One Billion people live in slums, and the number is growing each year. Read about and support Homeless International’s End World Slums campaign.
Homeless International are part of the Big Give Charity Xmas Auction on ebay and are auctioning a set of 3 signed Ralph Steadman prints. Bidding ends on 4 December. You can pick up the bidding here. You can find out more about Big Give through Twitter @BigGive or through their website.
Homeless International supports slum dwellers to improve their lives and find lasting solutions to urban poverty. It is the only UK charity devoted to the challenge of housing and basic services in slums.
HI’s Vision is a world in which all people can exercise their right to land, basic services and shelter. Shelter is more than a house: it is a space for privacy, economic activity, social care and personal fulfilment. HI helps communities transform slums by supporting them to work together to secure land, build homes, access safe water and sanitation, and negotiate with governments – ensuring that they have a voice that gets heard.
HI helps slum dwellers by supporting the development of local organisations in Arica and Asia, which have their roots in poor communities. These organisations often grow from small social movements into self-reliant organisations that are able provide shelter and basic services solutions that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.
HI believes that sustainable solutions to homelessness can be created only if people have access to land, finance, information, organisation and technology – and if they have an opportunity to play a lead role in designing solutions that work for them.
HI was formed following the 1987 United Nations’ International Year of Shelter for the Homeless as a permanent UK based organisation with the specific remit of supporting community-led shelter and settlement initiatives in the developing world.
HI sends grants to partner organisations in Africa and Asia to develop and implement initiatives that tackle urban poverty. This work is funded by a range of donors including many housing organisations, the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID), Comic Relief, Big Lottery Fund and the European Commission.
You can join HI as an individual or as an organisation. Find out more about the work of Homeless International here.
Author: Steve Hilditch
Categories
Desperately short of ideas
Not a great week for Mr Shapps. Falling out with John Humphreys is a bit like the two school bullies squaring up to each other for a change, much to the relief of the usual victims, but even I have to admit it was great entertainment for those of us who are not keen on either chap.
Now, whether Shapps agreed to go on the Today programme before agreeing to go to Stoke or whether it is just the assumption of the programme that anyone who is invited will appear, I just don’t know, and I can think of more important matters to discuss. For example, in Stoke Shapps gave back a tiny proportion of the money he had previously taken away from some of the Housing Renewal Pathfinders, having caused havoc for the residents of those schemes. With the Autumn Statement tomorrow, I suspect the theme of giving a little back as we drift from Plan A towards Plan B will be the theme of the week.
Shapps has been in trouble for making the Housing Strategy announcement the day before the worst imaginable affordable housing figures were slipped out. Of course it was coincidental, and he didn’t know the figures in advance. Pull the other one. The figures were unbelievably small, so small in fact that the Minister could have had a report on the progress of each house. Has the snagging been done on No 26?
Over at the Department the staff were working overtime to big up the new ‘Housing Strategy’. They put a page on the website called ‘Housing Groups’ reaction to the Housing Strategy’. Normally you would expect ‘housing groups’ to include CIH, NHF, Shelter and so on. But not this time. Of the 9 groups they could find to make a positive comment, 6 were builders, 2 were professional bodies and the last was involved in the mortgage indemnity scheme. That tells us quite a bit about who the real intended beneficiaries of the strategy are.
So here – in the interests of balance, you understand – is a selection of other views on the Strategy.
Shelter’s Campbell Robb ‘Today’s announcement falls far short of the quarter of a million new homes we need each year just to meet demand…. We are concerned that schemes to help first-time buyers and council tenants will simply encourage people to overextend themselves, while doing nothing to address the sky-high cost of housing.
“This strategy also does almost nothing to help the growing number of families living in insecure private rented housing with hardly any protection from rogue landlords or unexpected rises in rent. Unfortunately these aren’t the bold and radical solutions we need to solve a housing crisis that’s been decades in the making.’
http://england.shelter.org.uk/news/november_2011/housing_strategy_launches
National Housing Federation’s David Orr: “’Today’s announcement of an additional 3,250 affordable homes is a drop in the ocean. Ministers need to be bolder and go much further to fix the broken housing market and they can do it in a way that is effectively cost neutral.
