Like many others I sit and look at the pile of paper I have about my pension scheme and a fog descends. I was considering sorting it out and buying an annuity last year, but put it off because the process involved using up more brain cells than I felt I could afford.
It turns out for once that laziness and procrastination has a dividend. The Government’s Budget announcement seems to offer me better alternatives than a miserable annuity and opens up the possibility of taking most or all of the whole pension pot and doing something else with it.
So I am in the camp that says that more flexibility is a good thing and I will not weep for the annuities industry losing some of their share value. However I am no better than anyone else at predicting how long I will live and for how long I will need an income. Having the money in the hand could well prove a temptation, even putting to one side LibDem Minister Steve Webb’s ludicrous comment about buying Lamborghinis. Labour has been attacked for making points that are blatantly obvious – if people spend their money early, they may be left with insufficient income and be more dependent on the State later. David Cameron mocks such genuine concerns as being ‘patronising’ but it just shows how out of touch he is with the really difficult decisions that ordinary people have to make.
In his blog for the Financial Times, John McDermott raised an interesting point about what the Coalition is up to. Alongside general concerns that the policy will lead to short-termism and that there may be scope for new charlatans to operate in the market, he wonders how much this liberalisation of pensions has to do with paying for social care.
Sometimes two otherwise benign policies can collide in an unfortunate way, but with this Government more malevolent motivations should always be expected. They want to cap the costs of some aspects of care to avoid people having to sell their homes to pay for it. But now they can sell their pension entitlement instead. By foregoing a regular annuity income they may have capital sitting in the bank or in investments – waiting to be assessed. Even with the cap, care is expensive, and some costs, such as general living costs in a care home, are not included within the cap. ‘Goodbye annuities, hello social care accounts’ says John.
Julia Unwin of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was one of several charity leaders to also raise concerns about a pensions reform that could lead to people incurring social care costs which they would otherwise have avoided. As I understand it, someone with assets of less than £118,000, or £27,000 excluding their home, will have all their care costs paid. A pension being received in the form of an income from an annuity would be disregarded but a lump sum taken out of their pension pot could take them over the limit.
This flexibility over pensions does not come free. Any amount above 25% being taken out of your pension pot would be subject to tax. George Osborne has spotted that this could contribute painlessly to reducing the deficit in years ahead. Is this a classic case of short term gain but long term pain?
Author: Steve Hilditch
The astonishing advert and tweet published by the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Grant Shapps (aka Michael Green aka Bingo Bob) illustrates the condescending and insulting view that the Tories – the Eton Mess – have of the great British public.
If Bingo Bob thought a penny off a pint and cheaper Bingo would woo millions of working class voters then he was wrong – but it does illustrate that there is no money left, unless it has a political purpose of course.
The Budget holds out little hope for housing and has nothing at all to say about affordable homes. However the detail of the Budget documents always includes some items that get little attention but do have an impact on the housing world, so here are some initial thoughts.
The Government are obviously still thrashing around looking for a magic bullet to get housebuilding up. They have the cheek to claim that the extension of the Help to Buy equity loan scheme counts as ‘further action to boost housing supply’ but it is perhaps more significant that they have not extended the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme – is that an admission that it is misguided? A small builders finance fund is probably quite useful and is something Labour have been talking about. Small and medium-sized builders cite lack of access to finance as a key constraint on their activities.
The Urban Development Corporation for Ebbsfleet has a ring of deju vu about it, possibly because this small New Town has been announced before. A new prospectus for additional Garden Cities will be published but they will be ‘locally-led’, a policy we have criticised on Red Brick before. Their boast that planning approvals for housing are at a 5 year high is not much to write home about given the scale of the recession and the absolute certainty that the economy would eventually recover irrespective of Government actions. Most people will support a little more help being given to self-builders.
I shiver whenever I hear the word ‘regeneration’ these days because I have seen too many council estates being pulled down for private housing with the social rented element not replaced. So a new fund available to private developers will need to be watched. More support for infrastructure around Cambridge and a new rail connection to help open up Barking Riverside (a move supported by London Labour Housing Group in its submission to Lyons) may unlock thousands of new homes. We need many more plans like these. More planning relaxations are to be proposed but the Government still seem to be missing the point that planning authorities need to be working strategically at a regional level and to be operating as proactive bodies rather than just responding to private development proposals.
The Budget also includes welcome changes to the use of ‘corporate envelopes’ to purchase property, thereby avoiding stamp duty land tax, bringing properties of value over £500K into the new regime. It involves the extraordinarily named new Annual Tax on Enveloped Dwellings (ATED).
There is also a pre-announcement of a proposed ‘Right to Move’ for social tenants to increase their mobility for work-related reasons. Options will include giving such tenants priority when a new social home becomes available, and setting aside a pool of vacant lets to enable them to move across local authority boundaries. This seems totally at odds with everything done previously on housing allocations, with a stronger emphasis on residential requirements and ‘locals first’.
