Posted: February 10, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Legal, Local government, Right to buy, Rural housing, Section 106, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on February 10 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Start with a fundamental change to the funding mechanism for the right to buy, stir in more changes to key elements of the Housing and Planning Bill, then add criticism of the lack of detail and you have a recipe that shoud give ministers indigestion.
The report of the all-party Communities and Local Government Committee does support both the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants and the voluntary deal between the government and the NHF is ‘the best way forward’.
But that’s as good as it gets for ministers from a committee that has a Labour chair but a Tory majority. Here is the headline recommendation:
‘The Government proposes to fund the right to buy discounts for housing association tenants with the proceeds from the sale of high value council homes. However we believe that public policy should usually be funded by central Government, rather than through a levy on local authorities.’
This would undermine one of the central elements of the Bill and the government’s method of paying for right to buy discounts and the promised replacement homes. And the MPs are not finished.
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Posted: February 9, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Private renting, Right to buy, Supported housing | Tags: Brandon Lewis, John Healey |
Originally published on January 9 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
This week’s Communities and Local Government questions featured rogue policies, rogue landlords and a rogue house builder.
Rogue policy number one is the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap and its impact on supported housing. As Labour MPs lined up to criticise it, housing minister Brandon Lewis pointed to the review expected in the spring and pledged:
‘The changes will come in in 2018, but we are very clear, and have always been very clear, that we will make sure that the most vulnerable in our society are protected.’
That was not good enough for Labour’s Roberta Blackman-Woods, who quoted estimates by Newcastle-based Changing Lives about the losses it and other providers will suffer and argued that the discretionary fund will be inadequate. Lewis responded by pointing to the £400m of funding for new specialist affordable homes in the Spending Review (not much use if housing benefit won’t cover the rent) and the £5.3bn Better Care Fund (which is about health and social care, not housing).
But it was not good enough for Tory MP Peter Aldous either, who called for urgent clarity on whether the cap applies to homeless hostels and foyers. ‘If it does not, there is a real worry that many will close and that, as a result, there will be an unnecessary rise in the numbers of young homeless people.’
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Posted: February 8, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Budget, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: IFS |
Originally posted on February 8 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
If you feel like you’ve been banging your head against a brick wall making the case for greater investment in rented homes, take heart. Someone is listening.
The Green Budget from the Institute for Fiscal Studies appears every year a month before the real thing and gives an impeccably independent and influential assessment of the chancellor’s options.
The 2016 version was published on Monday and it includes two chapters written for the IFS by the Institute for Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Yes, I know the mention of chartered accountants may have you asking yourself why you started reading this blog, but please try to contain your excitement – because there is an important point to this.
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Posted: February 4, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Land, London, Tax |
Originally posted on February 4 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
The person who sprang instantly to mind when I saw the promotional material for London Help to Buy on Twitter this week was Lizzie Magie (of whom more later).
The scheme offering 40% equity loans to buyers of new build property in London costing up to £600,000 was first announced in the Spending Review and formally launched this week. Here (thanks to Joe Sarling for drawing my attention to it) is the advert designed for digital media:
The Angel, Islington, costs a little bit more than £100 these days and with studio apartments in one new development starting at £715,000 you can forget about building a house for £50 or renting one for £6. But you get the general idea: it seems that you can now get on the property ladder as easily as you can ‘Advance to Mayfair’ or ‘Go Back to Old Kent Road’.
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Posted: February 1, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Homelessness, Housing benefit, Pay to stay, Social housing, Starter homes, Supported housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally published on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
There was a depressingly common theme at a conference in London on the future of housing organised by Shelter this week.
Speaker after speaker felt the need to apologise for what would be a litany of gloom and doom and attempted to find something, anything, to lighten the mood.
Toby Lloyd of Shelter started with the good news on the Housing and Planning Bill. There is some, believe it or not, in the small steps towards tackling bad private landlords. But even then there’s a worry that measures to help genuine landlords tackle abandonment could turn into a fast track for evictions for more unscrupulous ones.
Then it was time for the real gloom. From Starter Homes to Pay to Stay and fixed-term tenancies to forced council house sales, the bill looks set to accelerate the slow death of social housing. As Toby put it, up to now all forms of affordable housing provision have had two things in common: they remained affordable in perpetuity; and the subsidy was recycled into more housing. Housing Bill-style ‘affordable’ (Starter Homes and whatever Greg Clark says) does neither. What hope there is now rests on what improvements (if any) can be won in the House of Lords.
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Posted: January 27, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Local government, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Rural housing, Social housing, Starter homes | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on January 27 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Part 1 of this blog covered the opening skirmishes in the Lords on the Housing Bill. This second part covers all-party criticism of the detail of the Bill where the sums don’t add up or don’t exist yet. What are the prospects for changes?
