Posted: November 13, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Housing benefit, Right to buy, Shared ownership, Social housing | Tags: George Osborne, Greg Clark, Iain Duncan Smith, ONS |
Originally posted on November 13 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Inside Housing: ‘Clark promises deregulation package’. FT: ‘Osborne eyes social housing stake sale.’ Daily Mail: ‘Duncan Smith’s great council house giveaway.’
Three rival visions for housing in England from three rival politicians who all think they know best.
Let’s assume some of this is the result of private disputes about budgets (especially between Osborne and IDS) playing out in public. The run-up to any spending review features media briefings designed to promote pet projects or scupper those of others. But this is still different: it’s not pet projects at stake here but potentially the entire future of housing. And the rival visions directly contradict each other.
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Posted: November 11, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Pay to stay, Section 106, Starter homes | Tags: affordability, Brandon Lewis, Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on November 11 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
So now it is official. Brandon Lewis has confirmed that ‘affordable’ means 80% of the market rate.
His statement at a Communities and Local Government Committee hearing on the Housing Bill confirms a direction of travel that has been clear ever since the creation of ‘affordable’ rent. Starter homes at a 20% discount to the full price now represent ‘affordable’ home ownership. Needless to say, neither is exactly affordable by any conventional definition of the word.
The minister’s statement came in this exchange with Labour MP Jo Cox:
Cox: Do you think there should be a statutory definition of affordability for both rent and purchase?’
Lewis: At the moment it’s 80% of the market value, whether to rent or purchase.
Cox: But there isn’t a statutory definition.
Lewis: Well, the definition of affordability… an affordable rent is 80% of market value and affordable purchase with starter homes it would effectively be 80% of market value.
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Posted: November 4, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Right to buy | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on November 4 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Here are eight key themes that emerged in evidence from housing association executives to the parliamentary inquiry into the extension of the right to buy.
I wasn’t planning to but I got sucked in to watching the Communities and Local Government committee hearing on housing associations and the right to buy on Wednesday. Across two sessions with witnesses from eight different associations, here’s what I learned:
1) This is not just about the right to buy
The inquiry is meant to be focussed on the right to buy but questions ranged far and wide as MPs asked about the 1% rent cut, Pay to Stay, starter homes, shared ownership, redundancies, reclassification, mergers, you name it. As an indication of the pace of change, they were even questioned about a policy that has not even been announced yet but everyone assumes will be soon (the end of lifetime tenancies).
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Posted: November 3, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, London, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Section 106, Starter homes | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill, ONS |
Originally posted on November 3 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
As MPs debated the Housing and Planning Bill on Monday it was hard to escape the impression that the real action was elsewhere.
From the extension of the right to buy to the forced sale of council houses to starter homes, key discussions had either already happened or were still taking place outside the Commons chamber. Yes, talks behind the scenes are an inevitable part of any Bill, but far more so with this one than any other that I can remember. Yes, the Deal removes what would have been a key element in the legislation from parliamentary scrutiny but this is about more than just that.
That’s partly because this is a back of a fag packet Bill that sets out some general principles with the detail to be filled in later. We still know little more about how the sums will add up for paying housing association discounts from forced council sales than during the election campaign. And, as Alex Marsh points out in relation to Pay to Stay, there are whole chunks of the Bill that give the secretary of state the power to do pretty much whatever they like.
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Posted: November 2, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Home ownership, Social housing, Wales | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill, John Redwood |
Originally posted on November 2 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
How English housing policy arrived from Vulcan via Wales.
I’ve recently been putting together the 100th issue of Welsh Housing Quarterly. The 25-year history of the magazine is closely bound up with the story of Welsh devolution, a distant prospect when it was first published in 1990 but a developing process that led eventually to the first-ever Welsh Housing Act last year. But there was one period early on that has a very contemporary relevance for England as it prepares for the second reading debate on the Housing Bill on Monday and the spending review later this month.
In May 1993 Wales got a new secretary of state who seemed to come from a distant planet. The Conservative MP John Redwood was an intellectual Thatcherite with an appearance that prompted sketch writer Matthew Parris to come up with a comparison that has stuck ever since: ‘a new creature, half human, half Vulcan, brother of the brilliant, cold-blooded Spock’.
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Posted: October 30, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations | Tags: George Osborne, NHF, ONS, public sector debt |
Originally posted on October 30 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Few blockbuster franchises stop at just two films and the reclassification of housing associations in England as public sector will be no different.
The implications from Friday’s decision by the Office for National Statistics (dubbed Judgment Day II: the Reckoning by Pete Apps in his blog yesterday) are multiplying by the hour and are far too numerous for one blog. But here are some quick thoughts on the decision itself – and on possible sequels to come.
