Posted: February 19, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, New towns |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
After a relentless week of grim international news, it’s good to have something to celebrate on the domestic and housing front.
Until the spending review in the Spring, any assessment of the government’s overall approach to housing will have to be provisional but this week brought some hopeful signs.
First up was the announcement of an extra £300 million for the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP), plus for more temporary housing, then confirmation that this is in addition to the £500 million announced in the Budget in October.
At the time that seemed a little underwhelming given advance speculation that an extra £1 billion might be available but it now seems that some of that was held back.
True, the additional 7,800 affordable homes promised will only make up for a small part of the 50,000 to 70,000-home shortfall against what the 2021-26 AHP was originally expected to deliver, but that still represents a significant short-term boost for this year and lays down a marker for the future in the spending review.
It also recalls the last couple of years of the last Labour government, when regular announcements of extra investment added up to something more significant over time.
Next up, and more for the long term, is the announcement that more than 100 sites across England have been put forward as candidates for the next generation of new towns.
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Posted: January 24, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Think of all the elements of the grim inheritance bequeathed to this government by the last one and perhaps the grimmest is the almost 160,000 children living, and sometimes dying, in temporary accommodation.
Homelessness minister Rushanara Ali called it ‘an absolute scandal’ in the Commons on Monday and ‘devastating’ at a Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee hearing on Tuesday.
One committee member spoke of meeting a constituent before Christmas who had been in ‘temporary’ accommodation for 14 years, so the entire period of Conservative-led government between 2010 and 2024.
This morning a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) calls it ‘unacceptable’ and ‘alarming’ that almost 6,000 homeless families with children are in bed and breakfast, the worst form of temporary accommodation that is no longer the last resort the guidance says it should be.
Of those, almost 4,000 have been in B&B beyond the increasingly theoretical six-week legal limit, a figure that is 23 times higher than in 2010.
It is a scandal that comes at a huge cost for local authorities: £3.1 billion a year for homelessness services, including £2.1 billion for temporary accommodation at the latest count.
All this should be enough on its own to condemn the Tory inheritance but it is just part of a broader failure highlighted by the PAC.
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Posted: January 9, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Housebuilding, Social housing, Temporary accommodation |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
What’s in a target? Angela Rayner faced questions at the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee this week and gave some illuminating answers to kick off 2025.
First up was the target that is a key milestone in the government’s mission on economic growth: the manifesto promise of 1.5 million additional homes over this parliament.
The deputy prime minister faced a series of questions about whether the target is achievable and what will have to happen in later years to make up the shortfall when fewer than 300,000 a year are built in the early years.
She ran through the measures the government is taking and summed it up in an unfortunate metaphor: ‘So there are a number of levers that we’re pulling at the moment which will hopefully start to turn the tide, but it’s a bit like the Titanic, it’s not like one of the Hackney cabs that can turn really quickly. It will take more time in the early stages before we start to see the shoots.’
It’s clear what she meant but it wasn’t a good start to conjure up images of icebergs ahead. Much better was her admission that: ‘Even If I achieve and this government achieves the 1.5 million homes target, it is a dent. It is a dent in what we need to achieve as a whole country, to deliver the houses we desperately need.’
It was also good that she acknowledged concerns about development by housing associations and Section 106 while promoting initiatives to accelerate new homes and remove blockages on stalled sites. So too her emphasis on the importance of land value capture, the grey belt and the balance that has to be struck with viability.
But 300,000 new homes a year has not been achieved since the heyday of council housing so I was intrigued to see what she would say about social housing in the present day.
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Posted: December 19, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Ireland, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
What would our politics look like if housing really were the most important issue in a general election?
After a week that’s seen the Labour government set out a series of bold planning reforms in pursuit of its ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes in England in this parliament, it’s a question that may seem to be moot or unrealistic depending on your point of view.
But it does not have to be either: take even a cursory glance at what’s happening in a country close to home and you will find an election where housing really was the number one issue at the polls.
The election in Ireland may not seem to have changed very much – the government will still be led by Fine Gael (FG) and Fianna Fáil (FF) as coalition negotiations continue – but housing could be set for a transformation.
On issues ranging from social housing investment to security of tenure for private renters, those parties of the centre right are well to the left of anything that Labour is proposing in England (or Wales).
On housebuilding numbers alone the contrast is staggering. That target for England works out at 300,000 a year and is widely seen as highly ambitious not to mention unachievable.
In Ireland, FF and FG plus the Progressive Democrats and Labour, the two centre-left parties that could form part of a coalition, are all promising 50,000 to 60,000 new homes a year. Adjust for England’s population (57.1 million) compared to Ireland’s 5.3 million and you get a range of 540,000 to 650,000 per year. That’s a level that really could make a difference to affordability rather than just slowing down the rate of house price growth.
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Posted: December 6, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Housing looked like an afterthought when Labour first set out what would be its missions and first steps in government.
Five months on from the election, though it is still a means to the end of the second mission of ‘kickstarting economic growth’, the manifesto target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament has moved centre stage as one of five milestones against which the progress of that government wants to be measured.
