Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For the most part, this was a Labour conference of nudges and winks rather than major announcements.
That is no coincidence because major decisions across government are being left to the Budget and one-year spending review next month and the multi-year spending review to follow in the Spring.
So for all the debate at what looked like an unprecedented number of fringe meetings on housing in Liverpool, for all the promises from the conference podium of brownfield passports and help for homeless veterans and care leavers, there was comparatively little that signalled the direction the new government intends to take.
The one exception was not a surprise: the reinstatement by net zero secretary Ed Miliband of the 2030 target to bring all rented homes up to a minimum level of Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C by 2030.
The announcement reinstates an earlier target for Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards that was scrapped by Rishi Sunak and extends it to social and private rented homes
Without a boost, that could accelerate the sell-off of older private rented stock and encourage social landlords to consolidate theirs, at the same time as it focusses their attention even more on improving their existing homes rather than building new ones.
On new homes, the big question for me is the relationship between Labour’s target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament and its manifesto promise on affordable and social housing.’
The economic inheritance of the next government will be so dire that it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prospects for housing investment will be even worse.
Take an already inadequate Affordable Homes Programme, add higher costs for construction, building safety, decarbonisation and follow the freeze on capital investment implied in current spending plans and you seem to have a recipe for housing disaster.
However, an important chapter in the latest UK Housing Review challenges that view on two important levels.
Glen Bramley builds on his longstanding work on housing need by essentially looking through the other end of the telescope at different scenarios for total completions of new homes in 2031 (ie after market conditions have recovered from the cost of living crisis etc).
His ‘low’ scenario corresponds with actual performance recently while ‘very low’ takes account of the current economic climate and recent changes in government planning policy that will reduce supply still further.
As the graph shows, under the ‘low’ scenario, there would be just 211,000 completions per year by 2031, with around 66,000 affordable homes including 35,000 for social rent. ‘Very low’ cuts those numbers by more than 20 per cent to just 164,000 overall and 50,000 affordable including 24,000 for social rent.
Judged against those numbers, the other three scenarios look a long way off, especially the promised land of ‘High-medium’ and ‘High’, which correspond with Labour’s pledge of 1.5 million new homes over five years and longstanding calls for 90,000 social rent homes a year.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
The prospects for housing investment look bleak whoever wins the election – and that is looking on the bright side – but there was an interesting comment this week from the frontrunner to be the next prime minister.
The Autumn Statement found money for tax cuts from an implausible sounding freeze in future capital investment and squeeze on departmental budgets after 2025. This seems designed both as a pre-election bribe and as a trap for Labour.
Labour leader Keir Starmer duly refused to fall into it in a speech at the Resolution Foundation think tank in which he said that anyone who expects the party ‘to quickly turn on the spending taps’ if it wins power will come away disappointed.
That will trigger bad memories for anyone who can remember the early years of the last Labour government, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pledged to match Conservative spending plans in its first two years.
That was disastrous for the social housing budget since those plans included deep cuts that seemed unrealistic even to the outgoing Tories.
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If the polls are anything like accurate, there will be a Labour government next year. What did what could be the party’s last conference before the election tell us about its plans for housing?
There seemed to be genuine excitement at packed fringe meetings at the prospect of meaningful reform of renting and leasehold if (when?) the government fails to deliver. Potential future ministers are well aware of the key issues they will face and there was loud applause inside the main hall, especially when council housing was mentioned.
Keir Starmer’s ‘we are the builders’ speech on Tuesday ticked all the right boxes on housing supply and planning reform and he became the first potential prime minister to declare himself a Yimby.
However, the conference still left some big questions about the prospects for real change.
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on September 30.
If the tone sounded very New Labour at times, this week’s party conference in Brighton also signalled that some of the radical housing policies of the Corbyn era are here to stay.
The speeches on tackling anti-social behaviour recalled the early days of Tony Blair while the promise of new fiscal rules and an Office for Value for Money were very Gordon Brown.
But the influence of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell was also evident in a leader’s speech from Keir Starmer in which he pledged a Green New Deal.
This would include a national mission to retrofit every home in the country within a decade ‘to make sure that it is warm, well insulated and costs less to heat and we will create thousands of jobs in the process’.
That timetable is just as ambitious as when Labour promised ‘Warm Homes for All’ in 2019 and, while there is not much detail, it suggests that housing decarbonisation will swallow up much of the £28 billion a year in green investment promised by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Originally published on March 11 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Can it really be less than five years since Labour’s plans for three-year tenancies in the private rented sector were attacked by the Conservatives as ‘Venezuelan-style socialism’?