There is to be a pilot project on passing a share of development benefits directly to individual households. We will have to wait to see if this is a scheme after the style of Islington’s innovative approach to development.
Boris Johnson was sunning himself in Cannes last week at the World’s greatest property development conference, obscurely called MIPIM (20,000 participants, 2,000 exhibitors from 80 countries) encouraging more global investment in totally unaffordable London property and making jokes in very bad taste about German invasions (watch his speech here if you have 32 minutes to waste in pointless activity).
Meanwhile, Chancellor George Osborne was busily working away at next week’s Budget. With a flick of a pencil, George could double the affordable housing investment programme and it would still be within the margin of error of the housing benefit budget. There are endless changes he could make to fund such an increase – for example, additional taxes on the most expensive properties, penalties for land hoarding, or ending the ridiculously ineffective New Homes Bonus.
But no. Instead Osborne is, according to the Sunday Times (paywall), beavering away on an extension to the Help to Buy scheme. Spun as a scheme designed to help people get on the property ladder, Help to Buy has been widely criticised as being inflationary at a time when the UK economy needs a property bubble like a hole in the head. It is of course a political rather than a housing policy – Osborne believes that rising house prices will make a key sector of the electorate feel richer and therefore better-off.
Right wing commentator Fraser Nelson in the Spectator says that pouring more petrol on the property market fire by extending this ‘discredited’ scheme ‘would be laughable if it were not so plausible.’ It is, he says ‘a flagrant example of politicians using taxpayers’ money in an attempt to buy votes. It’s a sign that Osborne intends to use help-to-buy as an election weapon, and as loaned money doesn’t show up on the deficit figures he’s quite relaxed.’
And he adds: ‘The last conservative leader who tried to manipulate the property market for political purposes (to claim to voters he was on the side of hard-working people etc) was George W Bush – and we all know how subprime lending worked out for America. But before its damage, it did bring a property boom – and that’s what Osborne seems to be trying to seek now.’ He also quotes a report from Bloomberg based on a survey of analysts, which concluded that Help to Buy is ‘creating the illusion of wealth by subsidizing house prices and encouraging a further levering up.’
So what is Labour saying? Labour appears unwilling at this stage to get caught up in an argument about who is in favour and who is against helping aspirational people to buy their own homes. Ed Balls is therefore not presenting a simple ‘end it’ message. Instead he is arguing for major reform, restrictions that would prevent the scheme from creating an unbalanced housing market that could put economic recovery at risk. He would cut the upper limit on the scheme from £600K to £400K, possibly with regional variations, and consider restricting the scheme to first time buyers. He argues : “The lack of funding for affordable housing, alongside a housing market that has been very slow to respond to rising demand, means there is a real risk for our economy” – by which he means greater pressure to raise interest rates faster.
Balls raises the interesting concept of a ‘Help to Build’ scheme as an alternative, using Government guarantees in a different way to help small and medium-sized builders to access finance. He thinks such a scheme could help provide an extra 10,000 homes a year. He has also floated the idea of using Government guarantees to back a new generation of New Town Corporations.
Help to Buy demonstrates that Government money is sloshing around in housing in its billions. Yet it is only when the conversation turns to genuinely affordable housing that the language of austerity reappears. There is no money left we are told. In my view, there is lots of money left. It is just being spent on the wrong things by the wrong people for the wrong purpose.
Alex Marsh, a Liberal Democrat, blogs a lot of sense about housing. But what is most noteworthy about his latest piece, a report on the various housing debates and fringe meetings at LibDem Conference last weekend, is the similarity between the Labour and LibDem parties when it comes to housing policy. Conference-going party members seem to have the same natural instincts.
We’ve commented before on Red Brick that LibDem official Party policy on housing is very strong, and at one point I went so far as to say that I would be happy if Labour adopted it. Some key points from the weekend: the Conference passed a motion which is critical of planning policy in similar terms to those used by Labour; there were robust criticisms of the right to buy and the failure of the policy of replacement; there was solid support for raising the cap on local authority borrowing; there was a widespread desire to switch back to bricks and mortar subsidies and away from reliance on housing benefit; there was backing for mechanisms to tackle landbanking and bring more land forward for development. Alex’s report even confirms similar areas of argument and debate – for example the importance of a brownfield first policy; whether an era of higher housebuilding rates will actually moderate house prices given trends the current housing market; whether there should be German-style private rent controls. From his detailed description of the discussions, I couldn’t spot any major differences between what they discussed and what I hear discussed in the Labour Party every week.
