Dead cert
Posted: May 10, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing market, Private renting Leave a commentSo, three years after it was pronounced dead, can anything stop buy to let squeezing out owner-occupation?
Figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) yesterday showed that loans to landlords accounted for 13.4 per cent of the £165.6 billion worth of outstanding mortgages in the first quarter of the year. That’s up from 13.0 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012 and just 9.8 per cent at the start of the credit crunch in 2007.
All of which makes it easy to forget that it was only three years ago when the last rites were being delivered for buy to let by probably its best-known pioneers, Fergus and Judith Wilson. The former teachers built a 700-home empire but by 2010 they were bailing out and telling The Guardian that buy to let was ‘absolutely dead and will never return’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Wake-up call
Posted: May 3, 2013 Filed under: Housing market, Mortgages Leave a commentThe interest-only mortgage is the housing scandal that just keeps coming back.
In the 1980s it was all about the mis-selling of endowment mortgages. In the 2000s it was about selling as many mortgages as possible without caring too much about whether there was a way to repay them. In the 2010s and 2020s it will be about dealing with the consequences – and who pays for them.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Never knowingly undernudged
Posted: May 1, 2013 Filed under: Civil service, Economics, History, Labour market 3 CommentsSo-called ‘John Lewis-style mutuals’ are (depending on your point of view) the future of the public sector or a euphemism for privatisation. However, the expression may have some unexpected implications for the government.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude launched a competition today to find a commercial partner for the government’s Behavioural Insights Team – or Nudge Unit. He described the move as ‘employee-led’ as the 12 Nudge staff have led the process and will continue to run the organisation. Reports suggest that private companies will be invited to bid for a stake of up to 50 per cent in the new business in return for the government guaranteeing long-term contracts. The staff and the government would also own stakes.
The Nudge Unit is claimed to have already saved the government millions of pounds although it not quite clear how. It hit the headlines for different reasons today when it was revealed to be behind bogus psychometric tests for jobseekers. It is best known to me as the unit that the DCLG failed to consult when it introduced the New Homes Bonus in a bid to change the behaviour of local authorities and I wonder what, if anything, it had to say about the behavioural impacts of welfare reform that the DWP found impossible to quantity.
Learning lessons
Posted: May 1, 2013 Filed under: Buy to let, Private renting Leave a commentThe plight of families with children highlighted in a report out today from Shelter illustrates yet again why private renting in England so urgently needs reform.
If the experiences of tenants facing damp and disrepair and soaring rents are depressingly familiar, the report adds detail to what has become a way of life for the one in five families with children who now rent their home privately.
The insecurity inherent in short-term tenancies means that one in 10 of 4,000 families surveyed have had to change their children’s school as a result of moving. They were nine times as likely to have moved in the last year as families who own their own homes.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Man on a mission
Posted: April 30, 2013 Filed under: Welfare reform Leave a commentSo can the Quiet Man with missionary zeal really deliver on the universal credit?
The policy regarded as (depending on your point of view) flagship reform or slow-motion train crash, started in a low-key way in Ashton-under-Lyne on Monday. So low key that, according to the Guardian, nobody turned up for help on the first day.
However, the internal battles over it revealed in Rachel Sylvester’s column in today’s Times (here for those with access) were anything but low key. She describes how Iain Duncan Smith battled with civil servants, the Treasury and Downing Street to secure what he sees as a moral mission of ‘changing people’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Letting go
Posted: April 26, 2013 Filed under: Private renting Leave a commentThings are slowly changing for the better for tenants in the private rented sector. It’s about time.
A series of small but significant things have happened over the last couple of weeks that suggest that even the government is waking up to the fact that it cannot continue to leave customers of a multi-billion pound industry to fend for themselves.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Debating downsizing
Posted: April 24, 2013 Filed under: Housing market, Planning Leave a commentSo it turns out that the Daily Mash has the answer to the housing crisis: build more bungalows but make them stackable.
As ever, Policy Exchange has succeeded in identifying a problem – the distribution of housing between old and young – and coming up with a media-friendly solution that sees planning as the villain of the piece. The ‘return of the bungalow’ for elderly downsizers has duly made all the headlines this week.
The problem with bungalows – and the reason why so few are now built – is that they don’t make financial sense in areas with high land prices where the affordability crisis is most acute. No housebuilder or housing association in their right mind would use scarce and expensive land in such an inefficient way. Existing bungalows tend to cost more than bigger terraced homes but only because of the potential to knock them down and redevelop their large plots. As the RIBA revealed yesterday, the average new-build one-bedroom home is now not the size of a spacious bungalow with a garden but of a London tube train carriage.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Beyond help
Posted: April 21, 2013 Filed under: Budget, Housing market, Mortgages Leave a commentIt’s hard to remember a more damning select committee report than the one just published on Help to Buy – and it has not even started yet.
You don’t even have to read between the lines of the Treasury committee report on the Budget to detect its doubts about a policy announced by chancellor George Osborne last month. It leaves him with a string of questions about how it will work and a list of concerns about unintended consequences.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Putting the cap on it
Posted: April 18, 2013 Filed under: Housing benefit, Labour market Leave a commentAmid claim and counter-claim the benefit cap began this week with a deepening mystery about how many people will be affected and how much it will really save.
As the four guinea pig boroughs in London – Haringey, Croydon, Enfield and Bromley – began applying the cap on Monday, the Department for Work and Pensions revealed in ad hoc analysis that it now expects 16,000 fewer households to be affected by the time when it is introduced in the whole country over the next few months.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 