Mixed messages
Posted: January 23, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Private renting, Universal credit | Tags: Fergus and Judith Wilson, housing benefit, private landlords Leave a commentSo are private landlords about to pull out of the housing benefit market or not?
It’s one of the most crucial questions for the future of the housing system but the answer may be more complex than recent publicity suggests.
The alarm was raised when Fergus and Judith Wilson, the King and Queen of buy to let, revealed that they were evicting all of their tenants on benefit. A poll yesterday by the website spareroom.co.uk found that only 18 per cent of landlords currently rent to claimants, down from a third two years ago.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Garden griping
Posted: January 20, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: garden cities Leave a commentSo Nick would like two, Eric (through clenched teeth) one or two, Emma five and Boris none. It’s time to play the garden cities game.
A quick look at the electoral map of constituencies around London tells you most of what you need to know about the politics involved. You’ll find a sea of Tory blue in the swathe of seats closest to the capital with only Labour Slough, Luton and Oxford and Lib Dem Lewes and Colchester anywhere near to being affected.
It also explains why David Cameron’s interest has waned and a government-commissioned study on new towns has allegedly been blocked. According to the FT, a Downing Street official has even joked that the only possible sites should be Buckingham and Mid Bedfordshire, the seats of Tory outcasts John Bercow and Nadine Dorries.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
The hardest word
Posted: January 14, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Iain Duncan Smith Leave a commentA remarkable thing happened iyesterday: Iain Duncan Smith used a five-letter word beginning with S.
Apologising for a mistake is just about the last thing any minister wants to do, but IDS got his chance when Labour’s John Healey asked him at work and pensions questions about the DWP’s bulletin admitting the pre-1996 under-occupation penalty error. Healey quoted the latest survey from the Northern Housing Consortium that ‘nearly half of all frontline housing workers have dealt with someone who has threatened to commit suicide’ largely because of the government’s welfare changes. ‘Will he apologise this afternoon to those people for the concern and chaos that he is causing?’
Duncan Smith replied: ‘I said it all right, and I say it again: the Department is, and I am, absolutely sorry that anybody may have been caught up in this who should not have been.’ So not just an apology but a double ‘sorry’ from both the secretary of state and his department. But before anyone gets too excited, he went on:
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Bald truths
Posted: January 9, 2014 Filed under: Housebuilding Leave a commentLike bald men with a comb, the politicians squabbled yesterday over who has the worst record on housebuilding.
The ghost of Stanley Baldwin occupied the green benches once again as Hilary Benn and Eric Pickles traded stats to show that each other’s governments had built the fewest new homes (in England) since the 1920s.
So where Benn opened the opposition debate with the accusation that ‘in the three years for which he has been in charge, the number of homes completed in England has fallen to its lowest level since Stanley Baldwin was first prime minister’, Pickles countered with ‘when I walked through the door of Eland House the spirit of Stanley Baldwin and those figures met me. That was our baseline—that is what we actually started from.’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Benefit baseline
Posted: January 7, 2014 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Welfare state | Tags: Council housing, George Osborne, housing benefit, welfare Leave a commentThe ‘hard truths’ about welfare outlined by George Osborne beg far more questions than answers when it comes to housing.
In a speech yesterday the chancellor set out plans for £12 billion worth of cuts in welfare and £13 billion cuts in departmental budgets in 2016/17 and 2017/18 if the Conservatives win the next election.
And he singled out housing as the target of two specific cuts: housing benefit for the under-25s; and council housing for people earning more than £60,000 a year.
However, a quick look at the detail of those proposals raises real doubt about how much they would really save and what else might be on the Tory agenda.
Appearance and reality in the 2014 housing market
Posted: January 5, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Help to Buy, Housing benefit, Housing market, Labour market, Private renting | Tags: David Cameron, Fergus Wilson, housing benefit, Sharon Ray 3 CommentsCombine one ex-PR man prime minister with one lucky homebuyer who’s also an estate agent, then add one ex-teacher turned buy-to-let mogul. Welcome to the New Year recipe for housing, where perceptions are everything.
David Cameron used Help to Buy as a metaphor for the Conservative message about economic recovery and opportunity for all when he took part in a photo op in Southampton with a young mum and her toddler and had tea in the new home she’s just bought through a government scheme.
It seemed standard, if rather awkward-looking fare, until this post appeared on the internet claiming that the young mum, Sharon Ray, was actually Sharon O’Donnell, a sales director with the estate agent that allegedly sold the home. That was followed by a typically sexist story about the ‘attractive blonde’ in the Mail and this corrective about some exaggerations and errors in the original post. Cue a Twitterstorm and debate between those seeing the whole thing as an example of Tory fakery and those outraged by the hounding of a young woman who’d done nothing wrong.
10 things about 2013: part 2
Posted: December 30, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market, Labour market, Planning, Private renting, Wales | Tags: Budget George Osborne, David Cameron Leave a commentHere’s the second part of my look back at the key themes I’ve been blogging about this year.
6) Help to Buy
If the bedroom tax was the subject I blogged about most in 2013 (see Part 1 of this blog), Help to Buy was certainly the best (or worst) of the rest.
The first hints of the scheme came in January as the coalition published its Mid-Term Review. Perhaps conscious of the gap between rhetoric and reality when it came to the government’s record on housing, David Cameron promised more help for people who cannot raise a deposit for a mortgage, with details to come in the Budget. By March Cameron and Clegg were promising what sounded to me like the coalition’s fourth housing strategy in three years. And in the Budget George Osborne duly announced what I called a huge gamble, loosening the targeting of previous schemes at first-time buyers and new homes and extending the help available much further up the income scale.