If, depending on the outcome of the General Election (and given the state of the LibDems that may be a big if), Labour was faced with the prospect of governing by forming a coalition or some other kind of pact with the LibDems, then housing should not be the issue that stands in the way. It would take less than an afternoon to come up with an excellent common policy platform that the vast majority of Labour and LibDem members could agree on.
There are two big barriers to this being possible: the historic enmity between the parties (in my own borough, Brent, Labour has had to deal with Sarah Teather) and the disgraceful record on housing of the LibDems in power. Weak LibDem Ministers in the CLG department (Andrew Stunell, Don Foster) have failed to constrain their highly ideological Tory Secretary of State (Eric Pickles) and the initial driver of many of the policies, that most political of men, Grant Shapps. Junior LibDem Ministers have provided full cover. At the top, only Vince Cable has raised doubts about the policy, especially the lack of investment and the risk of house price inflation from help to buy.
Policies supported in Government have been in direct contradiction to the LibDem Party’s stated policy: for example, ending the national social rented programme, ending security of tenure in social housing, supporting huge rent hikes with the ‘affordable rent’ policy, supporting the bedroom tax, failing to regulate private renting, the list goes on.
The LibDems have little credibility left in terms of delivering in Government what they support outside Parliament. If coalition or joint working is to happen, at the very least they will need to admit the error of their ways. Perhaps we should dust off the famous Nick Clegg ‘I’m sorry’ video?
There can be no doubt that the flooding of your home is a dreadful and traumatic event and that Government should be doing far more to improve flood defences and to mitigate the impact of climate change on our homes.
But the most surprising statistic to come out of the floods since Xmas is that the number of homes flooded was less than 6,000 and that media attention escalated when it affected residents in the Thames Valley. There has been a feeling of outrage in some parts of the north where much larger numbers of homes were flooded last year but without the same amount of attention being paid to them by the media and Ministers. No-one said to them that ‘money is no object’.
But there is a more astonishing comparison that can be made: with the number of families made homeless each and every year for reasons that are not as visually photogenic as the floods. You can’t normally see the homeless from a helicopter. The latest figures, showing yet more increases, created scarcely a ripple on the media and there were no statements of intent by David Cameron to spend more money on affordable homes.
Under the Coalition, homelessness is again rising rapidly after many years of falling. In the first full year of the Labour Government, the inheritance from John Major meant that 104,000 families were accepted as homeless by councils in England. It took Labour six years to bring it under control, by which time the figure had risen to 135,000 (2003/04). Each year after that the number of acceptances fell, down to 40,000 in Labour’s last year (2009/10). Since the General Election it has started to rise again, to 44,000 in 2010/11, 50,000 in 2011/12 and 54,000 in 2012/13. (NB figures rounded – they count households who are deemed to be unintentionally homeless and in ‘priority need’, mainly households containing children or a member who is ‘vulnerable’ due to mental or physical ill-health or age).
The detailed homelessness statistics are remarkably consistent year by year (eg which regions are most affected, the reasons for homelessness, the size of households, and so on). But there is one significant recent trend that is noteworthy. Homelessness that is attributed to the ‘end of assured shorthold tenancy’, which was 15% of cases when Labour came into office and fell to 11% in 2009/10, is now on a steep upward curve, rising to 22% in 2012/13 and 25% for calendar year 2013. This is now the biggest single reason for homelessness. It illustrates the ‘revolving door’ of Government homelessness policy: the duty to homeless households is increasingly discharged by placing them in private rented accommodation, but the loss of a private let is the biggest single reason for homelessness.
One of the most controversial aspects of homelessness is the use of temporary accommodation for long periods prior to a housing solution being found. Labour’s slow, but eventually effective, response to rising homelessness is again illustrated by these figures. The number of households in temporary accommodation stood at 47,000 when Labour came into power, but rose to over 101,000 in 2005. Following the implementation of a series of policies designed to meet a Government target to halve the number in TA, the figure began to fall, reducing each year to reach 50,000 when Labour left office (and thereby meeting the target). Since then the trend has been reversed and the number in TA has been rising again, standing just short of 57,000 at the end of 2013.
Households in temporary accommodation contain an astonishing number of 81,000 children. Everything that has ever been written about TA shows that it is bad for children. They become dislocated from school and child care, from friends and family, and from the place they identified as ‘home’. Educational attainment and socialisation suffer and behavioural problems become more common.
Of the households in TA, 7% are in bed and breakfast hotels. 500 households, containing 1,550 children have been resident in B&B beyond the statutory limit of 6 weeks. The contribution of private sector leasing (primarily where the property is managed by a housing association) is waning, and the number of households placed directly into private accommodation on a temporary accommodation basis has grown – doubling from 6,200 at the 2010 Election to 13,500 at the end of 2013. This is a hugely expensive option in terms of housing benefit costs.
