Last laugh
Posted: September 17, 2015 Filed under: Local government, Right to buy | Tags: Shelter Leave a commentOriginally posted on September 17 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
As official figures further undermine the government’s credibility on the right to buy there are new doubts about the feasibility of the plan to extend it.
If ministers are to meet their pledge of one for one replacement of all homes sold, starts on site should now be rising sharply as receipts from earlier sales feed through the system. Any guesses what’s happening instead?
That’s right, the latest quarterly stats from the DCLG show that just 307 replacements were started between April and June – down 17 per cent on a year ago. The significance of this is not just the year-on-year fall itself, the first since the government ‘reinvigorated’ the right to buy with increased discounts and the replacement pledge in April 2012. Nor even that starts are down 56 per cent on the previous quarter (the end of the financial year). It’s also that this quarter marks three years since the start of the new scheme: the small print of the pledge says that replacements will be built within three years for all additional homes sold on top of those already forecast.
That in turn raises severe doubts about the government’s claim that it can fund the extension of the right to buy through the forced sale of high-value council homes. It claims this will raise enough to pay for the discounts, pay off the historic debt, replace all homes sold one for one and set up a brownfield fund. The detail has not yet been published but the plan has led to alarm even among Conservatives about the impact in London.
Boom at the top
Posted: September 14, 2015 Filed under: Housing associations, Labour market Leave a commentOriginally posted on September 14 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
On current trends the first £1m a year housing association chief executive will appear by 2025.
It could happen even sooner than that. I’ve based that on the trend in the five years since 2010, which include two years during the recession when many bosses’ pay was frozen. And who knows what will happen if (when?) the first ‘free’ housing associations are launched?
I say this not to single out the highest-paid individual or the organisation involved. Nor do I deny that housing associations are complex organisations (and becoming more complex) that require skilled leaders and need to pay well to attract the right people. Places for People is far more than a housing association and currently styles itself ‘one of the largest property and leisure management, development and regeneration companies in the UK’ (to quote its website). It says that £330,00 of the £481,000 total pay package revealed in Inside Housing’s survey was attributable to social housing and £151,000 to ‘non-social housing’ businesses.
But that £330,000, and the current average of £183,000 for chief executives of the top 100 housing associations, are still huge sums and they are escalating year by year. The latter is double what chief executives got paid in the earliest Inside Housing survey that I can find (2001/02). Median pay for full-time employees has increased by around 35% since then and has been falling for most of the period since 2008.
Scotland goes its own way on private renting
Posted: September 2, 2015 Filed under: Legal, Private renting, Rent control, Scotland, Wales 1 CommentOriginally posted on September 2 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Rent control and increased security of tenure are back on the government agenda for the private rented sector for the first time in 30 years.
I am of course talking about the Scottish Government, which yesterday confirmed plans for a Private Tenancies Bill as part of its Programme for Scotland 2015/16. The Bill will ‘provide more predictable rents and protection for tenants against excessive rent increases, including the ability to introduce local rent controls for rent pressure areas’.
And it will introduce a Scottish Private Rented Tenancy to replace the current assured system and remove the ‘no-fault’ ground for repossession. That means the landlord will no longer be able to ask a tenant to leave just because the fixed term has ended but there will be ‘comprehensive and robust grounds for repossession that will allow landlords to regain possession in specified circumstances’.
The 101st day
Posted: August 16, 2015 Filed under: Budget, Labour market, Tax credits | Tags: Conservatives, David Cameron 4 CommentsThe Conservatives must be pinching themselves after 100 days in government. What can possibly go wrong?
For three months they’ve been able to do pretty much as they like. The Liberal Democrats are humiliated, Labour is demoralised and distracted and the opposition that has come from the SNP is a comforting reminder of the Scottish card that won the election. Thanks to all of that, plus expectations formed by inaccurate opinion polls, a government with a tiny majority elected with just over a third of the vote can behave as though it’s won a victory on a par with 1945, 1979 and 1997.
Yet the Tory luck cannot hold for ever. The obvious cloud on the horizon is Europe, with no sign that Brussels will hand David Cameron concessions meaningful enough to sell to his sceptical party ahead of the election. Economically, it’s far easier to start with a recession turn it into a recovery than it is to manage expectations in improving times.
But could the Conservatives turn out to be most immediately vulnerable where they seem strongest: on the ground they’ve staked out since the election to be ‘the real party of working people’? As Cameron put it in an article for the Telegraph on Saturday:
‘On the challenge of delivering an economy that supports working people, it is Conservatives who believe that a free enterprise economy is an ally not an enemy in generating wealth and extending opportunity. By cutting taxes, reforming welfare and increasing minimum wages we are showing we are the real party of working people.’
The sharp end
Posted: August 11, 2015 Filed under: Homelessness, Legal, Wales | Tags: Crisis, JRF Leave a commentOriginally posted on August 11 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Wales is setting an example on homelessness prevention but can it escape the UK-driven logic of austerity in housing?
The question is prompted by today’s Homelessness Monitor Wales 2015, the latest in a comprehensive series of assessments from Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on progress (or otherwise) in the UK nations. This one arrives just at the point where Wales is using its relatively new legislative powers to take a different path to England on housing policy.
Jules Birch 