Council Housing Residents Blocked From Accessing Communal Play Area And Gardens

A group of residents living on an estate have expressed outrage at being padlocked out from a communal garden and playground while private owners continue to have access. The Pembury Estate in Hackney, London used to be council-controlled housing, but management was handed over to the Peabody housing association 20 years ago. As part of the deal, Peabody was given permission to build a new block of privately rented flats with a fenced off garden and playground attached to the back. There is an external gate making it accessible to other residents of the estate, but Peabody has kept the gate padlocked for months. Read more on the Left Foot Forward website.

https://leftfootforward.org/2019/08/council-housing-residents-blocked-from-accessing-communal-play-area-and-gardens/

Budget: On Housing This Was About As Bad As It Gets

For those interested in a sensible housing policy and supporting the most vulnerable, this budget was about as bad as they get. There are five key elements. First is the decision to freeze the Local Housing Allowance. Already, this is a long way removed from what it actually costs to rent a property in many parts of the country. Shelter predicted that only 6 per cent of England would be affordable to those on housing benefit by 2017; that will now get even more extreme. Secondly, there are significant reductions in housing benefit entitlements -  the household benefit cap, the withdrawal of the family premium in housing benefit, the ending of housing benefit to those aged between 18 and 21 who are out of work, the restriction of housing benefit entitlement to families with more than two children. Thirdly, rents in the social sector are to reduce by 1 per cent a year, ripping up a ‘ten year’ agreement issued as recently as 2013. Fourth, rents for those earning £30,000 per year (£40,000 in London) will rise to ‘market or near market’ rents. Finally there is practically nothing in the budget which will boost housing supply. Read more on the Left Foot Forward website.

A Double Whammy for the Social Housing Sector

The extended Right to Buy to housing association tenants signals a further blow to the viability of social housing. It comes on top of cuts in capital funding and welfare reforms that have hit social tenants disproportionately hard. Selling housing association homes represents a double whammy for the social housing sector: loss of housing association homes paid for by sale of council homes. The consensus is that the extended Right to Buy will further weaken an already shrinking social housing sector. Social housing will probably be barely 15 per cent of total homes by the time of the next general election. It is also likely that many of sold housing association homes will eventually be owned by private landlords. It is estimated that one-third of ex-council homes sold since 1980 are now in the hands of private landlords. Read more on the Left Foot Forward website.

The Government Is Actively Contributing To Growing Housing Crisis

There are today 1.7m households on social waiting lists, yet the government’s focus is on creating a mini-housing boom through its Help to Buy scheme.  There are two housing systems in the UK receiving different rhetorical and real terms treatment from the government and the media. The first is the cossetted home ownership sector which receives billions in subsidy and is promoted as the ‘natural’ tenure for the UK’s ‘strivers’. Over the fence, there is social housing, which is gradually being whittled away through under-investment and sales and portrayal of its tenants as skivers and scroungers. Both approaches are contributing to a growing housing crisis in the UK. Read more on Left Foot Forward.

Welfare Minister Receives £10,000 from Loans Company

Tory DWP minister Esther McVey received £10,000 from the head of an aggressive loans company which offers unsecured high APR loans to customers on benefits. Tory donor Henry Angest, the chairman and chief executive of Arbuthnot Banking Group, gave the Conservative Party £17,500 in the first quarter of 2014, including £10,000 to welfare minister Esther McVey. Arbuthnot Banking Group acquired Everyday Loans in 2012, a company that provides unsecured loans to people on benefits at up to 80 per cent APR. Read more on the Left Foot Forward blog.

Government Failing Miserably In The Face Of Growing Housing Crisis

There are 1.7m households on council waiting lists, homelessness has grown by 68 per cent since 2009 and last year’s house building figures were the lowest since the Second World War and 45 per cent down on 2008 when the financial crisis hit. The chancellor’s Budget response was to announce a series of small loan funds aimed at pet projects – £525m development finance to encourage small and medium size builders, £150m to help self-builders and an inadequate loan pot for the private sector to become involved in inner city estate regeneration. Alongside this, the prime minister’s on-off romance with garden cities finally blossomed with one now planned for Kent, although when it will be built is debatable given the growing nimbyism in Tory ranks. The extension of the Help to Buy scheme for would-be home owners to 2020, at an estimated cost of £6bn is an ineffective means of increasing affordable housing supply but highly efficient at stimulating demand and inflating house prices. It worsens rather than tackles the underlying affordability problem in the UK’s housing market. Read more on the Left Foot Forward blog.

A Housing Policy in Disarray

To a large extent, the few housing policy announcements made at recent Labour and Tory conferences have been eclipsed by changes in the housing brief announced by both main parties in Monday’s ministerial and shadow ministerial reshuffles. All the same, Kris Hopkins, MP for Keighley, has been appointed housing minister, taking over from Mark Prisk, who was axed after just over a year in the role. Hopkins joins the CLG as an undersecretary of state, suggesting the role of housing minister has been demoted in the government’s ministerial hierarchy and reinforcing the impression that chancellor George Osborne is running housing policy from the Treasury.  Wolverhampton MP Emma Reynolds has replaced Jack Dromey as Labour’s shadow housing minister. Worryingly for the housing and construction sectors, these changes may signal downgrading of housing policy at a time when housing is growing in importance in the public’s mind. Read more on the Left Foot Forward blog.

The Benefit Cap Tackles a Real Problem from the Wrong End

A cap on the total amount of benefits that people receive begins rolling out across England, Wales and Scotland today. The problem is that the cap tackles a real problem from the wrong end. Taxpayers are often not subsidising claimants at all, but rather handing large sums of money to private landlords.  Today, a new report came out detailing how a third of Britain is now effectively off-limits to lower income families because of the increasing cost of rent. This being the case, it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that the benefits bill has also been increasing – the key point which the government has seemingly missed is that the state is subsidising landlords, rather than tenants.  Read more on the Left Foot Forward blog.