What’s gone wrong with our housing – and what could go right
Posted: April 4, 2023 Filed under: Private renting, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Barcelona, Singapore, Vienna Leave a commentAs symbols of failure, take a former council house in south London chopped up into six bedsits, housing association tenants waiting in vain for repairs and private renters searching non-stop for homes
As a symbols of success, take Vienna’s century of genuinely affordable rents, Barcelona’s long-term housing strategy and Singapore’s melding of the market and public ownership.
The Rental Health series stretching across BBC radio and television had all of that and more, from lots of jobs but no homes in the Highlands to the dire state of the rental market in Yorkshire to the mechanics of local housing allowance and Section 21 to people looking for housing alternatives in vans, co-housing and boats.
Those symbols of failure don’t come much starker than the three-bedroom council house on the Bampton estate in Forest Hill featured in the brilliantly appalling BBC Panorama documentary What’s Gone Wrong With Our Housing?
The first tenant moved into the home in 1971, bought it under the right to buy for £15,000 in 1984 and sold it for £85,000 in 1988. It is now owned by a private landlord who has converted it into six bedsits rented out for £960 a month each.
Most of what amounts to £60,000 a year in rent is paid in housing benefit by the government that sold it for a quarter of that.
As if that was not enough to make the point, the same private landlord has done the same thing to three other houses in the same terrace and is pocketing £250,000 a year.
Read the rest of this entry »State of the housing nation
Posted: March 28, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing, Bed and breakfast, Local housing allowance, Social housing | Tags: UK Housing Review Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
So where next? The publication of the UK Housing Review this week is a chance to take stock and ask where the housing system may be heading.
The sense is one of considerable flux, for home ownership as the housing market downturn continues, for private renting as the momentum behind increased regulation grows and for social housing as landlords face competing demands for scarce resources.
The paralysis of policy signalled by a Budget that mostly ignored housing could be just a temporary lull ahead of a UK general election.
As ever, the review puts all that into context. For starters, John Perry’s chapter on housing expenditure shows where total government support (in grants, loans and guarantees) for housing is going. The balance between the private market (59 per cent) and affordable housing (41 per cent) may not be quite as skewed as it was in the heyday of Help to Buy but it is still tilted in one direction.
The good news is that public spending on affordable homes has risen in real terms since the dark days of the coalition government. Investment under three Affordable Homes Programmes is set to peak this year – but the looming cliff edge is an indication of the big decisions that lie ahead:
Current spending plans (as in the Budget) rely on eye-watering (and unrealistic) austerity after the next election so that they comply with the chancellor’s fiscal rules. Key decisions lie ahead in the spending review after the next election regardless of who wins.
What is getting built is also skewed. There were 59,175 affordable housing completions in England in 2021/22, the highest for 11 years. However, more than 20,000 of those were for affordable home ownership and 28,000 for affordable rent, leaving just 7,528 for social rent (plus another 3,080 for similar London Affordable Rent).
Contrast that with Scotland, which managed 9,757 affordable completions in 2021/22 including almost as many social rent homes (7,306) despite having a population about a tenth of England’s.
Read the rest of this entry »Budget leaves housing frozen out
Posted: March 15, 2023 Filed under: Budget, Devolution, Energy efficiency, Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
In a Budget where everything had to begin with E there was little hope for housing.
Neither Rishi Sunak’s economic priorities nor Jeremy Hunt’s e-list (enterprise, employment, education and everywhere) left much room for an issue on which the Conservatives appear to have given up.
On energy, there was good news for tenants on pre-payment meters and for everyone with the extension of the price guarantee.
However, there was no more support for a policy that would do more than anything else to reduce dependence on unreliable overseas energy supplies and Vladimir Putin.
Investment in the decarbonisation of existing homes would cut energy demand at the same time as it cut carbon emissions and bills for tenants and home owners and delivered on the government’s new priority of energy security.
Energy efficiency even begins with the right letters but that either counts as a double negative or was quietly forgotten.
Read the rest of this entry »Downturn is a chance for a reset – but will the politicians take it?
Posted: February 27, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing market Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Housing market downturns are often dominated by debates about their consequences – whether they be falling house prices and negative equity, arrears and repossessions or builders going bust – and what to do about them.
But an important new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation argues that we should be thinking less about house prices and the immediate response to the downturn and more about the housing system as a whole and the long-term opportunities for a reboot.
We are already in a downturn even if the shape of it remains unclear. Toby Lloyd, Rose Grayston and Neal Hudson consider different scenarios ranging from back to normal (rising prices) to an outright crash but think market stagnation is the most likely outcome.
That may sound mild when seen in terms of house prices alone but the consequences would be dire: home ownership would remain inaccessible, driving up private rents and making it even more of a struggle for low-income households to keep a roof over their heads.
