Posted: March 10, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Council housing, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill, National Audit Office |
Originally posted on March 10 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Key elements of the Housing and Planning Bill have faced serious scrutiny in the last couple of days but we’re still not much nearer to knowing how or if they will work.
The frustration of MPs and peers is palpable as they repeatedly ask for more detail and are just as repeatedly told that it will be available shortly. It was all too much even for a Conservative MP on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Wednesday afternoon. ‘You’re treating the parliamentarians around this table with contempt,’ Stephen Phillips told two senior Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) civil servants. ‘You’re asking us to take this on faith. Why not do the work first and then bring the legislation forward?’
The answer is of course that it’s much easier for ministers if it works the other way around. Under current plans, the crucial detail will appear in secondary legislation only after the bill has Royal Assent.
The PAC was investigating the value-for-money aspects of the extension of the Right to Buy to housing associations and the levy on forced sales of council houses that is meant to fund it. But members didn’t get far asking for detail. ‘The timings have yet to be determined,’ ran one senior civil servant answer. ‘The amounts have yet to be determined. The formulae have yet to be determined.’
The National Audit Office (NAO) is not impressed either. Here’s its assessment of the government’s impact assessment of the bill:
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Posted: March 1, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Council housing, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Starter homes, Tenants | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally published on March 1 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
For a piece of legislation that’s already faced hours of scrutiny from MPs and peers, there are still gaping holes at the heart of a Housing and Planning Bill that started life on the back of a fag packet and hasn’t moved much beyond it in several important respects.
Opposition demands for more detail about legislation are nothing new of course, but I’ve argued before that the lack of clarity here is deliberate in a bill that is designed to allow the government to do what it wants in future. To take one example, after stretching the definition of ‘affordable’ to breaking point to include £450,000 Starter Homes, the bill adds that the secretary of state ‘may by regulations amend this section so as to modify the definition of affordable housing’.
Many of the gaps were highlighted in the Commons late last year. The last two months have brought little further detail but now it’s crunch time: as peers debate a series of amendments, ministers are bound to come under increased pressures to say exactly what they mean.
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Posted: February 10, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Legal, Local government, Right to buy, Rural housing, Section 106, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on February 10 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Start with a fundamental change to the funding mechanism for the right to buy, stir in more changes to key elements of the Housing and Planning Bill, then add criticism of the lack of detail and you have a recipe that shoud give ministers indigestion.
The report of the all-party Communities and Local Government Committee does support both the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants and the voluntary deal between the government and the NHF is ‘the best way forward’.
But that’s as good as it gets for ministers from a committee that has a Labour chair but a Tory majority. Here is the headline recommendation:
‘The Government proposes to fund the right to buy discounts for housing association tenants with the proceeds from the sale of high value council homes. However we believe that public policy should usually be funded by central Government, rather than through a levy on local authorities.’
This would undermine one of the central elements of the Bill and the government’s method of paying for right to buy discounts and the promised replacement homes. And the MPs are not finished.
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Posted: February 1, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Homelessness, Housing benefit, Pay to stay, Social housing, Starter homes, Supported housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally published on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
There was a depressingly common theme at a conference in London on the future of housing organised by Shelter this week.
Speaker after speaker felt the need to apologise for what would be a litany of gloom and doom and attempted to find something, anything, to lighten the mood.
Toby Lloyd of Shelter started with the good news on the Housing and Planning Bill. There is some, believe it or not, in the small steps towards tackling bad private landlords. But even then there’s a worry that measures to help genuine landlords tackle abandonment could turn into a fast track for evictions for more unscrupulous ones.
Then it was time for the real gloom. From Starter Homes to Pay to Stay and fixed-term tenancies to forced council house sales, the bill looks set to accelerate the slow death of social housing. As Toby put it, up to now all forms of affordable housing provision have had two things in common: they remained affordable in perpetuity; and the subsidy was recycled into more housing. Housing Bill-style ‘affordable’ (Starter Homes and whatever Greg Clark says) does neither. What hope there is now rests on what improvements (if any) can be won in the House of Lords.
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Posted: January 27, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Local government, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Rural housing, Social housing, Starter homes | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on January 27 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Part 1 of this blog covered the opening skirmishes in the Lords on the Housing Bill. This second part covers all-party criticism of the detail of the Bill where the sums don’t add up or don’t exist yet. What are the prospects for changes?
Starter homes. Peers criticised both their affordability and the fact that the discount disappears into the back pocket of the first buyer. As Labour’s Baroness Andrews put it:
‘We know from all the evidence that starter homes are not even affordable for most low and middle-income families, whether in rural areas or central London. However, it is not even a fair policy for future buyers. The 20% discount will apply only to the first tranche of buyers; they will be free to sell their assets after five years at market value. We will be minting a new generation of property speculators.’
Tory peer Viscount Eccles said the scheme had ‘not been thoroughly thought through’ and called for much more detail.
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Posted: January 27, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally published on January 27 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
The House of Lords gave a second reading to the Housing and Planning Bill on Tuesday. What struck me reading through the debate was not just the scale and breadth of the opposition to key parts of the Bill, not just the 34 new powers for the secretary of state to override local decisions, but the sheer number of provisions that either do not stack up or are not yet spelled out.