Some authorities have great difficulty in procuring temporary accommodation within their own district – which everyone recognises is the best option for families and individuals if they are to retain contact with their network of family, friends, schools, health services and other public services. Receiving authorities also often face additional costs of providing services to these families. Nearly 6,000 households were placed in TA in another district at the time of the General Election, this has now doubled to just short of 12,000.
The problems associated with homelessness and temporary accommodation are at their most acute in London – three quarters of the households in TA are from London – but they are certainly not restricted to the capital.
The geographical concentration of temporary accommodation use is illustrated in a helpful map contained within the official statistics (Live Table 775). The incidence is very low in most parts of the country but there are hot spots around the country and a major concentration in London.
High and rising levels of homelessness are an extreme symptom of wider levels of inequality in British society and our growing failure to meet basic human needs. Someone once said that the way we treat our most vulnerable people is the basic test of our civilisation. Quite.
Friday night’s deadline for Labour’s Lyons Housing Commission brought a burst of last minute submissions from organisations and individuals.
The Commission, chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, was set up after Labour’s Annual Conference in September 2013 when Ed Miliband announced his plans for a Labour Government to increase the supply of new homes in England above 200,000 a year by the end of the next Parliament. It is tasked with drawing up a road map for the housing and planning policies and practice that are required to deliver the new homes and communities we need.
One of the most interesting submissions is from the new campaign group SHOUT, a cross Party group that is arguing the case for a return to traditional social rented housing. It says that, if Labour plans to build 200,000 homes a year, then 100,000 of those need to be at genuinely affordable social rent levels. The group argues that this is the only way to meet the needs of people on low incomes and to increase the extent to which work pays. Rather than ever increasing housing benefit bills, a new social rented programme will create major new assets that will generate social and financial benefits indefinitely. The net impact of the £4.5 bn capital cost would be much less as there would be savings in welfare, health and other programmes. The group also says there is a ‘strong case for reclassifying the housing borrowing and spending of local authorities outside the core public sector definitions in line with international practice and the self-financing business model of social housing’.
In a comprehensive submission the Chartered Institute of Housing make the case for fully restoring ‘s.106’ requirements. They remind us that ten years ago a significant amount of housing association output came via s.106 planning gain. They raise concerns about the operation of the Community Infrastructure Levy and the fact that it excludes funding for affordable housing. They make the point strongly that achieving 200,000 homes a year requires an increase in investment and that much of that will have to come from the public sector: the private sector has only exceeded 150,000 homes a year 3 times since 1950. They argue that there is a strong value-for-money case for a ‘higher-grant lower-rent’ (ie social rent levels) programme rather than ‘lower-grant higher rent’ (as in ‘affordable rent’). Like almost everyone, they emphasise the need to give councils more freedom to borrow by either raising the ‘cap’ on housing revenue account borrowing or by changing borrowing rules to bring them in line with international conventions.
Former Housing and Planning Minister Nick Raynsford MP sets out some of the key principles that should be followed to reach the target of 200,000 homes. But he emphasises that there is no single magic bullet – the contribution of every provider will have to be maximised to achieve the goal. Mixed tenure development has the most potential for achieving higher volumes of output, schemes involving social and private renting as well as part and full sale. He also supports councils having greater freedom to borrow. And he is one of many making a plea for a ‘benefits-to-bricks’ approach: ‘While in the short-term it is difficult to see how the current level of [housing benefit] expenditure (c. £23 billion) can be reduced without causing substantial homelessness and hardship, the long-term objective must be to redress the unsatisfactory balance in public spending between investment incentives and revenue subsidies.’
The Riverside Group complains of a planning ‘free-for-all’ – ‘a lack of local direction and thus less predictability in securing planning approvals’ and identifies the lack of resources in planning department as a growing barrier to the progress of specific schemes. They argue that the current ‘affordable rent’ regime is unsustainable, dependent on higher rents at a time when welfare reform and uncertain household incomes is causing uncertainty about income streams, and that a doubling of grant per unit is needed. They also focus on issues around regeneration: ‘We are calling for a national enquiry into the future of regeneration, considering how housing and economic regeneration can be considered as part of a single, complementary framework with appropriate investment streams and incentives.’
And finally in this little selection, the London Labour Housing Group identifies the failure of Boris Johnson’s housing policy, especially his removal of requirements in relation to social rented housing from the London Plan and the removal of grant for social rented homes from his affordable housing programme. LLHG say ‘London has been characterised by its inclusivity and social mix, it is rapidly becoming socially polarised.’ They call for a new programme of grant for social rented housing in London – genuinely affordable homes – and a return to the objective of building mixed communities. They say that the principle of ‘planning gain’ must be restored and that it is a disgrace that luxury developments are being built across London with no social housing because it is supposedly ‘not viable’ to include it. They also call for a ‘benefits to bricks’ policy: ‘It is wrong that 95% of public money spent on housing is in the form of housing benefit and only 5% in the form of investment grants. The initial subsidy for social rented keeps rents low for the lifetime of the homes, but it pays for itself eventually through savings in housing benefit compared to either ‘affordable rent’ or requiring people to rent privately.’
