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.
Relegation zone
Posted: March 20, 2017 Filed under: Europe, Homelessness | Tags: Finland, Housing First Leave a commentOriginally published on March 21 on my blog for Inside Housing.
No wonder Sajid Javid wants to go to Finland: a report out today confirms it as the only country in the European Union where homelessness is falling. The remarkable performance compared to the other 27 EU members is attributed to 20 years of implementing housing policies based on Housing First.
That will only add to the attractions of the approach highlighted in a recent report by the Centre for Social Justice that apparently made the communities secretary so keen to go to Helsinki.
But as his boss gets ready to trigger Article 50, something else in today’s report may also give him pause for thought: the UK has fallen badly behind other EU nations in its performance on housing and homelessness.
Tax and the self-employed
Posted: March 12, 2017 Filed under: Labour market, Tax, Universal credit | Tags: Budget, Philip Hammond, Self-employment Leave a commentFor all the sound and fury over national insurance and the self-employed, it is still a sideshow in wider debates about tax, employment status and rights at work.
Philip Hammond’s unraveling Budget matters politically and it signals both the strength and the weakness of the government. Only a chancellor facing the worst opposition in decades could even consider a measure that breaks four separate commitments in the 2015 Conservative manifesto. Only a prime minister with a small majority could be forced to retreat at the first sign of Tory dissent and newspaper headlines about white vans.
Much of the blame lies with the ex-chancellor now trousering £1m a year on top of his MP’s salary for his advice and speeches. It makes you wonder how George Osborne is being paid for all that hard work and hope that he’s about to get clobbered for tax because it’s through a personal service company.
It was Osborne who in 2015 abolished Class 2 national insurance contributions (NICs) for the self-employed (from 2018) and gave them access to the higher state pension via Class 4. If he had introduced an increase in Class 4 contributions at the same time, few people would have complained. Instead he posed as the great reforming chancellor, agreed the manifesto pledge and left Hammond to fill the holes in his spreadsheet.
Combine these different measures and the treatment of the self-employed looks (reasonably) fair: most of the lowest paid will pay less, there’s a better state pension than before, and the burden falls heaviest on people earning more. But try and defend this week’s Budget announcement using that argument and you look like a shifty betrayer of ‘ordinary working families’ and ‘entrepreneurs’.
Don’t mention the benefits freeze
Posted: March 8, 2017 Filed under: Budget, Housing benefit Leave a commentOriginally posted on March 8 on my blog for Inside Housing.
For once this was a Budget that was more significant for what it did not say about housing than for what it did.
In one sense the lack of announcements was nothing new. Chancellor Philip Hammond had already announced that this would be his last Spring Budget and that the main event will be in the Autumn.
The extra money for social care was inevitable if inadequate and it will have an impact on housing organisations.
Housing itself got a single mention in Hammond’s speech in the section on the next generation. ‘Will they be able to get on the housing ladder?’ was the rhetorical question that did not get any answer. (Nope, not unless they’ve got rich parents, since you ask.)
For once (unless I’ve missed something) the background Budget documents revealed little more than an intriguing consultation on a redesign of Rent a Room Relief, the tax relief that homeowners can claim when they let out a room.
The aim is ‘to ensure it is better targeted to support longer-term lettings. This will align the relief more closely with its intended purpose, to increase supply of affordable long-term lodgings’. Presumably the plan is to stop people avoiding tax on AirBnb earnings?
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) Economic and Fiscal Outlook has some background on the profile of housing association spending spending and borrowing, which was less than it expected last year but is being brought forward at the end of the spending review period.
But what really caught my attention were some graphs on the scale of the continuing squeeze on benefits. This reflects the decisions that Hammond did not take to ease the effects of the four-year freeze on most working-age benefits announced by George Osborne in 2015.
The country that works a lot better for some
Posted: March 6, 2017 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Tax 1 CommentOriginally published on March 6 on my blog for Inside Housing.
If you are under 22 and you need help with your housing it all depends on who your parents are.
Three measures from George Osborne Budgets apply from next month: the cut in housing support for 18-21 year olds; the Lifetime ISA; and the cut in inheritance tax on main residences.
This time last week hopes were high that the government would row back on the first of these. A government source told The Observer that ministers and civil servants dealing with the cut in housing support ‘hate the policy’. Despite this the regulations implementing it were laid on Friday, a day when parliament was not sitting.
There is no official explanation of the move on the DWP website but a spokesman repeats previous lines about ensuring that 18-21 year olds ‘do not slip straight into a life on benefits’.
Jules Birch 