This two-part blog looks first at the debate on the overall principles of the Bill and then at the more detailed criticism and the prospects for amendments to its individual elements.
The fundamental flaws at the heart of the legislation were best summed up by two crossbench peers who will be familiar names to everyone.
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Posted: January 13, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Local government, London, Pay to stay, Right to buy, Social housing, Tenants | Tags: Brandon Lewis, Greg Clark, Housing and Planning Bill, John Healey |
Originally posted on January 13 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
If it is an achievement to pilot a Bill through the House of Commons and end up with legislation that is worse than what you started with, then congratulations Brandon Lewis and Greg Clark.
Back in October I blogged that the Housing and Planning Bill is written on the back of a fag packet. On Tuesday it completed its report stage and got a third reading with additions and amendments scribbled all over the front as well. It was hard to disagree with the verdict of shadow housing minister John Healey in his closing speech: ‘Usually, we hope to improve a Bill as it goes through the House. This was a bad Bill; it is now a very bad Bill.’
Healey cited late amendments to change the definition of ‘affordable’ to include starter homes costing up to £450,000 (‘the Government are not building enough affordable homes, so they are simply branding more homes as affordable’) and to force councils to offer fixed-term tenancies (‘meaning the end of long-term rented housing, the end of a stable home for many children as they go through school, and the end of security for pensioners who move into bungalows or sheltered flats later in life’).
It was hard to disagree either with his view that ‘the Bill sounds the death knell for social housing’. That much will be obvious to anyone working in housing or who has followed the progress of the Bill. The tab for the Conservative manifesto pledges of extending the right to buy and building 200,000 starter homes is effectively being picked up by councils that still own their homes, tenants and people who will not get the chance of a social tenancy in future.
The Bill accelerates the slow death of social housing through a combination of deliberate culling (forced sales, Pay to Stay and fixed term tenancies for council housing), euthanasia (voluntary right to buy for housing associations plus conversions) and redefining the conditions for life (‘affordable’ will now not just mean starter homes but anything the secretary of state says). It is also now official that a private rented home does not have to be fit for human habitation.
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Posted: January 6, 2016 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing associations, Planning, Private renting, Section 106, Starter homes | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on January 6 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
MPs staggered bleary eyed from the House of Commons at 2am last night without even getting to the most contentious parts of the Housing and Planning Bill.
Despite a series of obituaries for council housing and a ‘Kill the Bill’ protest outside, issues such as forced high-value sales, Pay to Stay and the voluntary Right to Buy will only be considered on day two of the report stage debate (set for next Tuesday, January 12).
Last night’s five-hour debate included starter homes, the regulation of housing associations, rogue landlords and the planning system. Opposition MPs complained that 65 pages of new clauses and amendments had been added at the last minute to a Bill that was only 145 pages long.
I blogged back in October that this a Bill written on the back of a fag packet and last night only confirmed that impression. The Bill also leaves a series of crucial decisions to be made by ministers by regulation later.
Nothing sums this up more than new clause 31 on planning obligations and affordable housing. This adds starter homes selling for up to £450,000 to the existing definition of affordable housing: homes for people whose needs are not adequately served by the market. However, it also adds that:
‘The Secretary of State may by regulations amend this section so as to modify the definition of “affordable housing”.’
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Posted: December 30, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Buy to let, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Housing market, Pay to stay, Private renting, Social housing, Starter homes | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on December 30 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Has there ever been a year quite like it for housing? Here’s the first part of my look back at the issues I’ve been blogging about in 2015.
1) Be careful what you wish for
It was the year that Homes for Britain became Home Ownership for Britain as political campaigning turned into political salvaging. Housing professionals made their case from Land’s End to London, filled the Albert Hall and secured wide ranging support for its case for more homes. But the election result changed all that – and many of them had booed the representative of the party that won.
True, housing and the need for new homes moved up the political agenda as the year went on but not quite in the way campaigners had imagined. As the election neared the Tories promised a ‘housing revolution’. What amounted to Plan C, the third revolution in five years, took a poor record on supply, and traded it in for what amounted to homes for votes on a grand scale. The campaigners who had filled the Albert Hall found themselves facing the extension of the Right to Buy to housing association tenants.
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Posted: November 11, 2015 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Pay to stay, Section 106, Starter homes | Tags: affordability, Brandon Lewis, Housing and Planning Bill |
Originally posted on November 11 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
So now it is official. Brandon Lewis has confirmed that ‘affordable’ means 80% of the market rate.
His statement at a Communities and Local Government Committee hearing on the Housing Bill confirms a direction of travel that has been clear ever since the creation of ‘affordable’ rent. Starter homes at a 20% discount to the full price now represent ‘affordable’ home ownership. Needless to say, neither is exactly affordable by any conventional definition of the word.
The minister’s statement came in this exchange with Labour MP Jo Cox:
Cox: Do you think there should be a statutory definition of affordability for both rent and purchase?’
Lewis: At the moment it’s 80% of the market value, whether to rent or purchase.
Cox: But there isn’t a statutory definition.
Lewis: Well, the definition of affordability… an affordable rent is 80% of market value and affordable purchase with starter homes it would effectively be 80% of market value.
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Jules Birch 