Private renting ten years on
Posted: September 10, 2018 Filed under: Private renting Leave a commentOriginally posted on September 10 on my blog for Inside Housing.
So what is the state of the private rented sector – and what can be done about it?
Ten years on from their official review for the government, Julie Rugg and David Rhodes of the University of York are back with an update for the Nationwide Foundation.
Despite finding some progress – the average condition of rental property has improved, the average tenancy has got longer and Build to Rent investment is at long last producing results – the problems remain depressingly familiar and in many areas things have got worse.
The private rented sector is now 40% bigger but that growth is more down to the decline of home ownership and social renting than a wave of new construction or an expansion of choice. Perhaps half a million homes sold under the Right to Buy are now private rentals.
Thanks to Buy to Let, the sector is even more dominated by individual ‘investors’ looking to boost their wealth by getting tenants to pay the mortgage – mainstream commercial property companies account for just 3% of the stock.
The review estimates there are now 2.3m adults in England who are landlords – of those, 9% are themselves also private tenants and (surely some mistake?) 1% are social tenants.
And the bottom end of private renting – the only option for tens of thousands of tenants on benefit – is under such pressure from welfare reform that it is becoming ‘a residual slum tenure’.
Where next for Help to Buy?
Posted: September 6, 2018 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding Leave a commentOriginally published on September 6 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Take a quick look at any of the results published by the major house builders this week and it becomes clear just how dependent most of the industry still is on Help to Buy .
Barratt relied on Help to Buy equity loans for 36% of its sales in the year to the end of June – to put that in perspective all its other private sales only accounted for 31%.
In the past six months, Help to Buy accounted for 39% of sales at Taylor Wimpey and 36% at Bovis.
And a presentation to analysts by Redrow showed that 40% of its sales came via Help to Buy in the year to the end of June.
No wonder its chair Steve Morgan calls it a “godsend”and wants clarity about what happens when the scheme expires in March 2021.
A report from the Home Builders Federation (HBF) this week claims that Help to Buy has been an “unmitigated success”, ensuring the construction of 170,000 new homes in its first five years, while supporting 150,000 jobs and helping 137,000 first-time buyers on to the housing ladder.
But increasingly hostile coverage in the national press concentrates far more on soaring profits, pay and shares at the major house builders and wealthier buyers taking advantage of interest-free loans that they do not need.
Time to end the freeze
Posted: August 29, 2018 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally published on August 29 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The freeze on the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) is a £1.2 billion question for which the answer seems obvious.
The problems detailed in analysis by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) published on Wednesday are severe and they are getting worse.
LHA rates are midway through a four-year freeze that is the culmination of seven years of austerity. The result is that they have completely lost touch with the rents they were meant to cover.
The CIH analysis shows that 90% of LHA rates now fail to cover the rent of the cheapest 30% of private rented homes (bear in mind that this was itself a cut from the 50th percentile and that LHA was originally designed to enable tenants to ‘shop around’ for cheaper rents).
That leaves tenants facing rent shortfalls that grow larger with each year of austerity: outside London, two out of every three LHA shared accommodation rates have a weekly shortfall of £4 or more and half of other LHA rates are short by £10 or more; in London, the shortfalls for shared accommodation are more than £10 a week in every LHA area and at least £30 for all other homes.
U-turns but no vision in social housing green paper
Posted: August 14, 2018 Filed under: Council housing, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Social housing green paper Leave a commentOriginally posted on August 14 on my blog for Inside Housing.
For all its faults (and there are many), the social housing green paper is still a remarkable document.
What I think it is the first-ever housing green paper from a Conservative government represents progress in itself: rather than taking half-baked ideas from right wing think tanks and putting them straight into legislation, the government is actually consulting us on its policies.
But that is just for starters: the green paper runs up the white flag on two of the barmiest and most controversial elements of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 and goes on to propose what amounts to a rewrite of much more of what the government has done since 2010.
The two explicit u-turns mean that local authorities will no longer be required to pay a levy on higher-value council homes as they fall vacant and fixed-term tenancies will no longer be mandatory for new council tenants.
This is not a complete surprise – neither policy had yet been implemented – but it is an indication of just how much the Grenfell Tower fire has changed the politics of social housing.
