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New housing ideas from One Nation Labour?

admin / April 30, 2013 / Housing / Permalink

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 →

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Who is social housing for, and who should it be for?

admin / April 10, 2013 / Bristol, Politics / Permalink

Yesterday I participated in a consultation event organised by Bristol City Council. it was designed to start a debate locally about the revision of social housing allocations policy. My talk, which ranged rather more broadly than simply allocations policy, is a bit too long to include in a blog post, so I have bunged it on to Scribd. It can be accessed below. Continue Reading →

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Next steps for housing policy

admin / February 7, 2013 / Housing / Permalink

[On 6^th 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:

a decent home
for all
a price within their means.

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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Nothing to see here …

admin / January 7, 2013 / Housing, Politics / Permalink

I’m not quite sure what the point of today’s Coalition Mid-Term Review was. Apart from reasserting that the Coalition intends to go the distance – and beyond? – the main thing that was clear was that they’d really rather like the media to change the metaphor and stop talking about a loveless marriage.

The document itself is largely a list of what the Government has done. It is not an evaluation of that programme. It does not, for example, compare what it has done with what it was planning to do. Nor does it reflect upon why the latter has, in many areas, fallen considerably short of the former.

And it is not – perhaps understandably – a critical document. All the actions the Government has taken thus far are presented unselfconsciously as positive in themselves, commensurate with the scale of the challenge they seek to address, and contributing positively to the achievement of the Coalition’s overall, shared agenda.

It is, therefore, largely a PR puff. As befits a government led by a former PR man.

Much of the document is taken up with what has happened since May 2010. But some of it is given over to listing future plans. I have been through the whole document and my sense is that a substantial slice of these future plans will not come as news. Lots of the individual initiatives have already been announced. That isn’t to say that there is nothing new in the document. Just that you have to hunt quite hard for it.

My first instinct was to search the document to see what it has to say about housing. This is, after all, as Nick Cohen reminded us earlier today in the Spectator, one of the biggest problems we currently face. Continue Reading →

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Housing at half-time

admin / November 21, 2012 / Housing / Permalink

There isn’t a great deal of disagreement about the key problems facing the British housing market.

The main issues are high housing costs in both the owner occupied and private rented sectors, with correspondingly high bills for housing allowances. Many households have difficulties in accessing appropriate accommodation, particularly given the limited flow of lettings in the social rented sector. And the market is subject to high volatility by international standards, which has negative ramifications for the macroeconomy. The root cause of this is the failure of housing supply – over a period measured in decades rather than years – to keep pace with the increase in the number of households.

The disagreements start to emerge when we move on to discuss what we should do about it. And, more specifically, to consider whether the Government is currently doing enough to address the problems identified. The Government has provided a perfectly sensible diagnosis of the problem. There has been quite a bit of policy pronouncement and promise. Much of the early bustle was brought together in last year’s strategy, Laying the foundations.

But does all this add up to a policy response that is appropriately targeted and on sufficient scale to make a dent in the problem? Continue Reading →

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Restructuring to reduce market volatility

admin / September 11, 2012 / Housing / Permalink

Last May the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Housing Market Taskforce produced a major report which touched on a wide range of housing market issues, with the main concern being how to reduce the substantial and dysfunctional volatility that plagues the market. Four issues were identified: increasing housing supply in the long run, implementing policy instruments to deal with short run price volatility, developing innovative and effective mechanisms for protecting consumers from the consequences of market volatility, and fostering alternatives to home ownership that will provide households with long term secure accommodation.

Two of the academics involved in the work of the Taskforce – Mark Stephens and Peter Williams – have returned to provide an update, published today, on policy developments under the Coalition. Has the Government taken the sort of steps that will move the housing market on to a more stable footing? Continue Reading →

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Housing transformations and trajectories: My contribution to #SLFconf

admin / July 15, 2012 / Housing, Politics / Permalink

[This is the text accompanying my presentation to the 2nd Social Liberal Forum Conference: “Social justice across generations”, King's College London, 14/07/12. Not all of it was delivered on the day, because of the way the session panned out and because there's too much of it. My thanks to my co-contributors Paula Keaveney, Emily Davey and Martin Tod - and to everyone who attended - for a really interesting session.]