There are many other contributions posted on the Your Britain/Lyons website and no doubt more have been received and will be posted shortly. This is undoubtedly a key debate for Labour and we will keep an eye on developments as Sir Michael Lyons and his team complete their review.
It is very frustrating when good new policy gets garbled by our rubbish media. Two very important speeches last week on the future of public services deserve much wider readership and decent commentary. They were Ed Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture and Jon Trickett’s speech to the Fabians.
Miliband’s typically thoughtful speech set out the principles for public services under Labour. He was particularly critical of the fragmentation and lack of integration of the public services under Tory reforms and the lack of openness and scrutiny arising from the contracting culture and commercial confidentiality. Claiming that ‘tackling inequality is the new centre ground of politics’, he said that the times demand a new culture for the public services.
Not old-style, top-down central control, with users as passive recipients of services. Nor a market-based individualism which says we can simply transplant the principles of the private sector lock, stock and barrel into the public sector. The time in which we live and the challenges we face demand that we should always be seeking instead to put more power in the hands of patients, parents and all the users of services.
I meet as many people frustrated by the unresponsive state as the untamed market: the housing case not dealt with, the special educational needs situation unresolved, the problems on the estate unaddressed. And the causes of the frustrations are often the same in the private and public sector: unaccountable power with the individual left powerless to act against it. So just as it is One Nation Labour’s cause to tackle unaccountable power in the private sector, so too in the public sector.
It is worth reading the original speech because some of the coverage was bizarre to say the least. Tom Watson rightly complained about the coverage – ‘I’ll govern like Margaret Thatcher’, ‘I will lead like the Iron Lady’, and so on – calling it ‘a thoughtful speech ridiculously spun’. It even infected Hugo Young’s own Guardian where Asheem Singh of the charity chief executives’ organization ACEVO wrote that ‘Miliband’s public services plan is just Big Society all over again’ and that he was ‘copying Cameron’. This suggests to me that he either hadn’t actually read it or was playing the old game of being seen to criticise both Parties equally. Either way, he didn’t own up to the voluntary sector being major recipients of outsourced contracts but he did show why the sector’s influence over Labour has waned.
Trickett took the argument first into defining the public interest and then into the specifics of procurement. He identified the value of ‘insourcing’ as including greater accountability, identifiable opportunities for performance management, improved public engagement, better strategic governance and an improved public service ethos. He argued the advantages of integration, the need to take a holistic approach to social issues, and the need to expand user influence over decisions. He commented on detailed but important accountability points like private bodies (including, by the way, housing associations) not being subject to Freedom of Information or judicial review.
In many of the examples where things have gone badly wrong under the Tories, he said, the central imperative was shown to be profit rather than service delivery. The problems with outsourcing were proving to be: big transaction costs (preparing, letting, monitoring, evaluating) which were not normally counted; the high incidence and cost of failure (litigation, emergency retendering); the scandal of frequent post tender variations and major cost overruns; and the fact that, in reality, the risk stays with taxpayer and is unpriced.
Why Singh is plain wrong is that Miliband and Trickett both signalled a decisive move away from mandatory outsourcing and tacit privatisation to a new test about what is in the public interest. That has nothing whatever to do with Cameron’s Big Society.
Trickett said it was instructive to watch what the private sector was doing itself. As the public services were being forced into outsourcing and fragmentation, the private sector is bringing services in-house and looking for benefits of integration. They have realised that outsourcing often increased costs, reduced flexibility and rarely involved the transfer of risk to the contractor. Many councils when given the choice – including Tory ones – have ‘insourced’ services that were previously outsourced, and the number of contract terminations is extraodinarliy high.
Prior to 1997, Labour looked to replace compulsory competitive tendering with a ‘Best Value’ regime, which was in effect a new performance management method for the whole of the public sector. In power, New Labour was dazzled by the private sector and had little real belief in the public service ethos. It allowed the same civil servants who ran CCT to then run BV and, guess what, it came to resemble the old system in practice.
Miliband is cut from a different cloth. By shedding ideological assumptions and by challenging unaccountable power and poor service across the board, the public services will at least get a genuine chance to show what they are good at.
(Evening Standard front page headline, 17/02/2014)
Eric Pickles’ disastrous performance as the temporary floods tsar – immediately seeking to blame everyone except the Government rather than getting on with the job – was predictable to anyone who has followed his constant bungling during four years in charge of housing.
