I spent the back half of last week at the European Network for Housing Research Annual Conference in Edinburgh. The organising committee were kind to me. My paper on the battle over the “bedroom tax” was timetabled for the first morning, so it was soon out the way and […]
There’s plenty happening in the housing world at the moment, and I’m not just talking about last week’s parallel Manchester gatherings at the CIH annual conference and the HACT House Party. We’ve seen IPPR launch a fuller version of its proposals for shifting housing subsidy away from housing […]
There seems to be an awful lot of housing news and comment circulating just at the moment. And it isn’t just more of the same. The arguments for a change of gear on housing policy seem to be growing louder and more frequent. The housing sector, it’s argued, […]
On Thursday Kris Hopkins, the Housing Minister, published a post at the Spectator entitled This government is solving Britain’s homes crisis. The post was designed to coincide with the publication of statistics about the unlovely, and largely unloved, Help to Buy scheme. When I saw the post I […]
A few weeks ago Janan Ganesh in the FT described the UK housing market as an ‘institutionalised pathology’. The problems that the housing market is causing for the British economic and political system seemingly become ever more apparent by the day. There is an increasingly strong coalition of […]
It’s clear we’re already entering what is going to be a very long election campaign in the run up to May 2015. In the housing policy field we’re seeing plenty of organisations pitching ideas at the moment, with the aim of influencing the content of the manifestos for […]
Rent regulation and three year tenancies. That’s Ed’s big housing idea for the private rented sector. It is what the people wanted. Well, quite a lot of people appear to support the idea. But even before the formal announcement has been made it is apparent that some are […]
You’d expect lefties to kick up a fuss about the Coalition’s austerity-justified policies. An agenda that is having serious negative impacts upon the most vulnerable, while at the same time transferring wealth to the already wealthy, will have a tendency to annoy those who prioritize solidarity, dignity and […]
On Wednesday this year’s Housing Studies Association conference featured a panel discussion on the theme “Who is best placed to judge the value of housing – the state or the consumer?”. The panel members were Vidhya Alakeson of the Resolution Foundation; John Moss, a Councillor at LB Waltham […]
There is little doubt that IDS’s pet project – welfare reform – is having a significant impact on the lives of some of the most disadvantaged members of our society. And for every case where we might conclude that impact is positive, it would appear there is a […]
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