Making the case

Posted: May 14, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Housing benefit, Social housing, Television | 1 Comment

Why do we need social housing? The answer may seem obvious on this website but too often elsewhere the one you’ll get is ‘we don’t’.

It’s a theme I’ve blogged about repeatedly over the last few years as social housing has been eroded from within and overtaken from without by the relentless rise of private renting. As coalition ministers never cease to remind us, the sector shrank by 420,000 in England under the last Labour government, but their own policies are merely accelerating the decline while they blur the distinction between affordable and social.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Discretion and discrimination

Posted: May 9, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Local government, Welfare state | 3 Comments

Shocking new figures published by Inside Housing reveal yet again the holes in the safety net provided by discretionary housing payments (DHPs).

On one level it beggars belief that in the last financial year councils turned down 70,000 requests for help from tenants facing cuts in their housing benefit and returned £9 million of DHP funding to central government.

On another, it’s no surprise that a system devolved to local authorities facing their own budget cuts has experienced problems or that one based on local discretion has varied so much between different areas.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Control speak

Posted: May 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Private renting | Tags: , | 1 Comment

Labour’s bold move on private renting seems to be working as politics. Will it work as policy?

I’ve never been to Venezuela or Vietnam but, with due deference to Grant Shapps’s expertise on their housing systems, I do have a few observations to offer.

The Conservative chairman compared Ed Miliband to Hugo Chavez in a ludicrously overblown reaction to the Labour leader’s speech yesterday. Free market think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and right-wing commentators like Fraser Nelson and Harry Phibbs joined him in condemning Labour’s supposed plans to introduce rent controls.

A quick glance at what Labour is actually proposing reveals that it owes far more to Ireland and Germany than Venezuela and Vietnam:

  • A ban on the outrageous fees letting agents charge to tenants, which Labour says will save them an average of £350.
  • A default three-year tenancy, from which tenants can give one month’s notice after the first six months
  • The rent to be freely negotiated at the start of the tenancy with annual increases after that based on a benchmark such as average market rents.

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Decision time

Posted: May 1, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding | Leave a comment

It’s May 8, 2015. A new government takes office promising that housing will be a priority. But can we be sure they will deliver?

They may have different means in mind but all of the major parties are apparently committed to the same end: Yes to Homes. Whoever wins in a year’s time faces an uphill struggle to boost output from the current miserable levels.

A report published today by Shelter and KPMG sets out a road map for how the new government can get from there to the promised land of 250,000 new homes a year by 2021. It begins with two significant and symbolic acts by the new prime minister on day one – the appointment of the housing minister to the Cabinet and a declaration that building more homes is a ‘national priority’ – and it continues with a programme for the first 50 and 100 days and each year of the new government. The full report is here and a shorter web version here.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Adjust your set

Posted: April 30, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, London, Television, Welfare reform | Tags: | Leave a comment

In case you missed it, How to Get a Council House is back – and so is the controversy about TV stereotypes and the hashtag on twitter.

The second series of the Channel 4 show focuses on the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and people affected by the benefit cap (two weeks ago), applying as homeless (last week) and in temporary accommodation (this week).

As with the first series, it’s provoked some strong reactions and it almost feels like we are in two different countries when I look on twitter.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

New regime

Posted: April 28, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Mortgages, Regulation | Tags: | Leave a comment

Will the new mortgage rules tilt the playing field even further in favour or the housing haves and against the have-nots?

On the face of it’s hard to argue with the idea that lenders should check whether borrowers can actually afford their mortgage before they make the loan. But is it quite that simple?

After a long consultation, the new Mortgage Market Review (MMR) regime finally came into force on Saturday. The aim is to prevent a repeat of the irresponsible surge in lending seen before 2007. The lax rules then were symbolised by the self-certified mortgage, or liar loan, which is now banned.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Full value

Posted: April 22, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: | Leave a comment

With 13 months left until the general election, how can housing demonstrate its economic, social and political value?

Ruth Davison of the National Housing Federation was in no doubt speaking to the annual conference of the Housing Studies Association in York last week. ‘It’s time to stop researching and start broadcasting,’ she told the assembled academics.

I’m not sure anyone in the audience was ready to go quite that far but her underlying point was well made. The evidence about the beneficial impact that housing can have across a vast range of fields is out there and the political parties seem at least for the moment prepared to listen. So why not shout about it?

The evidence and the politics both emerged in a debate I chaired at the conference on ‘who is best placed to judge the value of housing – the state or the consumer’. It produced some expected and some very unexpected results.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Complete picture

Posted: April 15, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Housing market, Ireland, Social housing | Leave a comment

As ever the new UK Housing Review offers a mix of authoritative statistics and some fascinating new insights on housing across all tenures.

Published this week, the 2014 edition of the bible for housing types edited by Steve Wilcox and John Perry mixes a compendium of statistics plus several chapters of expert commentary. It’s also one of the few publications to compare housing in the different nations of the UK. All that’s missing is an index.

Reports elsewhere have highlighted the bias in the mortgage market towards landlords and the threat to the affordable homes programme after 2015 but I’ve picked out three more themes to illustrate the breadth of what’s on offer in the review.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Help or hindrance?

Posted: April 13, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market | Leave a comment

So a year in to Help to Buy, who has it helped and what has the impact been so far?

Those are the questions I set out to answer in my feature in this week’s Inside Housing. It concludes that the limited number of Help to Buy transactions seen so far cannot have been enough on their own to account for what’s happened in the market in its first year. What’s been far more significant is the impact on the behaviour of buyers, sellers and housebuilders of a signal from the government that it will do everything it can to generate a housing market recovery. That, combined with a range of other government policies (and non-policies) and the favourable environment of record low interest rates, has duly produced one.

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Frank words on welfare reform

Posted: April 9, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Poverty, Social housing, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: , | 5 Comments

Getting the same criticism from different people is usually a sign you’ve got something wrong. How about for IDS and the DWP?

Three different reports published this morning amplify earlier warnings about the implementation of the bedroom tax, the wider impact of welfare reform on tenants and landlords and the prospects for universal credit. But it would surprise nobody if the work and pensions secretary saw them as yet more evidence that his reforms are a success.

Two of them come from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). Steve Wilcox finds that what he neutrally calls the ‘housing benefit size criteria’ has affected fewer people than expected but that half of those are in arrears and 100,000 who want to downsize are trapped and unable to move. Anne Power concludes that welfare reforms may end up making tenants more, rather than less, dependent and are making them more vulnerable.

The third is from the work and pensions committee and warns that it is still not clear that universal credit will work. The MPs on the all-party committee think that implementation will be delayed even further and have some strong words about Iain Duncan Smith’s attitude towards their scrutiny.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

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