Pickles’ calamitous oversight of housing policy, backed by an extraordinarily inept bunch of Ministers (in declining order of impact – Shapps, Prisk and Hopkins), should become a real area of weakness for the Tories over the coming months. It might be an area for Nick Clegg to address if he really does want to cosy up to Labour, because his CLG Ministers have noticeably failed to moderate or mitigate anything Pickles got up to – in particular his attempt to kill off social renting as a meaningful tenancy.
The Coalition has left a vacuum for the Labour Party to fill, which the industrious Jack Dromey was doing to good effect as shadow Minister. He has bequeathed a strong policy notebook to new shadow Emma Reynolds. Under Dromey, there was no question that good and detailed policy was being developed, the real doubt was whether housing policy had moved from niche interest to being genuinely central to the Party’s policy offer. Recent speeches by Ed Balls suggest that at long last the housing agenda, the welfare agenda and the economic agenda are being aligned.
Last night’s screaming Evening Standard headline ‘Miliband goes to war on London Housing’ has been reflected in commentary in several papers today (but without denting the broadcast media’s obsessive interest in flooding in the south of England – which is, apparently, much more newsworthy than previous flooding in the north.
This headline, and the Miliband article that gave rise to it, could be a key breakthrough in the local Election campaign. It coincides with a major housing drive being organised ‘on the ground’ by the London Labour Party and led by shadow London Minister Sadiq Khan.
Miliband’s article is perhaps the most comprehensive statement yet about where the Party has got to with its housing policy. And as the closing date for submissions to Labour’s Lyons Commission on housebuilding approaches, there is more detail and more policy to come.
The key ponts in his article were:
- The affordable housing shortage in Britain is ‘chronic’ and nowhere is this clearer than in London
- The shortage is becoming a critical economic constraint, with the CBI highlighting the lack of suitable housing as the biggest threat to London’s businesses
- ‘The shortage did not begin with this Government’ but it is getting much worse as the Government has failed on housebuilding. In London the mayor is building half his target – and his target is already inadequate.
- The average house price in London is now £600,000 and rents consume more than half the income of many low and middle income Londoners. There are 180,000 households on council waiting lists
- London is facing a growing ‘buy to leave’ crisis with many homes sold to foreign investors who do not then live in them
- Private renting is becoming harder for low income families and there are many unscrupulous lettings agents operating in the market.
The highlights of ‘what Labour will do’ are
- Show the same political commitment as the post war Labour Government – which got housing starts up to 200,000 homes a year from a zero start within a parliament
- Labour will set a target of 200,000 new homes being started a year by 2020 with the Lyons Commission doing the detailed work on the roadmap needed to achieve this
- A new generation of new towns and garden cities around the capital to ease the pressure on London
- A ‘right to grow’ for councils that are frustrated in their homebuilding efforts by neighbouring authorities
- A use it or lose it policy to strengthen the ability of councils to compulsorily purchase land with planning permission which has not been developed
- Controls on developers advertising properties for sale overseas first and new powers to levy double council tax on empty homes
- Radical plans to reform the private rented sector with a register of landlords and new regulation of letting agents to end rip-off fees.
Many of these points have been appraised by Red Brick in the past, with varying degrees of approval – for example on new housebuilding and a new generation of new towns. An overview might say: it’s a good start, but more is needed, especially on how to build more genuinely affordable homes and how to revive social renting. But giving housing real priority on the agenda and building the necessary political will to deliver is the first half the battle. Miliband is doing well on that score.
There is a lot of talk about building major new settlements in the south east outside London. Last month there was a row about a ‘secret report’ that David Cameron refuses to publish recommending that two ‘new cities’ should be built in the south east, in Yalding, Kent, and Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, according to the Telegraph. Having raised the idea forcefully in the first place, it appears that Cameron is now scared of frightening the horses in his own political back yard. Nick Clegg and the LibDems are said to be very much in favour. Labour has talked about ‘a new generation’ of garden cities and new towns, and Ed Balls has talked about using Treasury guarantees to support borrowing for the projects.
Two things strike me about this debate. First, none of the proposals are likely to produce any completed houses in the next Parliament and therefore should not divert attention from the more urgent policies required to build new homes. Second, the way garden cities and new towns are being discussed would have Ebenezer Howard turning in his grave.
Howard, who pioneered the garden city idea and was responsible for the building of Letchworth and Welwyn, had a particular concept in mind. He saw them as self-contained communities which would provide homes for a mix of agricultural workers and workers in new industries brought to the town. They were intended to provide working class families with a better alternative to living in agricultural tied cottages or in crowded unhealthy cities. His original concept was of a co-operative ownership scheme with no landlords, but this was compromised by the need to borrow privately to buy land and to build; in the end they housed more white-collar than blue-collar workers and could not avoid becoming dormitory towns for London to a significant extent.
