Posted: August 13, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market, Mortgages |
As the evidence for a housing market recovery mounts by the day, so is the impression that an old-fashioned dose of house price inflation is now seen as a very good thing by the government.
In a survey out this morning, members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) report that activity is rising around the country and not just in London and the South East and that prices are up for the fourth month in a row. Yesterday, the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) reported that the number of loans to first-time buyers was up 30 per cent on a year ago to its highest level since the credit crunch in 2007. On Friday, the CML said buy to let lending topped £5.1 billion in the second quarter of the year, the highest since 2008.
And the DCLG published stats overnight showing that 10,000 people have registered for a help to buy equity loan in the last four months. Whether by coincidence or design, that was neatly calculated to capitalise on a housing market feel-good factor that was sent into overdrive by last week’s forward guidance from Bank of England governor Mark Carney that interest rates will stay at a record low until unemployment falls below 7 per cent (widely interpreted as meaning until 2016 at least).
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: August 10, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Social housing |
How to Get a Council House broke free of its dodgy title and format last night. The same cannot be said for the reaction on Twitter.
The second episode in the series was set in Manchester and followed tenants and staff of Northwards Housing as the bedroom tax loomed earlier this year (watch again here). It gave some real insights into the way the system works and the good job that housing officers do in very difficult circumstances.
As I blogged last week, I felt the first episode also did well at showing the impossible situation in Tower Hamlets, where just 40 properties a week become available but 60 new families join the 24,000 families others on the waiting list. But I criticised the trivialising commentary and the lack of any context that might have explained why.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: August 8, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Mortgages |
Mark Carney’s pledge on interest rates can only make buy to let look even more of a one-way bet for landlords and the banks who lent them a cool £5 billion in the second quarter of 2013.
Figures published by the Council of Mortgage Lenders a day after the Bank of England governor made his announcement show a new surge in loans. In the three months from April to June its members made 40,000 gross advances to buy to let landlords worth £5.1 billion. Both are the highest quarterly figures seen since 2008. The number of loans was up 19 per cent and their combined value was up 21 per cent on the previous quarter. Loans were up 19 per cent by volume and 31 per cent by value on a year ago.
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Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: August 2, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Local government, Social housing |
A documentary about housing on Channel 4 is usually the cue for me to look what else is on TV. This time I watched the programme – and the reaction to it.
Inside my Twitter feed, the debate was about whether How to Get a Council House (watch again here) presented a realistic but depressing portrait of life on the waiting list or trivialised the issues by ignoring the reasons why the wait is so long.
Outside my feed, the racists, kippers and anti-welfarists were in full cry. Search under the hashtag #howtogetacouncilhouse and you will quickly see what I mean: in this world council housing is the preserve of immigrants and scroungers. All of the public prejudices against people on benefits are simply transferred to council tenants.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: August 2, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Welfare reform |
This week’s court ruling on the bedroom tax and BBC Trust verdict on the John Humphrys welfare reform documentary got me thinking again about the importance of language in the debate on both.
Language matters. You don’t have to be familiar with discourse analysis to know that there is a difference between ‘the bedroom tax’ and ‘the spare room subsidy’ or ‘welfare’ and ‘social security’. The words we use to frame ideas have a power that goes beyond themselves because of the associations, conscious or otherwise, that they bring with them. The battle of language is also a battle of ideas and of ideology.
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Posted: July 31, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Legal, Social housing |
If you take even a cursory glance at the circumstances of the 10 families involved in the legal challenge to the bedroom tax you’ll be left wondering how discretionary housing payments can possibly resolve their problems.
I read the High Court ruling painfully aware that I lack the legal expertise to interpret the finer points of the European Convention on Human Rights and Public Sector Equality Duty but with enough experience to know that what is lawful is not necessarily the same as what is fair.
The background to the case has already been covered in detail elsewhere. As Inside Housing reports, although the judges said that new measures must be introduced to protect disabled children who need their own room, housing groups were left bitterly disappointed by the dismissal of the other part of the judicial review and lawyers plan to appeal. Read this excellent blog by Kate Webb of Shelter or see statements by the solicitors involved here and here if you haven’t already for the background.
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Posted: July 29, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Right to buy, Social housing |
All those high earners with social tenancies seem to be slowly melting away ahead of the government’s plan to implement ‘pay to stay’ market rents.
I’m not just talking about the impact of the policy itself and the incentive for tenants to declare an income of £59,999 or even to cut the number of hours they work to get out of paying a market rent for their homes.
Rather I’m talking about the government’s own estimates of the number of high earners. When the policy was first floated at the Conservative Party conference in October 2011, the Telegraph was briefed that there were 6,000 ‘fat cat’ tenants earning more than £100,000 a year.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: July 26, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market, Mortgages |
With the Institute of Directors on one side and Simon Jenkins on the other, where is a safe place to stand?
I blogged about Help to Buy 2 earlier this week the day before the breakfast meeting at which George Osborne would apparently reveal full details of the mortgage guarantee that will be available in January.
Nothing that happened over the coffee and croissants has changed my view about the dangers of increasing demand for housing while doing nothing about supply. The schemes that it replaces are open to criticism too but at least they were targeted at first-time buyers and new-build homes. Help to Buy 2 will available to all buyers and on secondhand properties too – and it extends state support to people on household incomes of up to £150,000. Will it trigger a boom and bust that leaves the government picking up the bill or (perhaps more likely) give future governments a direct stake in propping up house prices?
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: July 25, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Social housing |
Every time I think I’ve got my head around the pernicious impacts of the bedroom tax something new emerges to make me think again.
The trigger this time is an excellent report from Aragon Housing Association on the first 100 days of what the government calls the spare room subsidy. But that also sent me back to several conversations I had at the CIH conference in Manchester and reports published while I was on holiday from the National Housing Federation (twice), Chartered Institute of Housing and Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.
Even before that the evidence was accumulating from around the country that the effects are at least as bad, and probably worse, than most people expected or feared. From rent arrears in Newcastle and Ayrshire to fears of more suicides in Birmingham to criticism of the Labour leadership’s stance on the issue in Liverpool, the effects of the bedroom tax continue to be felt emotionally, financially and politically.
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Posted: July 22, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Help to Buy, Housing market |
Is it too late to mitigate the impact of the impending disaster that is Help to Buy?
As the government prepares to reveal more details of the mortgage guarantee element of the controversial scheme (probably tomorrow), the evidence is already accumulating of the effect of early impact of Help to Buy plus the boost to mortgages delivered by the Funding for Lending scheme.
Mortgage lending is up, asking prices are up for seven months in a row and reservations under the equity loan part of Help to Buy are up by almost three times on the more limited and targeted FirstBuy scheme that it replaced. So too are forecasts of what will happen to prices over the next few years.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
