Parker Morris and Homes for Today and Tomorrow
Posted: February 19, 2019 Filed under: Council housing, Housebuilding, New towns, Regulation, Uncategorized Leave a commentOriginally posted on February 19 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Listening to a new Radio 4 documentary about Parker Morris and space standards it is impossible not to feel a mix of nostalgia for an era of housing optimism and sadness that our ambitions have shrunk so much since.
As John Grindrod relates in Living Room, the title of the 1961 report was an indication that it was about much more than just a technical exercise in allocating space per person.
Work on Homes for Today and Tomorrow started 60 years ago this year but it was building on a 20th century council housing tradition that began 100 years ago and it was also looking to the future to ensure that homes were fit for it.
‘A good house or flat can never be made out of premises which are too small,’ said the report, which set out a much greater ambition for new homes:
‘An increasing proportion of people are coming to expect their home to do more than just fulfil the basic requirement. It must be something of which they can be proud and in which they can express the fulness of their lives.’
The 300,000-home question
Posted: February 11, 2019 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: Alok Sharma, NAO Leave a commentOriginally published on February 11 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Can the government meet its target of 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s?
The target was announced to some scepticism in the 2017 Budget and a report just out from the National Audit Office (NAO) says with some under-statement that it will be ‘challenging to meet’.
In detail, the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) commitment is to ‘support the delivery of a million homes by the end of 2020 and half a million more by the end of 2022 and put us on track to deliver 300,000 net additional homes a year on average’.
That means net additional homes so it includes conversions and change of use (less demolitions) as well as new building.
Statistics showing a 78% increase in homes on this measure since the low point of 2012/13 (from 125,000 to 222,000) certainly suggest that it is possible.
However, recovery from the credit crunch is one thing, an increase from more normal times quite another, and the annual increase slowed to just 2% in 2017/18.
Celebrations fit for heroes
Posted: January 31, 2019 Filed under: Council housing, History | Tags: Addison Act Leave a commentOriginally published on January 31as a blog for Inside Housing.
This year marks the centenary of a key event in the history of housing in Britain that deserves to be widely celebrated.
The 1919 Housing Act was designed to deliver on Lloyd George’s promise of homes for the soldiers, sailors and munitions workers of the First World War. He never actually said the exact words ‘homes fit for heroes’ and only 213,000 of the 500,000 promised were delivered before the Treasury axe fell in 1921.
But the results can still be seen in towns and cities all over the country in well-designed and spacious houses and the Act drawn up by health minister Christopher Addison also legacy for the future that went beyond the homes themselves.
It effectively established principles for council housing that lasted (but would also be contested) through the rest of the century by giving local authorities responsibility for assessing local housing need and the tools and the resources to address it. Read the rest of this entry »
The man who collects houses
Posted: January 30, 2019 Filed under: Economics, Housing market, London, USA Leave a commentI’d never heard of Ken Griffin before a week in which the hedge fund billionaire bought the most expensive home ever sold in the United States and then snapped up (as you do) what is thought to be the priciest home sold in Britain for a decade.
I use the words ‘houses’ and ‘home’ in a loose sense, of course. Because we are talking about penthouses, apartments and condos too. And because, despite spending $238m on a four-storey penthouse in a new skyscraper in New York and £95m on a London house near Buckingham Palace, it’s hard to see how he will spend much time living in either of them.
Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund is actually based in Chicago, where he already has two more homes. The most expensive ever sold in the city, a $59m four-storey penthouse, offers a place to crash after day at the office. Fitting it out could cost another $25m but if he needs somewhere in the meantime he also owns a whole floor of the Waldorf Astoria plus a two-storey penthouse in another skyscraper.
For weekends or holidays he can fly down to Florida, the state where he was born and has acquired a $230m portfolio of land and property in Palm Beach near President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. One property (which cost $15m) will apparently be used as a guest house while some of the four others could be demolished to make way for a gargantuan beach house. That’s almost forgetting the $60m penthouse in Miami that he seemingly never moved into and has now put back on the market.
If he fancies a change of scene, he can nip over to Hawaii, where he bought one property for $11m in 2009 only to buy a second for $17m three years later.