And the non-implementation (or even repeal) of the forced sales levy means that there is no source of funding for a third policy that was a flagship Tory manifesto pledge in 2015 -the extension of the Right to Buy to housing association tenants.
‘Housing week’ off to an uncertain start
Posted: August 13, 2018 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Rough sleeping, Social housing | Tags: James Brokenshire, Rough Sleeping Strategy 1 CommentFor once this is a silly season that has some substance. If you can tear yourself away from the sun lounger or the latest pronouncement by the Etonian Katie Hopkins, mid-August sees a trio of government announcements that are crucial for housing and homelessness.
Last week featured another big benefits u-turn: confirmation that housing benefit will continue for supported accommodation removes a cloud that has been hanging over projects including homeless hostels and women’s refuges.
Monday saw the launch of the strategy that the government says will enable it to meet its target of halving rough sleeping in England by 2022 and ending it by 2027.
And what is billed as ‘housing week’ is set to continue on Tuesday with the launch of the social housing green paper – originally promised in the Spring, then before the parliamentary recess last month, but now appearing while most MPs are on holiday.
The timing does at least ensure some media attention, including an uncertain performance by James Brokenshire in the TV and radio studios on Monday morning.
After a lively appearance on Good Morning Britain, the housing secretary struggled on the Today programme when asked whether government policies are to blame for the relentless rise in rough sleeping and floundered when asked how much of the promised ‘£100 million plan’ is new money. (Somewhere between none and not much was the eventual answer).
What the English Housing Survey says about owner-occupation
Posted: August 13, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 CommentsThe third in a series of blogs looking at the latest English Housing Survey considers the state of home ownership in 2016/17.
Home ownership has stopped shrinking
The survey says 62.6% of households owned their home in England in 2016/17, down from 62.9% the previous year. Coming after a 10-year decline from a peak of 71% in 2004, that represents relative stability and the rate is now little changed since 2013/14.
The last time home ownership was lower was in 1984, just as the Thatcher right to buy boom was at its peak.
Or has it?
However, some more profound changes are going on beneath the surface. First, it depends whether you are talking about owner-occupation or home ownership – many more of us now own more than one home thanks to buy to let.
Second, it conceals the widening divide within ownership. Traditionally owner-occupation has been about first-time buyers getting on to the housing ladder but the tenure has matured as baby boomers get older and there are now more outright owners (34%) than people buying with a mortgage (28%).
In line with that, the proportion of owners who are under 35 has halved in the last two decades from 18% to 9% and even buyers with a mortgage are older than they once were (only 46% are under 45). By contrast, 61% of outright owners are over 65.
What the English Housing Survey says about private renting
Posted: August 2, 2018 Filed under: Private renting | Tags: English Housing Survey 1 CommentOriginally posted on August 2 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The second in a series of blogs looking at the latest English Housing Survey considers the state of the private rented sector in 2016/17.
Home to a fifth of us
The private rented sector has doubled in size over the last 20 years from 10% of households in 1996/97 (2.1m) to 20% in 2016/17 (4.7m). Most of the growth took place after 2003.
To put that growth into perspective, the private rented sector now accommodates a greater share of households than at any time since 1970. As recently as 1997, following rapid decline in the 1970s and 1980s, it was half the size of the social rented sector.
The rise of working homelessness
Posted: July 23, 2018 Filed under: Homelessness, Labour market, Poverty, Temporary accommodation | Tags: Shelter 1 CommentOriginally posted on my blog for Inside Housing on July 23.
Ever since 2010 the government has assumed that work is the solution to poverty and problems with housing.
It’s an assumption that underpins universal credit and it’s been nourished by a steady drip of propaganda from right-wing think tanks and newspapers about the alleged role of social housing in encouraging worklessness.
Anyone with experience of the benefits system knows that this is at best a simplistic and at worst a dangerously inaccurate interpretation of what is going on.
For all the government’s proclamations of a ‘jobs miracle’, work alone is not a guaranteed route out of poverty or poor housing or even, it now seems, homelessness.
A report out today from Shelter shows a 73% rise in the number of families who are in work but homeless and in temporary accommodation over the last five years: from 19,000 in 2013 to 33,000 in 2017.
Jules Birch 