But Thursday’s big launch of the Plan for Change still begs some very big questions when it comes to housing.
For starters, it’s a funny kind of milestone that will only be visible after the end of the journey: we won’t know for certain whether 1.5 million homes have been delivered in this parliament until well after the next election.
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Posted: November 28, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bed and breakfast, Homelessness, Temporary accommodation |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Another quarter, another new record in the number of homeless people and children living in temporary accommodation.
Take any measure you like and the homelessness statistics published today are beyond grim.
There are now 123,100 households in temporary accommodation including 78,420 families with 159,380 children.
All of these numbers are moving in the wrong direction, up around 5 per cent in the last three months and 15 per cent on a year ago – and all of them are the highest ever recorded in statistics that go back 20 years or more.
Within those numbers, there are 5,910 homeless families with children living in bed and breakfasts and – most shameful of all – 3,770 of them have been there beyond the six-week legal limit.
When local authorities are starting to shrug their shoulders as they break the law, pointing out plausibly that they have no other option, it must be a time for this government to act.
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Posted: November 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Social housing, Temporary accommodation, Tenants |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
Few readers of Inside Housing will find the new podcast series The Trapped a comfortable listen but it is a necessary one.
You’d hope that politicians will find it an essential listen: surely few could hear its harrowing accounts of the conditions facing tenants in social housing, private renting and temporary accommodation and turn a deaf ear.
Trapped is based on the reporting of Daniel Hewitt of ITV News that began in 2021 with a story about tenants living in appalling and dangerous conditions in a tower block owned by Croydon Council.
That led to a flood of messages from tenants across the country complaining about disrepair and squalor and being ignored by their social landlord.
Among them were Kwajo Tweneboa, the ‘teenager with a Twitter account’ who held Clarion to account for appalling conditions on the Earlsfield estate in south London and became a national campaigner.
Most of the individual stories will be familiar from his TV news reports but they feel all the more powerful for being grouped together in the eight-part podcast.
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Posted: November 5, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Fire safety, Social housing | Tags: National Audit Office |
A forensic examination of the government’s building safety programme lays bare the scale of the task facing ministers when they set out further steps on remediation of unsafe homes shortly.
Open the report published by the National Audit Office (NAO) today virtually anywhere and a number will leap out at you:
- It could take until 2037 – a full 20 years after Grenfell and two years longer than implied by current government modelling– for all homes with dangerous cladding over 11m to be fixed.
- Some 4,771 residential mid- and high-rise buildings (with 258,000 homes) are in a remediation programme but work has only been completed on a third of them and is yet to start on half.
- Those 4,771 buildings represent less than half of the number of buildings (9,000 to 12,000) that the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) estimates will need remediating. The others have not been identified – and there is a risk that some may never be.
- £16.6 billion is MHCLG’s best estimate of the total cost (within a range of £12.6 billion to £22.4 billion).
Putting those numbers together gives some idea of the scale of a crisis in buildings over 11m that has consistently grown faster than the government’s attempts to resolve it.
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Posted: October 31, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Budget, Fire safety, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents, Right to buy, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A final verdict will have to wait for the spending review in the Spring but how should we assess the first Labour Budget for 14 years?
The answer of course depends on what you take as your starting point. Compared with the disastrous first Conservative Budget in 2010 or even the first Labour one in 1997, this one takes some definite steps in the right direction.
But does this Budget live up to Labour rhetoric about greater investment and long-term solutions. To what extent will it really ‘fix the foundations’ and deliver ‘the biggest boost to affordable and social housing for a generation’?
Here are 10 key areas that I was looking out for:
1) New social homes: The £500 million top-up to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) briefed in advanceis welcome news but it must only be a down-payment on a far bigger increase for the next AHP after 2026.
It is at the lower end of expectations of up to £1 billion extra and it will not be enough to make up for a shortfall in delivery caused by construction cost inflation and other pressures on social landlords. The current AHP is on course to deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 affordable homes over five years rather than the 180,000 originally expected while need is estimated at 90,000 social homes a year.
All of which puts the 5,000 the government says will be generated by the top-up into perspective.
Details of ‘future grant investment’ in the next AHP will be set out in the spending review and will support a mix of tenures ‘with a focus on delivering homes for social rent’.
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Posted: October 21, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing |
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing
With the days counting down to the Budget and all eyes on the tax increases to come, you’d have to be quite an optimist to expect an immediate boost for housing.
There may be scope for redistribution of some existing budgets but the first fiscal event of the new government is taking place against a gloomy short-term backdrop, with cabinet ministers for unprotected departments reportedly protesting about the cuts they are being expected to take.
The real question for October 30 – and for the Spring spending review to come – is a more long-term one: a shift in thinking about the value of housing investment.
There have already been some hopeful signs on this, with chancellor Rachel Reeves said to be considering a shift in the measure of debt to take account of the value of the assets created by investment as well as the costs. This could create room for billions in extra public investment, but housing would have to join the queue alongside health, education, transport, prisons and all the other government priorities.
If you’re looking for reasons to invest in housing specifically, there is plenty of timely evidence in the new UK Housing Review Autumn briefing paper published this week.
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Jules Birch 