Budget 2014: the next five years
Posted: March 20, 2014 Filed under: Budget, Economics, Housing market, Private renting, Welfare state | Tags: housing benefit Leave a commentNever mind today and tomorrow: what does the Budget mean for housing over the longer term?
As usual, some of the most revealing information comes not in the speech or the Treasury’s background documents but in the Economic and Fiscal Outlook published by the Office for Budget Responsibility. This time around the detail and the forecasts for the next five years have a lot to say about housing benefit, the welfare cap and the housing market.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Mixed messages
Posted: January 23, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Private renting, Universal credit | Tags: Fergus and Judith Wilson, housing benefit, private landlords Leave a commentSo are private landlords about to pull out of the housing benefit market or not?
It’s one of the most crucial questions for the future of the housing system but the answer may be more complex than recent publicity suggests.
The alarm was raised when Fergus and Judith Wilson, the King and Queen of buy to let, revealed that they were evicting all of their tenants on benefit. A poll yesterday by the website spareroom.co.uk found that only 18 per cent of landlords currently rent to claimants, down from a third two years ago.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Benefit baseline
Posted: January 7, 2014 Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Welfare state | Tags: Council housing, George Osborne, housing benefit, welfare Leave a commentThe ‘hard truths’ about welfare outlined by George Osborne beg far more questions than answers when it comes to housing.
In a speech yesterday the chancellor set out plans for £12 billion worth of cuts in welfare and £13 billion cuts in departmental budgets in 2016/17 and 2017/18 if the Conservatives win the next election.
And he singled out housing as the target of two specific cuts: housing benefit for the under-25s; and council housing for people earning more than £60,000 a year.
However, a quick look at the detail of those proposals raises real doubt about how much they would really save and what else might be on the Tory agenda.
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.
Facing both ways
Posted: November 22, 2012 Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Tags: housing benefit, under-25s Leave a commentDecidedly mixed signals are emerging from different parts of the government over cutting housing benefit for the under-25s.
David Cameron seems determined to press ahead with the idea he first raised in April and then again at the Conservative conference in October. At prime minister’s questions yesterday he told Labour MP Mary Glindon: ‘I know that housing benefit is a very important issue, but there is a problem, which needs proper attention: we seem to give some young people a choice today, in that if they are on jobseeker’s allowance they can have access to housing benefit, but if they are living at home and trying to work they cannot. We need to recognise that in many cases we are sending a negative signal to young people through our welfare system.’
If that sounds like full steam ahead, Mary Glindon was getting some very different signals barely an hour earlier during a Westminster Hall debate she secured on the issue. Lib Dem communities minister Don Foster told her: ‘The hon. Member for North Tyneside said that the idea is something that the Government might effect, but the fact that something was said at a Conservative party conference does not mean that it becomes coalition policy. At the moment, it certainly is not.’
Read the rest of this post at Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Yet more cuts
Posted: November 12, 2012 Filed under: Economics, Housing benefit | Tags: housing benefit, Public spending Leave a commentAs Crisis launches a campaign against ‘unworkable and irresponsible’ cuts in housing benefit for the under-25s, there is another scary reminder today of the bleak prospects for the next spending review.
Fiscal Fallout, a report from the Social Market Foundation and Royal Society of the Arts, concludes that the flat-lining economy will make the structural deficit significantly higher than forecast in the Budget in March.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 