Starter homes. Peers criticised both their affordability and the fact that the discount disappears into the back pocket of the first buyer. As Labour’s Baroness Andrews put it:
‘We know from all the evidence that starter homes are not even affordable for most low and middle-income families, whether in rural areas or central London. However, it is not even a fair policy for future buyers. The 20% discount will apply only to the first tranche of buyers; they will be free to sell their assets after five years at market value. We will be minting a new generation of property speculators.’
Tory peer Viscount Eccles said the scheme had ‘not been thoroughly thought through’ and called for much more detail.
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Posted: January 27, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally published on January 27 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
The House of Lords gave a second reading to the Housing and Planning Bill on Tuesday. What struck me reading through the debate was not just the scale and breadth of the opposition to key parts of the Bill, not just the 34 new powers for the secretary of state to override local decisions, but the sheer number of provisions that either do not stack up or are not yet spelled out.
This two-part blog looks first at the debate on the overall principles of the Bill and then at the more detailed criticism and the prospects for amendments to its individual elements.
The fundamental flaws at the heart of the legislation were best summed up by two crossbench peers who will be familiar names to everyone.
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Posted: January 13, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Local government, London, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Social housing, Tenants | Tags: Brandon Lewis, Greg Clark, Housing and Planning Bill, John Healey |
Originally posted on January 13 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
If it is an achievement to pilot a Bill through the House of Commons and end up with legislation that is worse than what you started with, then congratulations Brandon Lewis and Greg Clark.
Back in October I blogged that the Housing and Planning Bill is written on the back of a fag packet. On Tuesday it completed its report stage and got a third reading with additions and amendments scribbled all over the front as well. It was hard to disagree with the verdict of shadow housing minister John Healey in his closing speech: ‘Usually, we hope to improve a Bill as it goes through the House. This was a bad Bill; it is now a very bad Bill.’
Healey cited late amendments to change the definition of ‘affordable’ to include starter homes costing up to £450,000 (‘the Government are not building enough affordable homes, so they are simply branding more homes as affordable’) and to force councils to offer fixed-term tenancies (‘meaning the end of long-term rented housing, the end of a stable home for many children as they go through school, and the end of security for pensioners who move into bungalows or sheltered flats later in life’).
It was hard to disagree either with his view that ‘the Bill sounds the death knell for social housing’. That much will be obvious to anyone working in housing or who has followed the progress of the Bill. The tab for the Conservative manifesto pledges of extending the right to buy and building 200,000 starter homes is effectively being picked up by councils that still own their homes, tenants and people who will not get the chance of a social tenancy in future.
The Bill accelerates the slow death of social housing through a combination of deliberate culling (forced sales, Pay to Stay and fixed term tenancies for council housing), euthanasia (voluntary right to buy for housing associations plus conversions) and redefining the conditions for life (‘affordable’ will now not just mean starter homes but anything the secretary of state says). It is also now official that a private rented home does not have to be fit for human habitation.
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Posted: January 11, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Local government, Regeneration, Social housing | Tags: David Cameron, Savills |
Originally published on January 11 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
It will take huge amounts of commitment, trust and money to deliver David Cameron’s vision of estate regeneration.
There is commitment but sadly only to the most simplistic of world views: lots of poor people live on council estates; therefore council estates must cause poverty. Never mind that much better funded area-based initiatives under Tony Blair largely failed. Never mind that poverty and even worse deprivation were concentrated in many of the same areas before the estates were built (just check the Booth poverty maps of London). The ‘so-called sink estates’ will be radically transformed or knocked down.
Trust is in such short supply after a series of controversial regenerations of estates in London (and we are mainly talking about London) that promises need to come from the very top to restore good faith. That applies both to the prime minister and to the Conservative candidate for London mayor Zac Goldsmith.
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Posted: January 6, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Planning, Private renting, Section 106, Starter homes | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on January 6 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
MPs staggered bleary eyed from the House of Commons at 2am last night without even getting to the most contentious parts of the Housing and Planning Bill.
Despite a series of obituaries for council housing and a ‘Kill the Bill’ protest outside, issues such as forced high-value sales, Pay to Stay and the voluntary Right to Buy will only be considered on day two of the report stage debate (set for next Tuesday, January 12).
Last night’s five-hour debate included starter homes, the regulation of housing associations, rogue landlords and the planning system. Opposition MPs complained that 65 pages of new clauses and amendments had been added at the last minute to a Bill that was only 145 pages long.
I blogged back in October that this a Bill written on the back of a fag packet and last night only confirmed that impression. The Bill also leaves a series of crucial decisions to be made by ministers by regulation later.
Nothing sums this up more than new clause 31 on planning obligations and affordable housing. This adds starter homes selling for up to £450,000 to the existing definition of affordable housing: homes for people whose needs are not adequately served by the market. However, it also adds that:
‘The Secretary of State may by regulations amend this section so as to modify the definition of “affordable housing”.’
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Jules Birch 