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 substantial essay by James Meek on the housing crisis, entitled Where will we live?, has appeared online today at the London Review of Books. It will appear in the print edition in the New Year. The essay roams widely across the terrain of housing policy. It focuses […]
If you were entertaining any idea that changes to property and land taxes could help to curb the volatility of the UK housing market then just stop it. That is the message of a new report Taxing Issues? released by the Policy Exchange this week. This is a […]
Labour seem to be getting themselves in a bit of a tangle. Again. Ed Miliband – he of the energy price freeze and the ‘use it or lose it’ approach to development land – claims to be bringing socialism back. The removal of Stephen Twigg and Liam Byrne […]
The more I think about economic policy the more I think that there isn’t a big enough dose of interpretivism applied to it. This thought recurred yesterday reading George Osborne’s set piece speech in which he, as Isabel Hardman of the Spectator put it, “trashed” Plan B. I […]
Something’s been bugging me, but I’ve not fully thought it through. That may well become apparent in a bit. I’ve a sense there is a link that isn’t being made as effectively as it needs to be. Within the housing policy community there is a widely shared presumption […]
Here’s a curiosity. Today I came across a piece on council housing that I’d originally drafted back in 2006 as a chapter for a book. Unfortunately, the book never came into being, for a variety of reasons. The piece has been sitting, neglected, on a memory stick ever since. […]
Today I participated in a conference organised by the National Housing Federation on the theme Affordable home ownership and intermediate tenure. I spoke in a session alongside Gavin Kelly of the Resolution Foundation and Owen Jones of the Independent. They discussed broad economic currents, in particular the trajectory […]
We’ve now had three years of the blue-tinged contingent of the Coalition perpetrating a sustained attack on social security recipients – those slugabed skivers – in the name of curbing the deficit. Yesterday’s post at the Guardian again maps the profoundly negative tone of the language that has […]
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 […]
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