The new towns that followed the garden city idea were conceptualised during WW2 and legislated for in the 1946 New Towns Act. The aim was to remedy overcrowding and congestion in the major cities, rehousing people in new communities that were also intended to be self-sufficient. Nearly 30 new towns were built, in the north (like the very successful Washington Co Durham, firmly established by the success in bringing Nissan to the town), south (like Stevenage and Harlow) and midlands (like Telford) as well as Scotland and Wales. Other towns were expanded, like Peterborough. Looking back, their success has been very varied but they housed 1 million people and made an important contribution to relieving housing pressure in the big cities.
Quite what the political proponents of new garden cities or new towns have in mind is still lost in generality. What they are, and who they house, matters almost as much as whether they should exist at all. They are certainly not cities, and even if in the end 2 or 3 are built in the south east it will take a decade or more, making a relatively small contribution to overall supply (assuming they house around 30,000 people each).
There is confusion about their purpose. Are they self-sufficient communities with their own employment or are they dormitories for London? I heard one commentator say they should be built along the route of HS2 without apparently realising that the damn thing won’t be stopping. Others insist that they should be built around stations with good commuter links to London, which will add to the existing overcrowding on trains from places like Basingstoke and Harlow – routes that will not be eased by the new capacity on HS2.
If they are built only where local communities want them – this is what Eric Pickles has said and what can be implied from the ‘new localism’ policies of Hilary Benn – what kind of towns will they be? The 1946 new towns were seen by the then Planning Minister, Lewis Silkin, as ‘a job for the nation’. The sites were decided by the Minister, the land was compulsorily purchased by the Minister and vested in an appointed development corporation. The local councils were ‘consulted’ but could not determine the development plan. Development plans were generally about welcoming incomers who were ‘overspilling’ from the great cities, setting out how to provide the mix of homes that was needed for them and how to settle them into a new community. ‘Exporting’ councils were heavily involved, effectively buying access to the new homes by paying the rate subsidy that was at the time required to match Exchequer subsidy for new housebuilding. (The Second Reading debate for the New Towns Act is fascinating reading, and can be found here). If modern new towns are under the control of local councils, whose interests will they serve? Will they have an appropriate mix of social rented and a full range of owner occupied homes, or will they comprise executive homes for the well-to-do after the style much loved by builders and councils in many places in the south east?
If the aim is to relieve housing pressure within the south east, then fair enough, they will make a contribution. But the commonly stated aim is that they will alleviate shortage and housing need in London. There is no mechanism to make sure the new homes will be made available to Londoners. No-one imagines that new development corporations will have the powers to override local interests in the same way that the previous generation did. Will Government insist that homes for sale will include starter homes that will be sold to first time buyers from London? Or will it be left to the market? Will there be a place for private landlords? How many social rented homes will there be, or will they be ‘affordable rent’? Will they be let to London’s housing waiting lists or will there be a locals-first policy, making the new homes irrelevant to London?
Ken Livingstone as mayor was highly doubtful that south east councils would ever be able and willing to contribute towards meeting London’s needs in addition to their own. If they did, that would be a bonus – but he insisted that the only viable strategy was for London to do everything in its power to meet its own needs and not hope for help from others.
Ambitious-sounding talk about more garden cities or new towns make it sound like the Parties are serious and ambitious about building large numbers of new homes. Of course there may be a few areas where new communities are both appropriate and have support locally. But they will take a long time, the benefits are not as clear as they need to be, and they will never be big enough to challenge my main conclusion. Which is: the homes London needs must be built within London, and the political focus must be resolutely on making that happen.
If you have ever wondered what an ‘ad hominem’ attack is, then the Tory and right-wing media broadside against the UN special investigator on housing, Raquel Rolnik, is a very good example of it. (Ad hominem means rejecting an argument by referring to some irrelevant fact about the person presenting the argument).
In Ms Rolnik’s case, her gender, her nationality, her religion, and some gross assumptions about her personal politics have all been used to undermine the fact that she has written an exceptionally good report on housing in the UK.
Raquel Rolnik is the United Nations’ special rapporteur on housing. She operates under a UN treaty that the UK has signed up to. She is one of 30 rapporteurs who visit UN member states and comment on various aspects of policy. Adequate housing is an element of the ‘right to an adequate standard of living’ and the ‘right to non-discrimination.’ Rolnik’s record is impeccable: she has commented on many countries around the world without fear or favour, including Serbia, Cambodia, Israel, Italy, Panama, Portugal, Nigeria, Colombia, Egypt, France, Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Russia, India and Nepal. Her reports are all available on her excellent website. She has also produced a number of thematic reports, including one on security of tenure across the world. It is her duty to report when she finds that a country is not compliant with the international human rights standards that it has voluntarily signed up to.