I’m labouring the point here but it’s worth it on a few different levels, most obviously for what it reveals about the astonishing lives of the ultra-rich but also for what this extreme case says about our attitudes to housing and property and about what has happened since the financial crisis.
Read the rest of this entry »Meanwhile, in other news…
Posted: January 29, 2019 Filed under: Brexit, Homelessness | Tags: James Brokenshire, John Healey, Kit Malthouse Leave a commentOriginally posted on January 29 as a blog for Inside Housing.
In the brief lull between Brexit chaos, the politics of housing just about continues as normal at Westminster.
The first Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) questions of the year was dominated by two all-too-familiar issues (homelessness and fire safety) while the HCLG committee inquiry into reform of the building regulations heard from the main expert and the minister.
First up in the main chamber was what the government is doing to reduce death rates among homeless people, with housing secretary James Brokenshire saying that every death is ‘one too many’.
Given the 597 deaths recorded in 2017, an increase of 24% in five years, his script about £100m for the rough sleeping strategy and £1.2bn for homelessness prevention, let alone £5m for colder weather, did not exactly sound convincing.
Read the rest of this entry »Shrinking homes to fit
Posted: January 23, 2019 Filed under: London, Planning, Uncategorized | Tags: Adam Smith Institute 2 CommentsOriginally published on January 23 on insidehousing.co.uk.
Shrinkflation made the headlines this week as government statisticians highlighted the way that food manufacturers reduce the size of their packets rather than put up the price of their products.
Most commonly seen in bread and cereals, it means you now get 10 Jaffa Cakes where you used to get 12.
But another news story got me wondering about whether the same thing could happen in housing.
‘Micro-homes could solve London’s housing crisis,’ said a BBC headline based on a new report from the Adam Smith Institute.
A new vision for social housing
Posted: January 8, 2019 Filed under: Social housing | Tags: Baroness Warsi, Ed Miliband, Shelter Leave a commentOriginally posted at www.insidehousing.co.uk on January 8.
Sooner or later a government will have to come up with a long-term plan for housing like the one that Theresa May launched this week for the NHS.
In place of the endless promises of the ‘jam tomorrow’ of more new homes at some point in the next parliament it would need a commitment that goes beyond the next election or even the one after that.
Today’s report from the independent Social Housing Commission provides a stark illustration of what is needed and the scale of the resources required.
And this is much more than the usual call for more from the social housing lobby. The 16 commissioners are drawn from across the political spectrum, with former Labour leader Ed Miliband matched by former Conservative ministers Lady Warsi and Lord O’Neill, and from across society, with Baroness Doreen Lawrence joined by members of the Grenfell community. There were also 13 public debates around the country and responses from 31,000 people.
10 things about 2018 – part one
Posted: December 21, 2018 Filed under: Grenfell Tower, Homelessness, Regulation, Rough sleeping, Temporary accommodation, Tenants, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Dominic Raab, James Brokenshire, Kit Malthouse, Philip Alston, Sajid Javid Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on December 21.
It was the year of three housing ministers and two secretaries of states (so far), the year that the department went back to being a ministry and a new government agency promised to ‘disrupt’ the housing market.
It was also the year of the social housing green paper and the end of the borrowing cap, of Sir Oliver Letwin and Lord Porter and of some significant anniversaries.
Above all, it was the year after Grenfell and the year before Brexit. Here is the first of my two-part review of what I was writing about in 2018.
1. New names, new ministers
January had barely begun when the Department for Communities and Local Government became the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government. The name harked back to the glory days when housing was ‘our first social service’ and housing secretary Sajid Javid became the first full member of the cabinet with housing in his title since 1970.
The best housing books of 2018
Posted: December 17, 2018 Filed under: Council housing, Financialisation, History, Land Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on December 17.
As housing has risen up the political and media agendas, so the shelves are filling with books explaining where we’ve gone wrong and what we could do to put things right.
Reflecting that, and just in time for anyone wondering what to get the housing nerd in their life for Christmas, here are my three housing books of the year.
First up is John Boughton’s indispensable history of council housing, Municipal Dreams – The Rise and Fall of Council Housing.
It’s a predictable choice and one already made by many other reviewers but it is one that is better late than never and one that will be even more worth reading next year against the background of the centenary of Homes Fit for Heroes.
Jules Birch 