Arguably we are already seeing stagnation in housebuildling as the big developers slow down development and the industry as a whole warns that completions could fall to less than half their pre-pandemic peak while blaming government regulations.
The conventional response would be to support supply and boost demand but that would be very much like a rehash of what happened after 2010, when various forms of Help to Buy did increase housebuilding but also produced a boom in housebuilders’ profits, share prices and bonsues without much quid pro quo.
For all the efforts to boost the home ownership chances of first-time buyers, the private rented sector continued to grow. And millions of people in housing need were the losers as austerity put the squeeze on social rent and forced housing associations into affordable rent and market sales.
Read the rest of this entry »How would a robot fix the housing crisis?
Posted: February 16, 2023 Filed under: Affordable housing | Tags: ChatGPT, Housing crisis Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Question: Is there a housing crisis in the UK?
‘Yes, there is a housing crisis in the UK. The housing crisis in the UK is characterized by a shortage of affordable housing, high house prices, and a lack of social housing. This has led to an increase in homelessness and people being unable to afford to buy or rent a home. The crisis is driven by a number of factors including population growth, lack of new home building, and government policies that have favored homeownership over renting.’
As you may have guessed, it wasn’t me that wrote the last paragraph. The clues are, I hope, there in the plodding prose style and the American spellings.
The author was actually ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that has workers anxious for their jobs and schools and universities fearing that essays will be written by robots rather than students in future.
The bot goes on: ‘The crisis has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to job losses and economic uncertainty, making it harder for people to afford housing. The situation is particularly dire in London and other major cities, where housing is in high demand and prices are particularly high. The crisis is not only affecting low-income households, but also the middle-class families and young people. This is making it harder for them to access decent and stable housing.’
If that feels a bit out of date (the pandemic has arguably contributed to the opposite problem of labour shortages), it seems a reasonable summary if you accept that longstanding structural issues that we have done next to nothing to address can reasonably be described as a ‘crisis’. ChatGPT does at least get that the problem goes across incomes.
But what would the robot do about this, I wondered.
Read the rest of this entry »Waiting for renter reform
Posted: February 9, 2023 Filed under: Local housing allowance, Private renting, Section 21 Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Take your pick. Section 21, housing benefit, tax, net zero, standards, Covid, the courts, mortgage rates, tenants.
All of them reasons why there will be an exodus of landlords and homes from the private rented sector if you believe what you read in certain newspapers. All of them are one more nail in the coffin of buy to let.
One or more of those reasons will be quoted in every article about landlords selling up but, though there may be an element of truth to some of them, few will stop to point out that the party lasted for years. I don’t remember many landlords cutting their rents when mortgage rates fell to record lows after 2009 or complaining about the capital gains they’ve made since.
What matters, as MPs on the all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee points out in a report published today [Thursday] is who buys the homes that landlords are selling.
Properties sold to another private landlord, or perhaps to a local authority or social landlord, are still available for rent. Those sold into owner-occupation will reduce demand for rentals if the new owner was previously a renter.
The really damaging destination is when homes for rent are sold, or converted, into short-term holiday lets and that means that the Westminster government must go further than tentative plans for registration.
That’s a powerful reminder that reforming the private rented sector is about much more than ‘greedy landlords’ or a ‘war on buy to let’ and that any new system has to balance different interests and demand from different groups for decent homes to rent.
Read the rest of this entry »Gove’s admission begs more questions
Posted: January 30, 2023 Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Michael Gove’s admission that ‘faulty and ambiguous’ building regulations set by central government were partly to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken even passing notice of the evidence at the public inquiry.
That a statement so blindingly obvious should be enough to prompt a worried look from one of the levelling up secretary’s media minders speaks volumes about the government’s stance up to now. It also begs significant questions about the administration’s approach to housing going forward.
The admission (and the look) came in an interview with the Sunday Times trailing the announcement on Monday that developers have six weeks to sign legally binding contracts to repair unsafe buildings or, in effect, lose the ability to build anything else.
As the levelling up secretary told Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News: ‘The people who were responsible for erecting buildings which we now know are unsafe have to pay the costs of making sure those buildings are safe.’
Except that making UK-registered developers liable for fixing the blocks they built themselves via the contracts but for paying to fix other buildings via the Building Safety Levy does not really capture all of those responsible.
As the inquiry has revealed, that list includes just about every part of the construction industry, and especially product manufacturers. Mr Gove’s written statement on Monday does say that contractors and manufacturers are among those whose conduct is being investigated by his department’s Recovery Strategy Unit.
The list now also includes a government that Mr Gove says ‘collectively has to take some responsibility’ (meaning current and previous governments).
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Jules Birch 