Sidelining of tenants is part of a wider pattern
Posted: April 25, 2019 Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Leasehold, Private renting, Tenants Leave a commentWhether you put it down to carelessness or couldn’t care less-ness, the inaction inside government inaction that has sparked open letter from A Voice for Tenants (AV4T) is symptomatic of a wider political paralysis.
As the group themselves point out, they are not representative of the eight million people living in social housing in England but they are the best we have until the government keeps the prime minister’s promise to bring tenants into the political process.
The letter is all the more effective for the contrast between its moderate language and its stark message that working behind the scenes has not produced results.
The only option left seems to be to embarrass the politicians into living up to what they have said over the last two years – accepting Inside Housing’s open invitation to a meeting seems the bare minimum they should do.
And there is a strikingly similar message in the Times this morning from Grenfell United, as it attacks ‘indifferent and incompetent’ ministers who took their ‘kindness as weakness’.
Two years of meetings have produced too little action, they say, with no progress on their call for a new model of housing regulator and thousands of people still living in ‘death traps’ with combustible cladding.
Grenfell and tenants were top of the agenda for the ministers in post at the time of the fire – the work of Alok Sharma and his civil servants is praised in the AVT letter – but have slipped down it as the months and now years have passed.
Where next for renting after Section 21?
Posted: April 15, 2019 Filed under: Private renting, Scotland, Tenants, Wales 5 CommentsBlimey. If it plays out as billed, the government’s consultation on ending no-fault evictions and introducing open-ended tenancies for private renters represents the quickest change in housing policy that I can remember.
I say ‘if’ because this is still only a consultation, because ministers have form for claiming rather more in press releases than turns out to be the case when the detail is published and because Theresa May could be succeeded within weeks by a new, more right-wing prime minister who could dump the whole thing.
One more caveat is that I am only talking about England. The first minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, pledged to end no-fault evictions on Saturday and so narrowly avoided the embarrassment of Welsh Labour lagging behind the English Tories on tenants’ rights.
Scotland has already abolished Section 33 (its version of 21) and introduced a new tenancy system in December 2017 that could become the model for the other UK nations.
In England, and taking it at face value, this announcement is a stunning victory for campaigners that takes May’s Conservatives to the left not just of where Ed Miliband was at the 2015 general election but also of what Jeremy Corbyn argued at the 2017 election. It was only later that year that the Labour leader committed to ending Section 21.
Last year the government consulted on its own plan for three-year tenancies but did not commit to making them mandatory – this was only one of three options alongside education and financial incentives for landlords.
The rise and rise of short-term letting
Posted: April 4, 2019 Filed under: Permitted development, Private renting, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Airbnb Leave a commentOriginally published on April 4 as a blog for Inside Housing.
What do you think have been the two fastest-growing forms of housing over the last decade?
The trends since the financial crisis of falling home ownership, declining social renting and surging private renting have only recently shown signs of going into reverse and we’ve also seen the blurring of social and ‘affordable’ housing.
But you would struggle to fit two of the biggest changes highlighted in the 2019 edition of the UK Housing Review (launched on Thursday) into those three traditional categories.
First up is temporary accommodation. The latest stats show there that 82,000 homeless families were living in it in England in the year to June 2018, an increase of 71 per cent since 2011. Of these, 57,000 were in London.
Second is short-term lets through sites like Airbnb. There are no reliable stats on this but the latest data suggests there are now over 77,000 Airbnb listings in London, of which 43,000 are entire homes and 34,000 rooms or shared rooms.
It’s tempting to join the dots between those numbers and see a direct connection between these two forms of short-term letting, especially in London – the more permanent homes that are converted into short-term holiday lets on Airbnb the more temporary accommodation is likely to be needed. Neither of them is necessarily that short term or temporary.
The implications of the leasehold scandal
Posted: March 19, 2019 Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing associations, Leasehold | Tags: HCLG committee Leave a commentOriginally published on March 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.
The leasehold scandal will have far-reaching implications for housing that will be felt well beyond the major housebuilders with whom it began.
A report published by the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on Tuesday takes as its starting point the doubling ground rents and onerous contract terms faced by buyers of new homes who it says were treated ‘not as homeowners or customers but as a source of steady profit’.