‘A public investment of £1bn – matched by £8bn from housing associations – would build 66,000 shared ownership homes for people on low to middle incomes, create 400,000 jobs and in doing so save the taxpayer £700m in job seekers not to mention the added savings from housing benefit and increased tax revenues.
http://www.housing.org.uk/news/federation_backs_government_ho.aspx
Chartered Institute of Housing’s Grainia Long: “We fear that the government’s strategy does not offer something for everyone, nor does it create a clear vision for the long term future of housing beyond 2015.”
“We fear that the welfare reform changes focusing on reducing the housing benefit bill will force poorer households further away from employment opportunities and this risks undermining the strategy’s aims.”
The Observer’s Heather Stewart: “The housing strategy is only the latest example of the fact that not only is the economy in a far worse state than it was a year and a half ago, but the government has run desperately short of ideas.
“It’s a muddled mix of standing back and letting the market mechanisms rip – and then floundering about desperately when it doesn’t work.”
Mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales: “It is nonsense, £400 million is less than 10 per cent of what was cut from housing – and that constitutes a national strategy? I think it would generate less than the Olympic village, let’s get real about it.”
IPPR’s Nick Pearce: “Today’s government intervention makes another lost decade of market stagnation more likely.
“There is a real danger that existing UK house-builders will merely use building on public land with public money to displace activity from less viable market sites – leading to no net increase in output.
“The house building sector in the UK needs greater competition and structural reform if it is to deliver high quality homes at lower cost.”
Michael Collins is styled as a biographer of the working class, with his best known work being ‘The Likes of Us’ published in 2004. The book’s rosy view of working class culture in history and how it was destroyed by social change was controversial, with black writer Mike Philips saying ‘the book… appeals to the most destructive form of nostalgia.’
Recently Collins has meandered through the history of council housing. I mainly enjoyed his TV film history ‘The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House’ earlier in the year, but took issue with his analysis of what had gone wrong over the last 40 years and in particular the blame he attaches to the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, an argument he returned to this week in a piece for the Independent. The core of our difference is that I think the homeless are ‘us’ too.
Comparing a distorted view of how awful council housing is now with an exaggerated view of how great it used to be only benefits those who wish to undermine its future. The golden era was just as mythical as the right wing press’s modern view that it is a failed sector populated by ‘Shameless’ characters, everyone skiving, dependent on benefits and getting their home by conning the State that they were homeless.
I don’t look back on my childhood in Newcastle, on the Montagu Estate in Kenton, as some great heyday when everything was right in the world. Still in the desperation of the post-War housing shortage, it was without doubt a pretty good deal: a brand new Bevan house, with partial central heating, front and back garden, close to both the Town Moor and the countryside stretching towards the tin hut called the airport. Virtually all the men were in work, most had skilled trades or were clerks, so I suspect there had been social selection going on. It could still be a tough place, with gangs and fights and flick-knives, and we didn’t venture onto neighbouring estates. Periods when men fell out of work, as most did from time to time, were hard. There were no shops, just travelling vans, and no community facilities apart from the neighbourhood school. The front door was the colour the council said it would be, no-one had security of tenure and anyone not paying their rent got kicked out. So my nostalgic memories are reserved for Len White or Stan Anderson playing at St James’s Park (now forgodsake the Sports Direct Arena) and a youthful visit to the Club A Gogo to see Eric Burden and the Animals.
So where specifically do I think Collins gets it wrong? Let’s start with his tirade against the homeless persons’ act. “It was Labour who demolished a fair letting system. In 1977, the homeless were made a priority and a system of “need” was introduced that was open to abuse. Unsurprisingly, a lot of “homeless” people appeared, to the annoyance of locals who had waited patiently for years on the housing lists.’
This revision of history, that allocating council housing according to housing need is the root of the sector’s perceived problems, has been gaining currency, influencing ‘Blue Labour’ and the Labour’s front bench. The reality is that the impact of the homelessness legislation on allocations after 1978 was slow. The Act encouraged a high degree of gatekeeping (and still does), and there was a high refusal rate for applications, rigorous application of the ‘intentionality’ rule, and many people suffered the purgatory of a period spent in bed and breakfast or single mother’s hostels. It was a process no-one would choose to go through if they had any real alternative. Local connection was vigorously applied and people with a connection to another place were sent back. Virtually all homeless applicants were local and on the waiting list. Crucially, the homeless only became a significant proportion of total allocations when supply collapsed in the 1980s as homes were sold and not replaced. Most homeless people would have been rehoused off the waiting list before becoming homeless in the 1970s when supply was much better.
