Can Labour Deliver 100,000 Social Homes Annually Within Five Years?

This was the headline promise from the leaked version of Labour’s manifesto. How feasible is it? Labour seems to have stepped back from a much more ambitious target of delivering 500,000 affordable homes over a five-year parliament. The new pledge is still ambitious but appears much more realistic. It says ‘By the end of the next Parliament we will be building at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year for rent or sale’. Let’s have a closer look at what it would require. Labour’s peak output was 61,090 in 2010/11, and the coalition managed 66,700 in 2014/15. Output fell sharply in the following year, to only 32,630, because the end of the previous financial year had been the cut-off date for the previous Affordable Homes Programme. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

The Redfern Review Into The Decline Of Home Ownership

The review reflects John Healey’s determination to put widening the opportunities for home ownership at the heart of Labour’s approach to housing. It is a significant development in the Labour Party’s housing policy for a tenure group that it is often ignored by the Left. The review takes the view that the fall of home-ownership in England from 71% to 60% frustrates the legitimate desire of most people to own their own home. There have been too many short term initiatives in housing policy. Solutions seeking to improve home ownership without considering the impact on other tenures will be unsuccessful. The reasons for this decline are several. Real house prices rose by 151% from the end of 1996 to the end of 2006, while real earnings have risen only about a quarter as much as that. The growth of buy to let mortgages and the global economic crisis have also contributed. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

Support For Private Market More Than Double Spending On Affordable Homes

The new UK Housing Review 2016 puts together figures you won’t find anywhere else: the government’s investment plans for housing and how they split between supporting the private market and building affordable homes. They show that the different market-support packages like Help to Buy and starter homes now total £43 billion, whereas affordable investment totals only £18 billion. The CIH concludes that, as a result, investment in affordable renting ‘will fall to its lowest levels since the Second World War’. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

There’ll Be A Boost To Housing Investment, But You’ll Have To Wait For It

‘I am doubling the housing budget’ said the Chancellor. But what he failed to add was that we’ll have to wait three years to see the extra money. In fact, more than a third of the extra won’t arrive until the next parliament. In the meantime, affordable housing investment will stay at just under £1 billion per year. As John Healey points out, in current prices this is barely 30% of what Labour was investing annually in housing. Even if it reaches £2.4 billion in 2020/21, this will only be a bit more than three-quarters of what Labour was spending before May 2010, calculated at current prices. Despite this, Osborne claims to have created ‘the biggest house building programme by any government since the 1970s’. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

Do We Have To Sell Off High-Value Council Houses?

The plan to sell off high-value council houses would require the top third in value of all council houses to be sold when they fall vacant, an estimated 15,000 sales per year. A report from a group of London boroughs estimates they’d need to sell 3,500 houses and flats in the next five years. This gives a real measure of the scale of the disaster that’s about to befall those areas where these more valuable homes are located.  The effects will be concentrated in certain areas rather than being pepper-potted, as the government is believed to be planning to define ‘high value’ regionally (so London will be one of the regions). In Westminster this would literally mean all relets – 400 units per year – being sold, with none being available to families on the waiting list. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

So, Rent Controls Will Drive ‘Three Out Of Five Landlords’ Out Of The Market?

What an unhappy coincidence that on the day the Residential Landlords Association chose to bleat about Labour’s planned rent controls, the private rented sector was fingered as one of the main reasons for the growth in the numbers of homeless families. The latest Homelessness Monitor, published by Crisis, shows that losing a private tenancy now accounts for almost one-third of official homelessness cases and is the reason behind most of the recent growth in caseloads. Private sector rent levels are also helping to drive up homelessness because they are often too high to be eligible for housing benefit.  Read more on the Red Brick blog.

Another Inglorious Failure

The New Homes Bonus scheme was meant to be a reward to councils that encouraged housebuilding. There was some Treasury funding at first but the main method of funding was to ‘top slice’ normal council grants. There was therefore always going to be a redistributive effect from some councils and to others. Analysis in the Financial Times concludes that the NHB ‘has shifted cash from poor northern councils to rich areas in the south with little evidence that it has boosted homebuilding.’ The FT quotes the National Audit Office finding that there is ‘little evidence’ that the bonus has change councils’ behaviour in terms of planning, contradicting ex Minister Mark Prisk’s claim that it would bring about ‘at least 400,000 additional homes’. According to the authors, NHB has cost £2.2 billion so far – which happens to be 50% more than the annual affordable grant programme. For that money, to justify itself the policy should be delivering major improvements in housing approvals and delivery. It plainly isn’t. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

SHOUT Campaign for Social Housing off To a Great Start

The SHOUT campaign (social housing under threat) got off to a great start with a successful launch event in Parliament. Speakers from the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green parties spoke in support of the importance of social rented housing as a major part of solving the housing crisis. There was considerable cross–Party support for the SHOUT Manifesto. Although not everyone agreed with everything – with political differences most notable around the right to buy – there was a strong consensus in support of building more homes for social rent and in favour of the case for moving back from ‘benefits to bricks’. In an interesting contribution, Gary Porter called for all the political parties to put the removal of council borrowing for housebuilding from the public borrowing requirement in their manifestoes. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

The Slow Demise of Social Rented Housing

The latest affordable housing figures show that numbers of new social rented homes have fallen by half. The year before, they’d fallen by more than half. So whereas for the three years up to 2011/12 we were producing around 34,000 new homes for social renting each year, now it’s less than 8,000. It’s not as if this is a temporary lull. From 2015, there’ll be virtually no social rented output funded by the HCA, so although local authorities will continue to build and let at social rents from their own resources, we can expect a further sharp fall in output. Furthermore, any recycled receipts from right to buy sales can only be used to build homes at higher, Affordable Rents (not social rents). Read more on the Red Brick blog.