We are experiencing a momentous period in UK housing – both in terms of the housing system itself and housing policy. This is not simply a product of the current economic crisis but of the crisis layered on top of longer-term and deeply-rooted problems.

We are witnessing a housing transformation on the ground. The last five or six years have seen an increase of more than a million households living in the private rented sector. This is in part because of the scarcity of mortgages for first time buyers; one of the consequences of the Global Financial Crisis.

And we are witnessing a transformation in the thinking underpinning housing policy. As those who play #shappsbingo know, Grant Shapps regularly refers to his aim of shattering the “lazy” consensus in housing policy. I don’t agree with him on much, but I think it is fair to say that there was a consensus on the broad parameters of housing policy, and that he has shattered it. Ideas that a few years ago were only whispered among the more outré right wing think tanks are now the premises upon which policy is based.

And if we don’t like the direction in which housing policy is heading then we will need to come up with some strong social liberal arguments as to why not. In my view housing policy needs refounding. Continue Reading →

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Housing and the global financial crisis

admin / June 5, 2012 / Housing, Politics / Permalink

One of most interesting dimensions of current developments in the housing market is the way in which global economic events are being refracted through housing policy: how a problem created in the private sector is being used to reconfigure the social rented sector and advance some long-standing objectives for the political right. In this respect it is a microcosm of the broader austerity agenda.

I have a paper forthcoming in the journal Housing, Theory and Society that has just become available on iFirst. It’s called The global economic crisis and the reshaping of housing opportunities. The paper is coauthored with my colleagues Patricia Kennett and Ray Forrest. We’ve worked together for 16 years and, after discussing a lot of possibilities, this is the first paper we’ve managed to coauthor. It’s in a special issue on the housing fallout from the global financial crisis. Continue Reading →

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On curbing housing benefit

admin / May 30, 2012 / Housing / Permalink

The Coalition committed itself to reducing the aggregate housing benefit bill, which stood at around £20bn per year when it took office. The seemingly inexorable growth in housing benefit payments had been identified as a problem before the Coalition’s formation. It was one indicator that the housing market was sick. So the Coalition’s policy aspirations here were not particularly implausible or objectionable. Indeed, you could argue that it showed creditable determination to deal with a longstanding issue.

The issue is how it has, then, gone about tackling the problem. And to do so it has started by introduced a range of restrictions on eligibility. Here in Bristol it is forecast that something like £11million will be removed from the annual private rented sector housing benefit bill, and the local authority has been allocated £500,000 to manage the fallout. If and when Universal Credit arrives next year the cap on housing benefit will sharply tighten again for many households. Continue Reading →

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Beds, sheds, and regs

admin / May 13, 2012 / Housing, Welfare State / Permalink

She is looking forward to returning to Hyderbad, where the living conditions will be much better.

Amelia Gentleman, Guardian, 10/05/12

This is the payoff line for an extended article about poor housing in the private rented sector in Newham. The aim is to provoke a reaction. Conditions are so bad in our glorious capital – a global city no less – that someone would rather return to India which is, we had always presumed, at the very least a bit squalid. We should be shocked.

The article covers “beds in sheds” and headlines the instance of people found renting a walk-in freezer to live in. But it is mostly about overcrowded rented properties. And when they say overcrowded they really mean overcrowded. Sir Robin Wales, the Mayor of Newham, notes that the record case was 38 people, 16 of them children, living in one property.

We are still one of the richest countries in the world but we have people living in sheds, three generations of the same family living in a single room, or several unrelated adults sharing a room or sharing a bed. And paying considerable amounts of money for the privilege. And all this is happening only a few miles down the road from neighbourhoods in which investors are happy to pay multi-millions for properties they will barely live in. Continue Reading →

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