A look ahead to the manifestos
Posted: May 11, 2017 Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Tax | Tags: General Election 2017 Leave a commentOriginally posted on May 11 on my blog for Inside Housing.
As we await the manifestos, what are the chances of real change in housing over the next five years?
Give or take the odd leak, there are some positive signs. First, this election has one of the two major parties pinning its election hopes on housing reform and members of the other saying that ‘building more homes‘ is a bigger priority than it has been for years.
Second, a clutch of select committee reports, which were published just before parliament shut down for the election, set down some useful all-party markers for future policy.
Third, in Gavin Barwell and John Healey the two main parties have their best housing spokespeople in years. That may be damning them with faint praise but both seem to be politicians who get the case for housing.
Time for ministers to listen on the LHA cap
Posted: May 2, 2017 Filed under: LHA cap, Local housing allowance, Supported housing Leave a commentOriginally posted on May 2 on my blog for Inside Housing.
When not one but two all-party committees of MPs call on ministers to think again about a controversial policy you might think they would listen – but will they?
The Work and Pensions and Communities and Local Government Committees say the government should scrap its plan to impose a Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap on supported housing and pay top-up funding via local authorities and devolved administrations.
Ministers claim the intention is not to save money but to ensure better value for money and monitoring of the quality of services.
But the MPs conclude that ‘the funding proposals, as they stand, are unlikely to achieve these objectives’ and that LHA is ‘an inappropriate starting point for a new funding mechanism’.
The price of everything and the value of nothing
Posted: April 27, 2017 Filed under: Land, Local government, Privatisation | Tags: Annington Homes, free schools, MoD Leave a commentOriginally posted on April 27 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Sometimes a conjunction of different news stories shines a new light on things and makes the obvious more obvious.
That’s exactly what happened this week when two excellent long read features on housing and a select committee report made me see familiar issues in a slightly different way.
The first was in Tuesday’s Guardian, an investigation by Holly Watt into the scandal of the privatisation of Ministry of Defence housing.
The big picture is that in 1996 the MoD sold its housing stock for military personnel to Annington Homes for £1.67bn and then rented them back at a big discount to market rates for 25 years.
That may have made short-term financial sense but the long term is a different matter altogether. The homes are now worth £6.7bn and the 25-year discount runs out in 2021. After that there is nothing to stop Annington charging full market rents.
What the snap election could mean for housing
Posted: April 18, 2017 Filed under: Council housing, Right to buy | Tags: Election 2017 Leave a commentOriginally published on April 18 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Here are some quick thoughts on what the snap General Election might mean for housing.
First, what about the campaign? Labour and Jeremy Corbyn will make a housing a big part of their alternative vision for Britain.
There will be lots about council and social housing and lots to appeal to private renters. Housing will be more prominent in the campaign of one of the two major parties than it has been for years.
But will any of that matter? Theresa May and the Conservatives will not need to say much about housing because their campaign will be all about Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn.
Housing won’t matter much to any of the other parties either as the Lib Dems try to win back seats by appealing to Remainers and the SNP and Plaid use the looming Tory apocalypse in England to win votes in Scotland and Wales.
The problem(s) with leasehold
Posted: April 13, 2017 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Legal | Tags: Commonhold Leave a commentOriginally published on April 13 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Question: When is a home owner not really a home owner? Answer: When they are a leaseholder.
Leaseholders have the responsibilities of being an owner without having all of the rights. They own the bricks and mortar* of the homes they are living in – but only for the length of their lease – and they do not own the land it is built on.
They pay a mortgage but they also pay ground rent to the freeholder and a service charge for maintenance carried out by companies over whom they may have no control. They may see themselves as owners but in the eyes of the law they are tenants.
The issue has come to a head recently with the scandal of developers selling leasehold new houses and then selling on the freehold for a profit. Unwitting buyers have found themselves facing bills for ground rent that double every 10 years and an escalating bill for buying the freehold.
Watching the benefit cap
Posted: April 6, 2017 Filed under: Benefit cap, Local housing allowance, Welfare reform Leave a commentOriginally posted on April 6 on my blog for Inside Housing.
What did see when you watched last night’s Panorama on the benefit cap?
Most people reading this here will, I think, have seen the impact of an arbitrary policy that leaves thousands of people with 50p a week towards their rent.
But outside my timeline on Twitter the view was very different. Roughly 95 per cent of tweets with the hashtag #benefitcap were hostile, but to the people featured in the programme rather than the policy.
There is nothing new in this divide of course – exactly the same thing happened with Benefits Street and How to Get a Council House and a Dispatches documentary on the cap last month– but this was an hour on BBC One on primetime.
Part of the problem lay with the way that Panorama framed the issue. This was clear in the first two minutes.
LHA: a reverse supermarket sweep
Posted: April 3, 2017 Filed under: Housing benefit, LHA cap, Private renting | Tags: Local housing allowance Leave a commentOriginally published on April 3 on my blog for Inside Housing.
It’s easy to forget now but the original idea behind the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) was that it would give tenants an incentive to ‘shop around’ for a cheaper rent.
Rather than get their actual rent paid, tenants would get an allowance based on the median rent for the area and if they found somewhere cheaper they could keep what they saved. In effect they could be rewarded for shopping at Lidl’s rather than Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s.
The ‘shopping incentive’ was a key feature of a new system that was designed to be fairer and more transparent than the one it replaced. The (then Labour) government said it would give tenants more choice and a greater sense of personal responsibility, administration would be easier and there would be reduced barriers to work.
Fears about the impact of moving to direct payment to tenants were allayed in local pilot schemes and for a time it seemed like the new system really was working as intended.
Nine years on and that early optimism has disappeared along with the original idea. Labour restricted the shopping incentive to £15 a week in 2009 and the coalition eventually removed it completely in 2010.
And that was just the start of a series of cuts in the allowance justified by constant references to a handful of very large claims in London, inferring that some tenants were choosing to shop at Harrods and Harvey Nicholls.
The charge of the Brexit brigade
Posted: March 27, 2017 Filed under: Europe, History | Tags: Article 50 Leave a commentFor some strange reason, these lines are running through my head ahead of the triggering of Article 50.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
It’s not so much because I think we will be metaphorically blown to pieces by the guns of the other 27 EU members. Nor because that verse is a pretty accurate description of MPs trooping through the lobbies to vote for something they know is a historic mistake. It’s because our generals seem to think those are reasons to send us even faster into the valley.
Without stretching the metaphor too far, the famous charge into the Russian guns at the Battle of Balaklava was the result of ambiguous orders, arrogance and personal rivalries. Lord Raglan probably said something about ‘having a punt, having a go, that’s what pumps me up’, Lord Lucan (yes, really) gave a speech in front of a bus and the Earl of Cardigan obeyed an order he knew was suicidal while mumbling something about a country that works for everyone.
Jules Birch 