And is it really less than three years since Royal Assent for a Housing and Planning Act that included provisions to abolish secure tenancies and make fixed terms mandatory for new council tenants?
A plan for that to apply to housing association tenants as well was only dropped because of concerns over their public-private status but many associations enthusiastically took up the voluntary option of fixed terms they were given in the 2011 Localism Act.
Until very recently it seemed that social housing was set to follow the private rented sector into a marketised world of flexibility and insecurity.
However, the pace of change on this issue in the last 12 months has been rapid and it is still accelerating.
The biggest move so far came on Friday when Labour followed up on its conference pledge to scrap no-fault evictions by announcing plans for indefinite private tenancies.
The green paper published by Labour on Thursday represents the most comprehensive plan for affordable housing put forward by a major party in England in 40 years.
The document launched by Jeremy Corbyn and John Healey does not just reject the market-based and Conservative-led polices of the last eight years, it also goes significantly further than the policies adopted by the last Labour government and in some ways even beyond what the party proposed at the last election.
In broad outline, it is an attempt to reclaim the word ‘affordable’ and spell out what housing ‘for the many’ would mean. And it explicitly rejects the current government’s claim that the only way to make housing affordable is to build as many new homes as possible:
‘Conservative housing policy is the wrong answer, to the wrong question. It is not just how many new homes we build, but what we build and who for that counts. We have to build more affordable homes to make homes more affordable.’
Originally posted on May 16 on my blog for Inside Housing.
Anyone caught up in the narrative about Labour’s radical manifesto will be left disappointed and a little bit puzzled by the party’s proposals on housing.
They will not be surprised given last week’s leak of the draft but they will find a sensible and pragmatic set of policies that move closer to what is desperately needed to tackle the housing crisis and are actually open to criticism for being too timid.
To give one example, the 2017 manifesto is routinely compared in the media to 1983’s ‘longest suicide note in history’.
But where Michael Foot’s Labour proposed a publicly-owned housebuilder and nationalisation of key parts of the building materials industry, Jeremy Corbyn’s party wants to extend Help to Buy for another seven years.
The equity loan part of the scheme is currently due to end in 2020 but Labour would guarantee funding until 2027 ‘to give long-term certainty to both first-time buyers and the housebuilding industry’.
That goes well beyond necessary action to avoid a cliff edge and abrupt fall in output after 2020.
It should be cause for celebration in the boardrooms of the big housebuilders because Help to Buy would continue to underpin their completions, profit margins, dividends and share options.
Or at least it might be if housebuilder executives were not also going to be hit personally by tax increases on higher earners and corporately by an excessive pay levy on employees paid over £500,000 a year.
But it’s still a surprising move from Labour. As Theresa May found out yesterday, Help to Buy is by no means universally popular and critics argue that too many of the benefits go to the big firms, their shareholders and people who can afford to buy anyway.
Whether you agree or disagree with it, extending Help to Buy until 2027 is evidence that on housing Labour’s approach would be pragmatic rather than ideological.
If you’re looking for anything new on housing in the Labour manifesto you’re going to have to search very hard for it.
The party’s priorities were clearly elsewhere in the document launched this morning and the housing sections are largely rehashes of Labour’s response to the Lyons Review and of previous statements on social security.
Housing gets a mention in the introduction but only in relation to housebuilding and home ownership:
‘We are not building the homes we need. Our sons and daughters have been shut out of the housing market and too often they are forced to leave the communities where they were brought up.’
The weekend’s big speech by Ed Balls looks like significant news for housing under a future Labour government – and not just for the obvious reasons.
The national headlines from the shadow chancellor’s speech to the Fabian conference were taken by his pledge to restore the 50p rate of tax and subsequent accusations that Labour is therefore anti-business. The undoubtedly good news for housing was that it will be ‘a central priority’ if Labour wins power in 2015.
But it was Balls’s message about ‘fiscal discipline’ that was more interesting to me:
‘We won’t be able to reverse all the spending cuts and tax rises that the Tories have pushed through. We will have to govern with less money, which means the next Labour government will have to make cuts too. No responsible Opposition can make detailed commitments and difficult judgments about what will happen in two or three years time without knowing the state of the economy and public finances that we will inherit.
‘But we know we will face difficult choices. The government’s day-to-day spending totals for 2015/16 will be our starting point. There will be no more borrowing for day-to-day spending. Any changes to the current spending plans for that year will be fully-funded and set out in advance in our manifesto.’
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 