I also disagree with Collins when he says ‘The Government should clarify who the houses are for. In the past it was clear who was entitled.’ My view is that it was only in late 1960s and early 1970s, following ‘Cathy Come Home’ and the rise of Shelter, that council allocations policies came under greater scrutiny. Before that there was a variety of local practices, but rarely were they transparent. Applicants were subject to subjective assessments of their housekeeping standards by home visitors, and the practice was often discriminatory as the poorest were kept out. In many areas, individual house allocations were made by councillors, a practice that would be condemned today.
Collins lauds ‘sons and daughters’ schemes which ‘ensured extended families remained on the same estates, in the expectation that further generations would remain locally.’ But it is worth remembering that in many places black people were excluded either by schemes that favoured existing families or by direct discrimination. The National Front used the phrase ‘sons and daughters’ to mean ‘no blacks’. It was right that these practices were challenged vigorously by the Community Relations Commission and others.
There’s plenty wrong with council housing, now as in the past. But it is better run and managed than it ever has been. Tenants have gained security of tenure and reasonable rents in a profit-making and improving sector. 5 million households have expressed their demand to live in it. Council housing is a success story, just as it was in the past, and could have a great future. Its role in providing decent housing to millions of ordinary people deserves proper recognition and proper assessment – with a lot less spin.
Monimbo
Steve and Tony’s excellent posts on the government’s housing ‘strategy’ have hit the nail on the head. As Steve said, writing down lots of little policies in one place is not the same as writing a strategy. Here are some more reflections on the gaps and contradictions, from someone who had the misfortune to spend Monday going through the 88 pages in detail.
First, it’s not quite true to say that the strategy does not assess the size of the task. It notes early on that household numbers are projected to grow by 232,000 per year. True, it ignores the backlog of unmet need which was put at almost 2m households in a report slipped out by DCLG last November. But having made a stab at saying how many houses are needed in future it effectively says that the worst way of getting that number built is to… say how many houses are needed in future. It made me wonder whether, at Cameron’s no doubt sumptuous wedding to Samantha, he bothered to tell the hotel how many guests had been invited or whether he thought the best solution was for them to make an intelligent guess.
Second, as Steve said, the report belatedly recognises the importance of housing, encapsulated in that magic moment when (as Cameron said) the young couple turns the key in the door of their first flat. Well the reader is entitled to ask whether, as a result of the strategy, a lot more Daves and Sams will be able to do this. Frankly, we don’t know, but the size of the task is so huge that it is most unlikely. As Steve Wilcox said in last year’s UK Housing Review, first-time buyers are being kept out of the market at the rate of a staggering 100,000 per year. Yet what the strategy offers them is a mortgage indemnity – in a scheme yet to be established – providing they buy a new house. How many of the 100,000 Daves and Sams will be able to do that?
Much more likely, of course, is that they will rent privately. Here, the silence of government policy is deafening. We have a sector that has grown from just over two million to nearly four million households in a decade. It houses one in six households and by 2020 may well house one in five. All of this is the largely accidental result of buy to let mortgages followed by the credit crunch. But this surely raises some policy issues? Despite recent progress it remains a sector with a lot of poor properties and poor landlords, to whom vulnerable households are going to have to turn much more than they did before. At the other end of the market, will still have a situation where the Daves and Sams can be booted out at two months’ notice. Yet as the recent LSE report Towards a Sustainable Private Rented Sector made clear, in other countries which make heavy use of private renting, more tenure security is common and seems not to deter investment. Why not at least announce a review of the future of the sector, given it is now playing such a vital role?
Finally, in contrast to private renting, the social sector warrants a plethora of policies, although almost none of them are new. Here the government’s confusion of purpose becomes more apparent by the hour. The strategy aims to challenge the ‘complacent consensus’ about social housing, and ensure that it goes only to those in genuine need. Indeed, councils are to be told that houses are not to go to ‘people who don’t need them’. Yet what are the government’s flagship policies? Its main one, the ‘affordable rent’ programme, aims new homes and relets of existing ones at people who can pay more, not the most needy. Its welfare reforms will make it more difficult for low-wage tenants to keep their homes. And now, the government plans to revive the right to buy, which will provide a massive subsidy for a select few better-off tenants to keep their homes in perpetuity. This is not so much a strategy as an anti-strategy: setting aims for the sector, then choosing measures which will achieve precisely the opposite effect.
