Making the move
Posted: March 13, 2014 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Legal, Local government, Private renting Leave a commentForced out of area moves are on the increase and they are not just happening in London.
The Oxford Times reports this week on cases of people being offered homes as far away in Cardiff, Cheltenham and Birmingham. The council blames the cuts in housing benefit and the benefit cap that make it impossible to find affordable private rented accommodation but a local solicitor has accused it of dumping people outside the area.
Elysha Britnell, a 22 year old mother of two children, was told she would have to move out of her temporary accommodation in Oxford and accept a home in Birmingham. She says she has no family and friends outside Oxford and has never lived anywhere else and is appealing against the decision:
‘I’m Oxford born and bred. If this appeal fails I’ll be completely homeless. I have got nowhere else to go. Even if I go to Birmingham, I may as well be homeless, because I have nobody there.’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Buy, buy, bye?
Posted: March 11, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market, Mortgages | Tags: George Osborne Leave a commentAs George Osborne prepares for next week’s budget, even the people who’ve benefited are calling for changes to help to buy. But is he listening?
A survey out today finds that most mortgage lenders and brokers now believe that help to buy 2 – the more controversial mortgage guarantee element of the scheme – will be scaled back or scrapped before the official end date of 2016.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Minding the gap or moving the government?
Posted: March 10, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Housing market, London Leave a commentWhat can be done about the London problem: the growing economic divide between the capital and the rest of the country?
Mind the Gap, a two-part BBC documentary by Evan Davis, looked at the causes and consequences of the growing divide between London and the rest of the country. He argues that powerful economic forces are polarising Britain: in theory technology should mean we can work from anywhere but in practice the economics of agglomeration mean that businesses look to cluster together and secure the benefits go with being close to each other.
However, for all those positive effects there are negative externalities too: the pressures on transport infrastructure, the environment and perhaps above all housing. Not so slowly, but surely, Londoners are being priced out of their own city. Much of this was summed up by in part one of the programme by film first of The Shard and then, just a few miles, the derelict and the soon-to-be-gentrified Heygate Estate.
Equity moans
Posted: March 6, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding | Tags: National Audit Office Leave a commentIn the furore over the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme, its equity loan counterpart has escaped much scrutiny. A report out today changes that.
Help to Buy 1 started in April last year. Equity loans worth more than £500 million households were made in the first nine months of the scheme to almost 13,000 households. Another 9,600 loans were in the pipeline. If everything goes to plan over the next two years, 74,000 households will eventually benefit from equity loans worth £3.7 billion.
Today’s report from the National Audit Office (NAO) makes you remember that although it is small by comparison with the £12 billion of mortgage guarantees offered by its more controversial sibling, Help to Buy 1 is significantly bigger than the FirstBuy scheme that it replaced.
Five years on
Posted: March 5, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Housing market, Private renting | Tags: Interest rates, QE Leave a commentOn today’s fifth anniversary of record low interest rates all the talk is about how savers have lost out to borrowers. It should also be about renters and owners.
On 5 March, 2009 the Bank of England cut its main interest rate to 0.5 per cent, the lowest in history, and began its associated policy of quantitative easing in a successful attempt to prevent economic collapse.
But the effects continue to be controversial. The campaign group Save Our Savers estimates that savers have lost £117 billion in lost interest over the last five years plus another £209 billion from the way inflation has reduced the spending power of their money.
In contrast, borrowers have gained billions from lower interest rates. SOS’s message resonates because of the perceived unfairness that prudent savers and are paying to extricate us from a crisis caused by excess borrowing.
But what about the housing impact? In a CIH policy essay a few months ago, I did a rough calculation that mortgage borrowers have saved around £30 billion a year as a result of lower mortgage rates, QE and politcies such as Funding for Lending. Those with larger mortgages and with enough equity to remortgage to lower rates will have gained proportionately the most. The impact has also varied considerably between different regions.
Unequal shares: All that is Solid
Posted: February 25, 2014 Filed under: Equality, Housing market, Tax | Tags: All that is Solid, Danny Dorling Leave a commentWhat if our real housing problem is not a lack of a new homes but the distribution of the ones we already have?
That’s the key premise of All that is Solid: the Great Housing Disaster, an intriguing new book published this week by Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Oxford University. In it he attacks not just the ‘yes to homes’ consensus about the solution to the housing crisis but the actions of just about all the key people involved. Politicians, housebuilders, landlords and property journalists are all seen as part of the problem but housing associations, the CIH and the voluntary sector also come under fire for accepting the status quo.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Pickled homes
Posted: February 20, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding | Tags: Eric Pickles Leave a commentTo hear ministers talk we are in the middle of a housebuilding boom. Official figures released today beg to differ.
According to the DCLG housebuilding statistics for the fourth quarter of 2013, starts and completions in England were both down 1 per cent on the third quarter. These are only the figures for one quarter but they don’t seem in the script.
While starts for the year as a whole were up 23 per cent on 2012 at 122,800, completions were down 5 per cent at 109,480. True, those starts will soon turn into new homes but this hardly feels like a giant step towards the promised land of 250,000 additional homes a year.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Rough times
Posted: February 13, 2014 Filed under: Homelessness, Local government Leave a commentIn a grim few years for housing and homelessness No Second Night Out stands out as a rare bright spot.
The idea behind the scheme, which was extended to 20 areas outside London in 2011, is that the longer someone sleeps rough the greater the risk that they will become trapped on the streets and vulnerable to crime, drug or alcohol issues or mental or physical health problems. No Second Night Out (NSNO) aims to help people off the streets as quickly as possible and ensure that they do not return.
Jules Birch 