consequences of abolishing the Audit Commission while the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will have its hands full with pensions.

Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.

Heard and not seen

Posted: March 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Mortgages, NHS, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

A brave and commendable attempt by my local MP to get the government to drop the NHS Bill met with predictable failure in the House of Commons yesterday.

Brave because Andrew George was defying the Lib Dem leadership (not sure how bothered he is by promotion prosepcts though). Commendable because I’d suggest that he was expressing the views of the vast majority of his constituents in west Cornwall (and the country as a whole) and many Lib Dem members. Predictable because this is the way things seem to work at Westminster.

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Family values

Posted: March 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Housing benefit, Mansion tax, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

Anyone who has followed the debates about housing benefit cuts and the Welfare Reform Bill will probably have been thinking the same as me during the debates this week about the mansion tax and child benefit.

Surely we heard exactly the same arguments about ‘fairness’ and ‘family’ in all the debates over the last year about welfare reform and housing benefit cuts?

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Last post

Posted: March 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Tags: , | 1 Comment

And so, having ‘done this to death’, the bedroom tax and the Welfare Reform Bill have passed their final parliamentary hurdle.

The quote came from welfare reform minister Lord Freud as peers debated a final attempt to amend the under-occupation penalty. It may have been accurate in terms of the parliamentary procedure but it will have a hollow ring for landlords and tenants as they spend the next 13 months agonising about how a measure that will cost 670,000 people £14 per week will be implemented.

Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing.

 

 

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