I was asked to produce a brief note setting out some of the context and challenges facing housing associations.
The note was to inform thinking as part of a strategy discussion taking place somewhere in England.
I took that brief note and elaborated upon it a bit.
Given that the discussion was couched in pretty broad terms, it may be of interest to others. So I’ve posted the resulting document on Scribd and you can access it here beneath the fold.
Yesterday the Chartered Institute of Housing released a brief note summarizing a couple of recent roundtable discussions they arranged jointly with Tunstall. The focus of the discussions was on how housing policymakers and practitioners can make the case to the health service for diverting funds into housing and care. A lot of health spending – both primary and acute care – is directed at providing services to older people. Yet, a chunk of this spending could be avoided.
The CIH note deals with some pressing issues and arguments, but it is written in the awful quasi-management speak beloved by some practitioners. Every time I read the term “the housing offer”, for example, it sets my teeth on edge. But the note also, inadvertently, highlights a very important point. It says something interesting about the changing dynamics of service delivery.
Provision of extracare housing and appropriate support and adaptations, among other things, has the potential to prevent incidents in the home that result in hospital admissions. It can also allow older people to keep living independently for longer. And it can speed hospital discharge so that older people do not end up occupying hospital beds they no longer need. This we know. And we have known it for years.
The important point the CIH note raises is in its tone and orientation. And what this tells us about the drivers of policymaking at the moment. Continue Reading →
Under the heading A One Nation programme with new ideas to begin turning Britain’s economy around yesterday Ed Miliband outlined six bills that would appear in Labour’s alternative Queen’s speech. It is good to see him offering some policy detail, at last, but to what extent are we being offered new ideas?
The focus of the housing component of his statement was the private rented sector, which in one sense is new. The idea that the political battle to be fought over housing was going to be fought over private renting is one that would have made no sense a few years ago. And whether it is the biggest problem facing the housing system at the moment, given the broader context of poor affordability for a nation of frustrated aspirant home owners, could be debated.
Leaving that to one side, what did he offer? Continue Reading →
Last week The Independent published an article on an initiative by Yarlington Housing Group, down here in the South West. Yarlington have introduced Household Ambition Plans for their tenants. Such plans will not necessarily focus on ambitions related to housing, rather they could include losing weight or giving up smoking. And whether or not a households is offered another tenancy will depend on how well they meet their ambitions.
This development has generated considerable debate in the housing world.
My discussion of the issue roamed wide and long(ish) so I have put it into Scribd rather than just treating it as a blogpost. You can read it below.
One of the central conclusions drawn from the Global Financial Crisis was that the UK economy was too dependent on financial services and unproductive investment in the property market rather than the real economy. So the economy needs rebalancing.
One of the main issues facing the housing market is that households overwhelmingly aspire to owner occupation, even as the chances of accessing the tenure become increasingly limited. House prices that seem to defy gravity, stagnating incomes, and difficulties in meeting deposit requirements mean that thousands of households have to reconcile themselves to renting privately for the long term. That the whole system is a mess hardly needs saying.
Is addressing the broader economic rebalancing agenda compatible with addressing the dysfunctional housing market? Is it possible to rebalance the economy without persuading households to spend less on housing and invest elsewhere instead? Even framing the question like this implies that households have a choice over incurring large housing costs, which of course is not the case for many people.
Unravelling the dependence of the UK economy on financial services and property investment is no easy matter. It took many years to back ourselves quite so tightly into this corner. How is policy handling the complexities of the agenda?
On the housing side we could argue that things are not going hugely well. Efforts to increase housing supply directly are modest, while efforts to increase supply indirectly by assisting with housing costs – notably the Help to Buy scheme – have been widely condemned as wrong-headed. On the economic side, the government has clearly made some efforts in the direction of rebalancing both sectorally and regionally, but these are initiatives that are going to take years to have serious impacts on the productive capacity of the economy. Whether the government is pursuing the rebalancing agenda with sufficient vigour is debatable.
That brings me to a curiosity. Continue Reading →
Over the last few years Policy Exchange has been a prolific contributor to the debate over the direction of housing policy. As regular readers will know, I have not always been entirely complimentary about those contributions. In particular the PX regularly exhibits an unhealthy fixation with the planning system as the source of Britain’s housing supply woes. I’m not aware of anyone who thinks the planning system is perfect, but to lay the blame entirely at its doorstep is too simplistic. I suspect PX knows that full well: its work on other aspects of housing supply shows a more sophisticated understanding of the interlocking problems that have led the system to its current parlous state. I can only assume that it is somehow constitutionally obliged to have a dig at “top down, centralised planning” in all housing-related publications.
Planning is again the bogeyman in the most recent brief PX publication on Housing and Intergenerational Fairness, produced for Hanover. But its invocation is rather incidental and a little half-hearted. The discussion treats planning as both more inflexible and less contextualised than it is. That is the case regarding the discussion of density. Planning systems may well have specified (re)development at higher densities. But that is not a timeless given. It is part of a broader agenda driven by concerns for sustainable, compact cities rather than sprawl and long-term energy dependence. It is not simply caprice on the part of planners.
Anyway, the critique of the planning system is not really central to the contribution the new publication makes to the debate.