Ms Rolnik visited the UK in August/September last year at the invitation of the British Government, and spoke to many people, ranging from community organisations to Government Ministers, about housing conditions in the UK.
Both her initial report and her final report are extremely critical of housing policy in Britain, recording decades of underinvestment but highlighting the ‘despair’ created by welfare reform and the bedroom tax.
Rather than try to deal with the content of her report, the Tories have gone into full attack mode about Ms Rolnik’s background and lifestyle. When her initial report was published, Grant Shapps dismissed her as a ‘a woman from Brazil’. Tory MP Stewart Jackson called her ‘a loopy Brazilian Leftie’. The Daily Mail managed the headline ‘Raquel Rolnik: A dabbler in witchcraft who offered an animal sacrifice to Marx’. On her final report, Housing Minister Kris Hopkins called it a ‘misleading Marxist diatribe’. This time the Daily Mail surpassed itself by describing her as a ‘Brazil nut’. Why we should want to be so offensive about Brazil is beyond me.
Her final report on the UK is a wide-ranging document. No-one in their right mind would consider it to be anything other than a well-researched and evidenced document that looks into the history of housing policy as well as current policy. As Patrick Butler on the Guardian put it: ‘Sometimes you just have to sigh and lower your eyes in embarrassment. There is nothing in this well-mannered report that would be out of place in any mainstream political, policy and academic discussion of housing in the UK. Of course it is uncomfortable for ministers: the truth hurts.’
You can read her full report here. Below are her key conclusions and recommendations, so you can make your own judgement as to their relevance. I defy anyone to find a trace of ‘Marxism’ or even of eccentricity. It is close to the mainstream of opinion across the political spectrum in the UK. Is it a fair and objective assessment or ‘partisan’ according to Kris Hopkins or based merely on ‘anecdotal evidence’ according to that reliable user of statistics, Iain Duncan Smith?
The Special Rapporteur regrets that some policies and practices which have resulted in the progressive realization of the right to adequate housing are being eroded, and that the structural shape of the housing sector has changed to the detriment of the most vulnerable. She expresses her concern that recent measures are contributing also to an increased vulnerability of those who, until a few years ago, were protected.
In light of these conclusions, the Special Rapporteur wishes to make the following recommendations to the central Government and devolved administrations, as applicable:
(a) Assess and evaluate the impact of the welfare reform in relation to the right to adequate housing of the most vulnerable individuals and groups, in light of existing data and evidence; consider whether particular measures are having a disproportionate impact on specific groups; assess whether the overall costs of the implementation of some reforms might outweigh the savings intended, thereby violating the State’s obligation to use the maximum of available resources; and consider alternative avenues to achieve similar objectives without affecting the poorest or most vulnerable;
(b) In particular, the removal of the spare-room subsidy should be suspended immediately and be fully re-evaluated in light of the evidence of its negative impacts on the right to adequate housing and general well-being of many vulnerable individuals and households;
(c) Extend and expand grants and subsidies for social housing (for local councils and housing associations), as these have been essential in responding to the housing need of the most vulnerable. More resources and allocations are needed in this area to ensure that new developments address the specific needs of those individuals and households, and that a variety of tenure forms are encouraged, promoted and protected. Special attention must be given to the situation of low- income people and households, especially children;
(d) Ensure that current measures to release public land to tackle lack of availability of housing favour social and affordable housing, including through local councils, housing associations, cooperatives and community land trusts;
(e) Consider the inclusion in planning and land management systems of strict conditions for immediate development of land with planning permits, “build-or- lose” safeguards and priority for affordable housing;
(f) Put in place targeted measures to increase the supply of housing in the private market for those individuals and households who face unaffordable alternatives, especially the young and those in the middle and lower ends of the spectrum;
(g) Increase regulation and enhance information and accountability in relation to the private rented sector; adopt regulatory tenancy protections, including minimum length of contracts, restraints on rent increases and strict limits on eviction; encourage the use of standardized human rights-compliant rental contracts; enhance mechanisms of registration of landlords and letting agents, and establish clear accountability mechanisms to eliminate discrimination in the private rented sector;
(h) Strengthen efforts to address stigma and discrimination for the Gypsy and Traveller communities in relation to the wider spectrum of rights, starting with the recognition that cultural adequacy in housing is a pillar for inclusion, and that legislation and policy are not enough to overcome local obstacles;
(i) Put in place additional efforts to address challenges to overcome persistent inequalities in housing in North Belfast. For this purpose, active, free and meaningful participation of all in decisions made about housing should be promoted, including in relation to the collection of official data, that should be disaggregated, open and accessible to all;
(j) Promote and protect the right to adequate housing without discrimination on any grounds; in particular, refrain from establishing mechanisms that can result in indirect discrimination against migrants or Roma in access to adequate housing.