Overpaid and overclaimed
Posted: January 14, 2015 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit | Tags: DWP, Public accounts committee 3 CommentsToo expensive to repeal the bedroom tax? Look what’s happened to housing benefit overpayments.
A damning report published on Tuesday by the Commons public accounts committee reveals that overpayments cost £1.4 billion in 2013/14, the first year of the under-occupation penalty. That is an increase of £420 million since 2010/11.
Of that £1.4 billion, the DWP estimates that £900 million was claimant error, £340 million claimant fraud and £150 million official error. Overpayments since 2000/01 now total a staggering £12.6 billion – and there seem to be no figures on how much of the money that is overpaid is ever recovered.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Winners and losers
Posted: January 12, 2015 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Mortgages, Private renting | Tags: Financial Times 2 CommentsSo buy to let landlords made £177 billion from rising house prices over the last five years – and that does not include rental income.
A series of linked stories in the Financial Times this morning make clear who the beneficiaries of booming property market have been since 2009, when interest rates fell to a record low. In addition to buy to letters, they are home owners in London (prices up by £563 billion in the last five years) and in Conservative constituencies outside the capital (prices up eight times faster than in Labour seats). Even social landlords get in on the act, with a 20 per cent increase in the value of their stock since 2009.
Yet all the research by Savills and impressive FT data visualisation beg some far bigger questions about what it calls the politics of British housing. Why has this happened? If those are the winners, who are the losers?
The return of rent control?
Posted: January 6, 2015 Filed under: Economics, Private renting, Rent control | Tags: Civitas, Generation Rent 2 CommentsAn idea that was supposedly buried a generation ago is rising rapidly up the housing policy agenda.
Last year saw modest proposals by Labour for rent regulation within three-year tenancies in the private rented sector. Now there are calls for something that goes much further.
The conjunction of two news items last Friday put the issue into sharp relief. The first was an opinion poll for the private tenants campaign Generation Rent that asked ‘would you support or oppose proposals for the government to introduce a “rent control” system in the UK’. The result was 59 per cent to support, 6.8 per cent to oppose and 34 per cent with no opinion. Levels of support rose to 77 per cent among private renters, 69 per cent of Labour voters and 64.5 per cent of Londoners. However, rent control also had the support of a majority of Conservatives (55 per cent) and homeowners (56 per cent).
Top posts of 2014
Posted: December 31, 2014 Filed under: Blogging Leave a commentSo it turns out that two of the most read posts on my blog in 2014 were written in… er… 2012.
This is the time when anyone with a WordPress blog gets sent their stats for the year. It’s a chance to take stock of what you’re doing and who’s paying attention to it.
If you’re interested, you can see the complete report here. My ten best read posts of 2014 were:
- 10 things you may not know about the Beveridge report
- Property and the political elite
- Revealing the real Rachman?
- Benefits Street, The Spongers and welfare reality
- Appearance and reality in the 2014 housing market
- The bedroom tax: only fair to private tenants?
- What do Power Lists say about who really has power?
- Minding the gap or moving the government?
- Rachman, rogues and renting
- The West London question
10 things about 2014: part 1
Posted: December 23, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Devolution, Housing benefit, Television, Universal credit 1 CommentThe first of a two-part look back at the issues and people that I’ve been blogging about this year.
1) Groundhog Day on the bedroom tax
The year ended as it began, in a welter of parliamentary accusation and counter-accusation that left tenants in England and Wales still having to pay the under-occupation penalty. A Commons debate in December just before the Christmas recess a classic example: Labour called a vote condemning the bedroom tax that didn’t actually change anything; the Lib Dems voted in favour and produced a weasly justification for the decision; and the Conservatives went from claiming it would save £1 million a day in January to £500 million, £1 billion and even £2 billion by the end of the year.
However, there were at least three occasions during the year when it looked as though significant changes would be achieved.
Time loop
Posted: December 18, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax Leave a commentMore than one MP compared Wednesday’s debate on the bedroom tax to Groundhog Day and it was not hard to see why.
Labour calls a debate that will not change anything but is designed to expose the Conservatives as callous and the Liberal Democrats as collaborators. The Conservatives (as personified by pictures of a laughing Iain Duncan Smith) duly live up to their billing. The Lib Dems accuse Labour of playing games but end up seeming to vote for something that they were against before they were in favour of it. We’ve been here many times before.
A Labour motion ‘that this House believes…the bedroom tax should be abolished with immediate effect’ was voted down by 298-266. A coalition amendment approved by 300-262 extols its record on cutting the welfare bill but also ‘notes’ that ‘the part of the coalition led by the deputy prime minister has proposed reforms to introduce other formal exemptions to the policy, including where claimants have not been made a reasonable alternative offer of accommodation’.
The net result of all that politics was that nothing much changed yesterday apart from UKIP’s Douglas Carswell voting against the policy he supported as a Conservative. But the sense of déjà vu hanging over the opposition day debate was about much more than just that. Here are some high (or low) lights:
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Bonus verdict
Posted: December 17, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding, Local government, Planning | Tags: New homes bonus 2 CommentsThe New Homes Bonus, the government’s flagship policy on housing supply, is listing badly. Does it deserve to stay afloat?
Labour has pledged to scrap the policy introduced by Grant Shapps as a ‘powerful new incentive’ for local communities to support new homes. The National Audit Office delivered a damning verdict last year. And a Conservative member of the public accounts committee memorably described it as a Rolls Royce idea that ended up as a Reliant Robin in practice.
Now, the government has finally published an evaluation, which summarises the results of internal DCLG and externally commissioned the research. So what’s the verdict?
Starter for 20
Posted: December 15, 2014 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Housing market, Planning | Tags: Starter homes 1 CommentThe government’s plan for starter homes with a 20 per cent discount begs all sorts of questions. Today we got some of the answers.
The scheme announced by David Cameron this morning was first trailed in his conference speech in October as an idea for after the election but has now apparently been brought forward to start early next year.
Some of the details of Dave’s Dream Homes seem to have changed along the way. According to a DCLG consultation also published today, the starter homes initiative seems to amount to an extension of rural exceptions sites to urban areas. So how will it work?
Jules Birch 