On my reading the piece makes three useful contributions. Continue Reading →
When the Chancellor announced his two-part Help to Buy scheme in the Budget last month it was met with a chorus of disapproval. Representatives from the mortgage and construction industries – who, of course, have a financial interest in seeing the scheme implemented – were positive about it. Pretty much everyone else thought it was a pretty dumb idea.
When I reviewed the scheme at the time I noted:
Just about the only perspective from which this initiative makes sense is carrying through on an absolute determination not to add directly to the public sector deficit, but not minding too much if the guarantees get lost amongst everything else in the public debt.
So it probably makes perfect sense to the Treasury.
Otherwise, the scheme has almost nothing to commend it. The economic illiteracy it displays is remarkable. The fact that, coming from the current occupant of No 11, this is no great surprise is perhaps equally remarkable.
The debate has now been joined by the Treasury Select Committee in its report on the 2013 Budget. What comes through clearly from the paragraphs of the Select Committee’s report is that they are not hugely impressed with the Help to Buy scheme. But it is perhaps even more clear is that the Committee is not at all impressed with the quality of thought – or lack of it – that underpins the scheme. They finish their discussion of the scheme with a list of 17 questions they would like the Treasury to answer (para 182). These questions address topics of an absolutely fundamental nature. They are the basics that need to be in place before it is possible to conduct a sensible appraisal of the wisdom of spending more than £15 billion under the Help to Buy scheme. You get the unmistakeable sense that the Select Committee is frustrated, and not a little alarmed, that the Treasury is as yet unable to provide clear answers to even the simplest of questions (Para 177: “As far as can be understood from the Chancellor’s evidence, …”).
Most of the issues covered by the Select Committee report have already been discussed. And the pattern of industry support for the scheme contrasted with scepticism elsewhere repeats itself.
One important further dimension the Select Committee adds to the debate – apart from further weight behind the criticism – is a form of the slippery slope argument. Continue Reading →
The objections to George Osborne’s latest wheeze to assist the housing market are hardly worth discussing. They are almost too obvious. And they have been rehearsed at length in relation to similar, smaller scale initiatives that have already been tried.
The new “Help to Buy” scheme, announced in today’s Budget, aims to provide equity loans of up to 20% of the value of new properties worth less than £600,000. Households have to come up with a 5% deposit to participate. The Chancellor is proposing that the scheme be backed up with government guarantees sufficient to support £130 billion of mortgages. The guarantee scheme will start in 2014 for a period of three years.
Just about the only perspective from which this initiative makes sense is carrying through on an absolute determination not to add directly to the public sector deficit, but not minding too much if the guarantees get lost amongst everything else in the public debt.
So it probably makes perfect sense to the Treasury.
Otherwise, the scheme has almost nothing to commend it. The economic illiteracy it displays is remarkable. The fact that, coming from the current occupant of No 11, this is no great surprise is perhaps equally remarkable. Continue Reading →
Let’s start with the most important point. The Coalition’s proposal to cut the housing benefit to social housing tenants who are deemed to be underoccupying is going to cause further hardship for households who are already poor and vulnerable. Reflecting on the experience of the WCA regime administered by ATOS, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the changes will make life intolerable for some.
The second most important point about the bedroom tax is that it is likely to lead to some housing associations going out of business as a consequence of rising rent arrears. This could spread the misery and uncertainty to a much wider group of households who are not directly affected by the changes to the rules on underoccupancy.
And this story is going to begin to unfold for real in less than two months’ time, unless the government has a major rethink.
But stepping back and looked at the issue from a more detached position the politics of the underoccupancy changes are interesting.
The welfare reform agenda is made up of several distinct policy changes. Some of them are genuine reforms of the system – such as the move to universal credit. Some are simply cuts. All of these changes have be criticised heavily by those close to the social security system. But only the changes to the rules on underoccupancy – the so-called “bedroom tax” – seem to have gathered any political traction. And even here the momentum behind opposition is gathering rather late in the day.
One reason for the failure of opposition to these reforms is the fact that the Government’s reworking of language – its version of fairness and its crude division of the world into skivers and strivers – strikes a populist note. It goes does well will the tabloids.
The Government has done a good job of boiling their agenda down to a few simple, divisive messages that can secure majority support. Continue Reading →
[On 6th February I participated in the NHF South West Regional Conference “Building neighbourhoods”, held in Exeter. This is the text to accompany my presentation.]
For half a century the aspiration behind housing policy in England has been captured by the statement “A decent home for all at a price within their means”, or some variation on that theme.
Embedded in this statement are three key terms:
The way in which this aspiration has been articulated may have remained broadly constant, but the vigour with which governments have pursued it has varied. The rhetoric may be the same, but the realities of the substance of policy and implementation may have differed substantially.
And the understanding of the three key terms is mutable. Over time thinking has shifted. For example, when we talk of a “price within their means” do we mean that housing costs need to be lowered so that they can be sustained on the basis of available earned income? This might suggest the need to reduce housing costs. Or should it be interpreted as meaning that we need to enhance households’ incomes so that prevailing housing costs come within their reach?
We could rehearse the history of housing policy over this period and trace out the ways in which the aspirations of housing policy have subtly, and not so subtly, been reinterpreted. But we won’t. For now the important point is that the Coalition government is, broadly speaking, holding to the standard rhetoric. But at the same time it is reframing the debate. Continue Reading →
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