Spring Statement glow could soon fade
Posted: March 27, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Welfare reform | Tags: Spring Statement Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Just for a change, housing looks like one of the winners from the Spring Statement – but is everything quite what it seems?
On housebuilding overall, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) gave Rachel Reeves a big boost as it delivered a positive verdict on the planning reforms introduced by the government in the Autumn.
The chancellor boasted in her speech that measures such as the new National Planning Policy Framework, the release of ‘grey belt’ land and the restoration of mandatory housing targets would permanently boost GDP by 0.2 per cent by 2029/30 and 0.4 per cent within ten years.
She said: ‘That is the biggest positive growth impact that the OBR have ever reflected in their forecast, for a policy with no fiscal cost.’
Just as good for the chancellor was the watchdog’s forecast on housing numbers: ‘The OBR have concluded that our reforms will lead to housebuilding reaching a 40-year high of 305,000 a year by the end of the forecast period,’ she said. ‘And changes to the National Planning Policy Framework alone will help build over 1.3 million homes in the UK over the next five years, taking us within touching distance of delivering our manifesto promise to build 1.5 million homes in England in this parliament.’
The chancellor phrased that carefully but the Treasury press release was more gung-ho as it boasted that this would be ‘bringing the UK one step closer to its Plan for Change mission to build 1.5 million homes’.
That really would be good news, since almost nobody believes the target can be met, but read that paragraph again and you may spot a problem with it.
Read the rest of this entry »A statement of lack of intent from Sunak
Posted: March 28, 2022 Filed under: Housing benefit, Poverty, Welfare state | Tags: Rishi Sunak, Spring Statement Leave a commentRishi Sunak was always going to have to tackle the cost of living crisis in his Spring Statement and the big questions were how and who would benefit.
Faced with a choice between measures that would benefit the well-off, those on middle incomes and the least well-off, the chancellor did a bit for the first and second groups but more or less ignored the third.
He chose to increase the threshold for National Insurance at a cost of around £25bn over the next five years and followed that up with a 1p cut in the standard rate of income tax at a cost of more than £17bn over the three years from just before the next election in 2024 – though his previous decisions to freeze the tax thresholds and increase NI rates mean these tax ‘cuts’ were really tax rises.
Of the three new measures that he billed as ‘helping families with the cost of living’, the temporary 5p cut in fuel duty (£2.4bn next year) and cut in VAT on energy efficiency materials (£280m over the next five years) are good news if you can afford a car or improvements to your home but not much use otherwise.
The £500m increase in the Household Support Fund in 2022/23 will enable local authorities to help the most vulnerable households with the cost of essentials but it is a drop in the ocean compared to his action (or lack of it) on benefits in general.
To put this in perspective, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that average real disposable incomes will fall by 2.2 per cent next year, the most since records began.
However, the squeeze on benefits will be much greater than that.
Read the rest of this entry »Housing in the Spring Statement
Posted: March 13, 2019 Filed under: Affordable housing, Climate change, Housebuilding, Land, Permitted development | Tags: Spring Statement Leave a commentOriginally published on March 13 as a blog for Inside Housing.
With Brexit dominating everything, the Spring Statement seems at first glance to be just as underwhelming as the chancellor hoped when he moved the main Budget event of the year to the Autumn.
The most eye-catching details from usual array of announcements and re-announcements on housing includes are £3bn Affordable Housing Guarantee Scheme to support 30,000 homes and a proposal to ban fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025.
But to add to the sense of Brexit drift, the first re-introduces a coalition scheme that lowered borrowing costs for housing associations but was abolished in 2015 while the second does something to address climate change but will be arriving nine years later than the zero carbon homes that were scrapped by the coalition.
Jules Birch 