I was nine years old when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and uttered the immortal words that he didn’t quite get right.
At the time the landing seemed most memorable because we got the day off school to watch it. In retrospect, of course, it was almost the end of term anyway so the teachers were probably glad to pack us all off into a room to watch TV.
Re-watching it now the main thing that strikes me is how blurry and black and white it looks but it was a completely different story then. It’s important to remember that hardly anyone had a colour TV and live TV of any kind was pretty primitive, so it did not seem that way at the time. The whole thing with the beeps on the soundtrack etched its way so far into the national consciousness that we would be doing them on the school playground for months afterwards.
Here’s why I think the housing backlash against the Montague report is being overdone.
From some of the reactions so far, the review group seem to a bunch of pin-striped latter-day Rachmans intent on squeezing out affordable housing and trousering the profits in between slaughtering the first born and unleashing plague, pestilence and famine.
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
If the government can change the public borrowing rules for roads, why not for council housing?
The papers this morning (see here and here) have been briefed that the government growth package to be launched when parliament returns next month will include not just a housebuilding stimulus but a radical new plan to boost road building.
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Policy Exchange is well known for its opposition to the Green Belt but that has not stopped it proposing what amounts to a Blue Belt in expensive areas of the country.
The influential right-wing think tank published a report this morning calling for social rented homes that become vacant expensive areas to be sold off to fund the construction of more homes in cheaper areas. Read the rest of this entry »
Octavia Hill retains an extraordinary ability to inspire and infuriate. The ideas of this pioneer of housing management, social work and environmental protection almost seem more influential (and more contradictory) now than they did when she died 100 years ago this week.
She was a high-achieving woman in a society dominated by men but she was not by any stretch of the imagination a feminist. Her housing managers were women because, ‘ladies must do it, for it is detailed work; ladies must do it, for it is household work; it needs, moreover, persistent patience, gentleness, hope’. Yet she was opposed to women’s suffrage on the grounds that, as Kathryn Hughes puts it, ‘women were unsuited to thinking about the big issues of finance and foreign policy’.
Behind the good news story of falling mortgage repossessions a different tale is starting to emerge of rising possession actions against tenants.
Figures published by the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) yesterday showed that its members repossessed 8,500 homes in the three months to June. That was the lowest quarterly total since the final quarter of 2010 and implies that the total for the year is likely to undershoot the CML’s forecast of 45,000.
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Four years after it was supposedly killed off by the credit crunch, buy to let continues to go from strength to strength as first-time buyers are squeezed out of the mortgage market.
Figures published by the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) yesterday confirm that the total number of buy-to-let mortgages has increased by 45 per cent since the third quarter of 2007 from 978,900 in the third quarter of 2007 to 1,415,000 now. According to CML director general Paul Smee it is ‘growing broadly in line with expectations’. He goes on: ‘The rental sector has grown strongly over the last decade or so, and buy-to-let continues to help deliver a wider choice for tenants.’
Wider choice? I doubt very much that would-be first-time buyers will see it that way when tighter lending criteria mean their only choice is to be a tenant. After all, the same banks who are unwilling to give them a loan against their future income unless they have a sizeable deposit seem quite willing to give an amateur landlord a buy-to-let loan to be repaid from the rents (and therefore the future incomes) of their tenants.
If the Devil is in the detail then he is dancing a jig around the regulations for the universal credit and the benefit cap.
Ok, I am exaggerating for effect but by how much? Take a look at the response (PDF here) from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) to the consultation by the Social Security Advisory committee that closed on the opening day of the Olympics and you decide.
Many of the same points are being made by the CIH, NHF and others but they have an added impact coming from the organisation representing lenders that have invested £60 billion in social housing and cannot be easily dismissed by ministers as coming from the ‘housing industry’. Read the rest of this entry »
Even as the Olympics provide compelling evidence that Britain is not as broken as the government makes out, the anniversary of the riots is a reminder that it is not fixed either.
In the glow from the marvellous opening ceremony and the stellar performances of the athletes it’s easy to forget that we are a country in austerity and recession. Perhaps that’s because we weren’t when we won the games and when the stadia and all the other facilities were funded.
The Olympics and the Paralympics that follow are like a holiday from the cuts, unemployment and welfare ‘reform’. The thousands of volunteers who are being hailed as a living embodiment of the Big Society are happily working for nothing for the common good rather than being made to work for nothing for private contractors. And the homes that will be built at the athletes village and on the Olympic park will be a lasting legacy of all that investment.
The launches of Tesco mortgages and the Funding for Lending scheme have led to some hope at last for the dysfunctional housing market. Here’s why I don’t think they will make much difference.
In the short term at least, most of the benefits look like going (yet again) to existing owners rather than frustrated first-time buyers.