Miliband Drags Private Renting Into the 21st Century At Last

Ed Miliband rides to the rescue of ‘Generation Rent’ – taking the boldest of steps and bringing together a number of Labour’s big themes – by promising thorough reform of the private rented sector. For years now, people have been saying ‘something must be done’ about the private rented sector, and now ‘something’ is on the agenda. It’s the right thing to do, it’s audacious, it’s imaginative, and it’s not before time. And it will come under sustained attack from the Tories and from the less enlightened end of the landlord lobby. Already the lead Tory buffoon Grant Shapps has called it ‘Venezuela-style’. He has apparently never heard of Germany or Ireland, where rules similar to these have been successful and led to a much more stable private rented sector. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

From Right to Buy to Buy to Let

Tom Copley, Labour’s housing spokesperson on the London Assembly and chair of the London Labour Housing Group, has compiled an astonishing report on the disaster of the right to buy in London. Tom concludes: ‘As a policy, Right to Buy is possibly unrivalled in representing such poor value for money to both taxpayers and local authorities. For taxpayers, they not only funded the initial building of the council home, they then subsidised the substantial discounts offered to tenants and then – once the homes were sold – missed out on the rental income that would have covered the build costs.’ Tom focuses on the evidence he has collected that shows that a minimum of 36% of all homes sold by councils across London are now let by private landlords. Many are let at extremely high market rents to tenants who need support from housing benefit. Tax payers have to pay again. To add insult to injury, some of the homes are let back to councils or housing associations to house homeless households for which the councils have statutory responsibility. Read more on the Red Brick blog.

MP Tells Developer to Beware Of Council's 'Social Cleansing'

A Labour MP has warned a major housebuilder that its proposed joint venture with a London council will involve it in "social engineering". Andy Slaughter, MP for Hammersmith, has written to developer Stanhope over its planned deal with Hammersmith and Fulham Council for the development of luxury flats after the demolition of "hundreds and possibly thousands" of council homes. In a letter to the firm's CEO, David Camp, the MP warns that Stanhope risks losing its corporate reputation if it proceeds with the scheme. Read more in Andy Slaughter’s post on Red Brick.

New Homes Bonus Not Fit For Purpose

The latest planning application figures published by CLG give little comfort to the view that we are seeing a resurgent housebuilding sector emerging on the back of the New Homes Bonus and generous government support to the housebuilding industry. It is of course hard to disentangle the NHB impact given the data is not readily available and it sits at odds with the more traditional housing starts and completions data sets.  The Hansard record of the debates point up the fact that the NHB output includes empty homes coming back into use  and a large number of new one bedroom flats which seem either to be conversions of existing larger  and possibly multi-occupied homes plus new student residences.  Either way the evidence regarding the incentive effects of NHB are very poor to date raising the question about whether it is fit for purpose as a central plank of housing supply policy. Read more of this blog post on the Red Brick blog.

NPPF Tries to Mix Oil and Water

The National Planning Policy Framework, the final version of which was published – and comes into effect – this week, is good at polarising opinion.  As someone who thinks we haven’t built enough homes for a generation, under Governments of both Parties, the apparent determination to build more houses is appealing.  A small part of me admires Planning Minister Greg Clark’s willingness to take on some traditional Tory interests in his attempt to do so.  But the NPPF leaves me feeling queasy that it just won’t deliver or it will deliver the wrong things.  Where there are local council plans in existence, it leaves too much scope for NIMBY interests.  Where there are no local plans, the ‘presumption in favour of development’ seems to me to give developers too much rope and too much power.  So the NPPF might just be defining the next battleground between developers and local communities.  Quite correctly, the NPPF says development should be plan-led; but combining localism with thrusting commercial interest is like mixing water and oil – they will separate eventually.  Read more of this opinion piece on the Red Brick blog.

Tenants Don’t Count Says Shapps

Last week Metro carried an article about the rise in the number of people being forced out of their homes by mortgage lenders or landlords. 16,600 properties were repossessed in the third quarter of 2011, a rise of 20%. The article clearly pointed out that ‘nearly half of the repossessions were carried out on behalf of mortgage lenders, while 5,140 tenants were evicted for social landlords and another 1,627 on behalf of private landlords.’ They quoted an expert claiming that the numbers would continue to rise as unemployment continued to bite. So far no surprise, but the article provoked a little tantrum from our housing minister. It was ‘Inaccurate and misleading’ he said. And why? Well, it was because the article was ‘lumping together statistics of homeowners, social tenants and private tenants’. Now the original article was not about tenure but about people losing their homes, whatever their tenure and whatever their circumstances. Read more on the Red Brick blog.