[Originally posted at the SPS Comment and Analysis, 03/11/16, under a slightly different title] We are about to see one of the welfare policies of the late, only occasionally lamented Coalition government bear particularly ugly fruit. On Monday the process of lowering the Overall Benefit Cap (OBC) from £26,000 […]
I’m not sure quite how I missed it the first time around. Most probably because, like many policy commentators, I’m inclined to focus too closely on the relatively parochial and the marginal shifts in domestic policy position. As a consequence of this failure to look sufficiently far beyond the […]
Rumours have been circulating in the housing policy ether for several months now. Given the housing policy influence of the Policy Exchange at No 10 those rumours should have been, and were, treated seriously. And now it looks like those rumours are well-founded. They’ve only gone and done […]
What’s new in the housing world this week? What have we learnt? The primary lesson so far would seem to be that rich people really don’t like living next to poor people. They’d rather the poor, and even the middling sorts, made themselves scarce and freed up the […]
[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 […]
The other day I had to give a 10 minute summary of my take on the housing challenges we currently face. I don’t claim any great originality in what I covered. But I thought it might be useful to set the points out here. The next stage is […]
[Originally posted at Dale&Co., 03/01/12] The new year has opened with a couple of important housing stories. The first was another attempted crackdown on illegal subletting in council housing. The second, which attracted significant media attention, is the reform of the local housing allowance (LHA) – the housing […]
A few days ago I tweeted that current housing policy was a “right mess”. That was in part a response to the news, reported in Inside Housing, that there is going to be an increase in the distribution of tents for homeless ex-offenders in Nottingham, in lieu of […]
To say that there appears to be inconsistency, incoherence or complacency at the centre of Government policy is not a particularly novel observation. Indeed, it doesn’t really narrow down what we’re talking about, given the generally rushed and badly thought through nature of current policy proposals in many […]
[Originally posted on Liberal Democrat Voice, 31/12/10] I started this discussion of current developments in policy towards housing by noting that it is an area in which the tensions in inherent in balancing “the fundamental values of freedom, equality and community” are absolutely central. Housing policy needs to […]
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