And it also highlights the issue of leaseholders facing huge bills to remove and replace combustible cladding raised in its work on fire safety.
But this report goes well beyond those recent high-profile problems with leasehold and poses some fundamental questions about a tenure that only exists in England and Wales – and they are ones that will require answers by social landlords as well as private sector housebuilders and freeholders.
Housing in the Spring Statement
Posted: March 13, 2019 Filed under: Affordable housing, Climate change, Housebuilding, Land, Permitted development | Tags: Spring Statement Leave a commentOriginally published on March 13 as a blog for Inside Housing.
With Brexit dominating everything, the Spring Statement seems at first glance to be just as underwhelming as the chancellor hoped when he moved the main Budget event of the year to the Autumn.
The most eye-catching details from usual array of announcements and re-announcements on housing includes are £3bn Affordable Housing Guarantee Scheme to support 30,000 homes and a proposal to ban fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025.
But to add to the sense of Brexit drift, the first re-introduces a coalition scheme that lowered borrowing costs for housing associations but was abolished in 2015 while the second does something to address climate change but will be arriving nine years later than the zero carbon homes that were scrapped by the coalition.
Freezing out ‘No DSS’ landlords
Posted: March 5, 2019 Filed under: Housing benefit, Local housing allowance, Private renting, Uncategorized 10 CommentsOriginally published on March 5 as a blog for Inside Housing.
The way that responsibility for housing is split between different government departments means that sometimes the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
The classic example of this came in parliament yesterday when even as MPs were approving another year of frozen working-age benefits, the housing secretary was making a written statement attacking landlords for refusing to let to tenants on housing benefit.
The vote means that the local housing allowance (LHA) will be frozen for the fourth year in succession and the benefit cap will stay stuck at the reduced rate of £20,000 (£23,000 in London).
The impact of that will fall directly in the ‘thousands of vulnerable people and families’ mentioned by James Brokenshire in his written statement and will be felt most by families with children and those living in the most expensive areas.
And it will come on top of the continuing impact of the transition to universal credit and all the problems with waiting times, delays in payment and supposed simplicity for tenants and landlords that it brings in its wake.
If it reinforces the sense of relief among social landlords that the government abandoned plans to cap housing benefit for social and supported housing at LHA rates, it means many social tenants face a freeze on the rest of their incomes despite rising prices.
But the freeze will give private landlords yet more reasons to think twice about letting homes to tenants on benefits.
And the move by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) comes at precisely the moment that ministers at the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) give their backing to a campaign by Shelter on ‘No DSS’ adverts.
It’s not just about Help to Buy
Posted: February 28, 2019 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding Leave a commentOriginally posted on February 28 as a blog for Inside Housing.
All the headlines this week are about Persimmon and Help to Buy but the issues with housebuilding are much bigger than either.
Yes, Persimmon is the most extreme example of the gains made on the back of state intervention, with profits of £1 bn and margins of over 30% to go with those huge executive bonuses that made it the poster child for corporate excess in the industry.
And, yes, Help to Buy supported almost half of its 13,341 private completions in 2018 and a major part of the rest of the industry’s output.
Public and media outrage has now reached the point where ministers feel they have to act and housing secretary James Brokenshire let it be known over the weekend that he has ‘become increasingly concerned by the behaviour of Persimmon in the last 12 months’.
Coping with climate change
Posted: February 21, 2019 Filed under: Climate change, Housebuilding, Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally published on February 21 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Remember when England was going to lead the world on zero carbon homes?
Three years after that was meant to happen, a report published today (Thursday) by the government’s independent advisor on climate change reveals that instead we are going backwards.
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) warns that ‘UK homes are not fit for the future’, with progress stalled on reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to adapt the housing stock falling far behind the risks posed by higher temperatures, flooding and water scarcity.
Improving the quality, design and use of homes will not just address the challenges of climate change, it says, but save people money and improve health and wellbeing, especially for vulnerable groups like the elderly.
Many of today’s headlines were generated by its recommendations that would mean no more gas boilers and hobs, with no new homes connected to the gas grid from 2025 .
However, the report as a whole has multiple and far-reaching implications for new and existing homes if the UK is to meet its legally binding target to reduce carbon emissions by at least 80% of 1990 levels by 2050.
Jules Birch 