On Tuesday 7th December I chaired “The Social Housing Tenants Engagement Event 2021” for Government Events. That entailed making some preliminary remarks and some closing reflections. I have amalgamated these comments into this blogpost. How best to engage social housing residents in the management and governance of their […]
[This post first appeared on the CaCHE blog on 28/01/20] This blog by Professor Alex Marsh is based upon an extract from the presentation ‘Spotlight on the private rented sector’, given to the Wales Housing Research Conference, 9 January 2020. This post follows the recent CaCHE blog series on […]
The Grenfell Tower inferno is a tragedy on a scale that is difficult to process. It has already generated acres of comment in the mainstream media and on the blogs. While much sense is being talked, there is some nonsense out there. Some of the comment from the […]
Over at the Guardian Dawn Foster kicked off the year with Five steps to fixing the UK housing crisis in 2016. The five steps proposed were: build social housing; scrap the bedroom tax; improve renters’ rights; tackle homelessness; scrap help to buy and right to buy. At the […]
Liberals aren’t desperately keen on concentrations of power. It’s pretty integral to the whole ‘liberal’ thing. Whether it be power accreting to the state or to private interests or to the church, stark structural inequalities can threaten mechanisms by which different voices can be heard and society can […]
The full ramifications of George Osborne’s pronouncements on housing during the Autumn Statement will no doubt take a while to emerge. Some of the rumours of nasty surprises proved to be unfounded. There were some surprises that were broadly positive – such as the increase in stamp duty […]
Last Friday evening I took a trip out to Coalpit Heath to talk housing at a meeting of the newly constituted South Gloucestershire Liberal Democrats. The title I was working to was Housing: What Crisis?. The talk was followed by a Q&A session in which members of the […]
The announcement by ONS that housing associations are to be reclassified as non-financial public corporations, thereby moving at least £60bn of debt onto the public balance sheet, came as a surprise to many. It perhaps came as more of a surprise than it should have done, given that […]
An awful lot seems to have happened on the housing policy front this week. Or at least the volume of housing talk has increased considerably. We started the week with Brandon Lewis announcing that the Government wants to see a million new homes by 2020. But the Government […]
It is tempting to think that the UK housing system is uniquely dysfunctional. Policy over so many years has so manifestly failed to get the measure of the problem and failed to take sufficiently radical action that we might be tempted to consider those in charge uniquely inept. […]
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