Category: Housing

Engaging social housing tenants

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 […]

Comment in the aftermath of Grenfell

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 […]

Executive unchecked

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 […]

Housing and the Autumn Statement

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 […]

Housing: What Crisis?

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 […]

Sell offs and sell outs

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 […]