So what does it mean? First, and most seriously for George Osborne, it will add £60 billion of previously private sector housing association debt to the public sector balance sheet. The ONS decision says that this is likely to happen just in time for Budget 2016. Whoops! No wonder the chancellor sounded so relaxed/resigned about the prospect when questioned in a House of Lords committee last month (see my blog here).
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Posted: October 29, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Pay to stay, Social housing | Tags: National Living Wage |
Originally posted on October 29 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
The impact assessment of the Housing Bill reveals two devils buried in the detail of proposals for a compulsory Pay to Stay.
First, the principles. The assessment says ‘the Government believes that those on higher incomes should not be subsidised through social rents’. There are 350,000 social rented tenants with household incomes over £30,000 a year including 40,000 with incomes over £50,000. Higher rents for these High Income Social Tenants (HISTs) are justified by the fact that they ‘benefit from a subsidised rent that could be as much as £3,500 less, on average, compared to equivalent rents in the private sector’.
Needless to say, neither of these figures is sourced. The government has form when it comes to changing its estimates of high earners (not to mention statistics in general) but:
‘This intervention is designed to remove an unfair subsidy. Households with a sufficiently high income do not require this, as they are able to access market housing.’
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Posted: October 27, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Local government, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Social housing, Starter homes | Tags: Brandon Lewis, Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on October 20 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
A few answers and yet more questions: my round-up of the latest developments on the Housing Bill.
An ex-colleague used to speak in awed tones about the time he saw an old-school football reporter compose his match report for the Football Pink as the final whistle sounded. He took a cigarette packet out of this pocket, drew lines on it in the shape of paragraphs, and then dictated a word-perfect report down the line to the copy takers.
Much has changed since the olden days: smoking in public places; laptops and the internet have replaced phones and copy takers; and Pink ‘Uns died out long ago in most cities. But looking back at the events of the past week it seems that cigarette packets remain as popular as ever for drawing up plans – and for things infinitely more complicated than football matches.
This was exactly the metaphor used by an anonymous source in Jill Sherman’s story in The Times last week that the government is set to phase in the extension of the right to buy because of concern over the costs. ‘The Treasury people are hanging their heads in despair,’ the source said. ‘How did this policy that was made up on the back of a fag packet get adopted during the election campaign?’
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Posted: October 14, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Poverty, Right to buy, Section 106, Social housing, Starter homes | Tags: Conservatives, David Cameron, Generation Rent |
Originally posted on October 7 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Forget social housing, any kind of affordable rented housing is living on borrowed time in the wake of this year’s Conservative conference.
In his speech on Wednesday David Cameron announced ‘a national crusade to get homes built’ and go from ‘Generation Rent into Generation Buy’.
The headline policy of starter homes does not look any better than it did the first two times he announced it (in December 2014 and again when he doubled the target in March). The original policy had potential because it offered the prospect of additional homes on sites that would not have got planning permission before. Though there were potential problems, what would amount to urban exception sites looked like a good idea, especially if the uplift in land values could be captured to pay for infrastructure.
But the idea has looked worse and worse the more it has evolved. Research by Shelter has shown that even at a 20 per cent discount the homes will not be affordable in most of the country. Despite an advisory committee on design, there’s not much to stop housebuilders cutting costs by making them starter hutches rather than homes and no mechanism has been suggested so far to check that the discount really is a discount. And even if there is a deal to be had for Generation Rent some of the benefits will go to people who could have afforded to buy at the undiscounted price.
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Posted: October 6, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing associations, Local government, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Conservatives, Greg Clark, National Housing Federation |
Originally posted on October 13 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
If the result of the NHF ballot was a foregone conclusion, just about everything else about the extension of the right to buy remains unclear.
With a majority of 93% by stock and 86% by membership, the NHF has a result it can present to the government as a resounding endorsement of its voluntary deal. True, it’s only 55% of those eligible to vote (or, as Joe Halewood argues, 20% of all registered providers) but that presentation is what really counts. Given the dubious nature and timing of the vote, this was always going to be the result (see my related post Deal or No Deal?).
But anyone looking for a response from Greg Clark at the Conservative conference on Monday will have come away disappointed. The communities secretary extolled the virtues of the right to buy, argued housing association tenants have the same ambitions to own as everyone else and delivered the line Tories wanted to hear: ‘We are doing what we promised, we are extending the right to buy to housing association tenants.’ But there was no explicit reference to the deal rushed through in time for the conference.
The omission may just be a demonstration of the political sensitivity involved. Early reports said Clark had watered down the manifesto pledge (something he denied, though the voluntary arrangement may result in the right to a discount rather than a right to buy for some tenants). However, it’s also a reflection of how much has still to be resolved.
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Jules Birch 