Mind the gaps
Posted: August 18, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Poverty, Welfare reform | Tags: David Cameron 2 CommentsSpot the gaps between rhetoric and reality in the speech by David Cameron about family-friendly policies.
The prime minister spoke on Monday about how he will put families at the centre of new domestic policy-making. He asked three questions on this, none of which are directly housing issues but all of which touch on housing: How can we help families come together? How can we help families stay together? And how can we help troubled families and those children who don’t even have families?
Cameron also promised to introduce a family test as part of the impact assessment of all domestic government policies. That has to be good news even if the government has a track record of ignoring inconvenient evidence from impact assessments. However, it also prompts the obvious question of how existing government policies would fare under the test.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Doubts about Dave
Posted: May 20, 2014 Filed under: Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing market, Planning | Tags: David Cameron Leave a commentHow do David Cameron’s claims this morning about home ownership and new housing in his own constituency measure up to scrutiny?
It’s a measure of the growing political importance of housing took top billing in his Today programme interview sandwiched between reaction to the conviction of Abu Hamza and Britain’s relationship with Europe. Listen again here from about 1:30 in.
The interview was notable for me for two things: first an unequivocal claim to the old Tory mantle of the ‘property owning democracy’; and second a denial that Tory councils are nimbys made with specific reference to West Oxfordshire (Cameron’s Witney constituency has the same boundaries).
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
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.
Jules Birch 