Theresa May’s social housing

Posted: May 15, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Compulsory purchase, Land, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally posted on May 15 on my blog for Inside Houisng. 

The reality may not match the rhetoric but it is still good news that a housing pledge is set to be the centrepiece of the Conservative manifesto. Even better, this one seems to involve building social housing rather than selling it off.

The Tories are calling it ‘a new generation of social housing’ for England and the Sunday Times a ‘council housing revolution’ but within a few hours of the policy being announced it was starting to unravel.

Senior Conservatives appearing on Sunday TV, including former housing minister Brandon Lewis, confirmed that there is no new money, just £1.4bn already announced in the 2016 Autumn Statement.

They also refused to confirm how many homes the initiative would generate but look back at the Autumn Statement though and the chancellor was claiming that the £1.4bn would fund 40,000 homes. However, this was part of a relaxation in grant funding and the statement said the money would enable housing associations ‘to deliver a mix of homes for affordable rent and low cost ownership’.

If the funding is uncertain at best, the weekend manifesto announcement sounds like a new idea and there could hardly be a bigger contrast with the Tory headline promise at the last election to extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants and fund it by forcing councils to sell their most valuable stock as it falls vacant.

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The Conservative manifesto plan for council housing

Posted: May 14, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Right to buy | Tags: | Leave a comment

The Tory ‘council house revolution’ trailed in all today’s papers begs all sorts of questions that I’ll be blogging about soon (now up here).

In TV interviews today we’ve learned that there is no new money, just the £1.4bn for affordable housing promised in the 2016 Autumn Statement.

Conservative spokespeople refused to say how many homes were involved but the Autumn Statement said 40,000.

If that is welcome news it hardly qualifies as a ‘revolution’. However, the policy includes other details that could prove to be more significant in the longer term.

Given that all today’s reports are based on a Conservative Party press release that I can’t find anywhere online, here it is:

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A look ahead to the manifestos

Posted: May 11, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Private renting, Tax | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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Time for ministers to listen on the LHA cap

Posted: May 2, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: LHA cap, Local housing allowance, Supported housing | Leave a comment

Originally 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’.

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Holding the government to account

Posted: April 28, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Private renting, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally published on April 28 on my blog for Inside Housing. 

The housing crisis could persist ‘for decades to come’ unless the government shows more urgency and ambition on supply.

That’s the verdict* from an all-party committee of MPs on Friday in one of a series of reports due to be rushed out in the next few days as Westminster clears the decks for the election.

The Public Accounts Committee says:

‘
We are highly concerned by this lack of urgency and ambition, most of all in view of the rising costs, both human and financial, of homelessness. Not only does becoming homeless people represent a terrible blight on people’s lives, it also places additional strain on public spending: councils’ spending on temporary accommodation amounted to £840 million in 2015–16, a real-terms rise of nearly half (46%) in just five years.’

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The price of everything and the value of nothing

Posted: April 27, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Land, Local government, Privatisation | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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How the LHA cap will target the poorest communities

Posted: April 21, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: LHA cap, Social housing, Wales | Leave a comment

Originally posted on April 21 on my blog for Inside Housing.

If you were looking to design a policy to penalise the poorest families paying the cheapest rents, it would be very hard to come up with something better than the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap.

My feature in Inside Housing looks at the situation in Wales. I already knew that the impact would be severe in deprived areas like the South Wales Valleys because of their very low LHA rates but the more people I talked to the worse the implications seemed to be.

Even in areas with higher LHA rates there are growing worries about the long-term impact. Ask people what the number one threat to their business plan is and everyone will say welfare reform: for some universal credit is the biggest worry but others say the LHA cap because of its effect not just on tenants and business plans but also future development.

I’m talking here about the cap as it applies to general needs housing when the cap is introduced in 2019. There are three main problems: the impact on the under-35s who are single with no children; areas where social rents are already above or close to LHA rates; and the effect on pensioners.

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What the snap election could mean for housing

Posted: April 18, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Council housing, Right to buy | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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The problem(s) with leasehold

Posted: April 13, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Legal | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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Watching the benefit cap

Posted: April 6, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Local housing allowance, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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