What to do about the housing crisis? It’s a question that, should you have been so inclined, you could have focused on throughout much of yesterday’s proceedings at Liberal Democrat Spring Conference. A motion on the reform of planning policy was passed, unamended, during the morning’s official business. […]
The Coalition government has embarked on a wide-ranging and far-reaching programme of change to the UK welfare system. Several components of the agenda have already been implemented. Some are still to come. The Coalition is pursuing policies on welfare benefits, rents and social housing development that have potentially […]
The issues of housing shortage and increasing housing supply feature prominently in current debates over how to deal with the UK housing crisis. Housing analysts often seek to place these urgent policy problems in the context of the longstanding issue of excess volatility in the UK housing market, […]
Vince Cable made a substantial speech to the Royal Economic Society at the beginning of this week. The speech is worth reading in full because it represents one of the most thorough, thoughtful and wide-ranging perspectives on the economy that you are likely to hear from a front […]
We are now beginning to get some insight into the fallout from the Government’s changes to the housing benefit underoccupation rules: the policy that Grant Shapps would like you to call the “spare room subsidy” but most people call the “bedroom tax”. It is a topic I’ve blogged […]
At the ISA RC43 Conference in Amsterdam last week I took part in a Roundtable discussion convened by Ken Gibb (Glasgow) on the possibilities of deresidualising social housing. I participated alongside Professors Ed Goetz (Minnesota), Rachel Bratt (Tufts) and Mike Darcy (Western Sydney). This is what we were […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
[On 10/01/13 I gave a brief overview of the context facing rented housing as part of an event called Housing Challenges in Exeter organised by Exeter City Council. This is the text to accompany my presentation.] Our housing system faces significant pressures. Short term pressures generated by the […]
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