The best thing about this ‘strategy’ is that it raises the stakes for the government, puts housing higher on the agenda and provides a golden opportunity for Labour to make its mark. As Tony said, it’s a feeble attempt at a Keynesian stimulus. There are plenty of aspirations in the 88 pages, even if there are few targets. The challenge for Labour is to develop a real strategy that addresses the massive problems that are building up and – even more important – shows how they can start to be solved. To do this it can’t avoid the most glaring gap of all – investment.
Categories
New foundations built on sand
That dodgy building company Cameron and Clegg (est 2010) today tried to sell us a bogus new housing strategy called ‘Laying the Foundations’.
Deals for first time buyers! Council homes nearly free! Free infrastructure on us! Front door keys for all! But just like that shiny new tarmac front drive built by a scammer, very soon the cracks will emerge and we will realise no hard core has been laid.
Sick joke of the day – we are all in this together
“You always remember that moment, if you’ve done it, when you get that key and you walk into your first flat, it’s a magic moment. It’s a moment I want everyone in this country to have, not just better-off people.”
David Cameron
I was bowled over to hear Grant Shapps on BBC Breakfast this morning sounding like a late convert to Keynesian economics – arguing that housing investment was a good way to stimulate the economy (I agree!). But the new sums announced today are tiny (and we need to check that the money really is new) and a drop in the ocean compared to the 60% cut already made to the housing programme.
It may be Plan Aplus but it’s not yet Plan B. As Ed Miliband commented: ‘These measures are too little, too late from the man who was responsible for choking off growth in the British economy when he came to power. Putting back just 10% of the £4 billion he cut from housing investment last year will convince no-one he is serious about getting growth back into the economy.’
Reading the strategy document is a bit like watching rolling 24 hour news, as the same few points are repeated endlessly. The occasional piece of wisdom – “we have not built enough homes for more than a generation” – is lost in a sea of false claims, like trying to take credit for an increase in housing starts in 2010/11 which could have had nothing whatever to do with the coalition.
There are a few worthy things and some ideas for further consideration – for example, indemnities for first time buyers, a new fund for infrastructure, development finance for smaller building companies, ‘build now pay later’ for land purchases, a loan fund for self-builders, more support for locally planned major development, build to let. But every plus has several minuses, and the bulk of the document is a restatement of previous announcements. Flexible tenancies, more evictions for criminal action away from the home, means-testing all social tenants, changing allocations priorities, reducing homeless rights, etc, are rehearsed again.
So what are some of the missing big things? Here are four for starters:
- There is no overall assessment of housing need – the requirement to build new market and sub-market homes and the level of private and public investment needed to maintain the housing stock and improve its energy efficiency.
- There is no assessment of housing affordability – it describes how the affordability of home ownership has worsened, but sets no expectation or objective for the future. It expresses no concern at all about the affordability of so-called ‘affordable rent’ homes, nor about the plan to increase social rents at a rate faster than the growth in incomes.
- There are lots of warm words about home ownership, but no analysis of the dramatic changes in tenure taking place right now and whether the rapid rise in private renting is sustainable.
- There is virtually nothing that ties together housing policy, taxation and benefits. And in particular no acknowledgement that higher rents means higher benefits – or greater poverty.
Despite the fact that further work on the right to buy was the reason given for the delay in publishing the strategy, the plan to ‘double’ RTB discounts on average remains mysterious and there are no real figures. The same can be said about the use of receipts. The strategy says that the first call on receipts will be ‘to meet debt on additional properties sold’, and the second call will be to meet assumptions already made about the contribution receipts will make to the government’s deficit reduction plan. But it still boasts that ‘the expected receipts will provide a sufficient contribution to the cost of replacement homes’. Exactly how they will deliver the commitment to replace each home sold with an affordable home (nb not a social rented home) will not be answered until there is a further round of consultation.
The chapter on the private rented sector is perhaps the most disappointing of all. Having dismissed Labour’s proposed reforms as ‘red tape’ there has been growing pressure to bring in some form of regulation of private renting and even to find a way of mitigating runaway rent increases. It appears the Government has been sitting on its hands, saying ‘we are also looking at measures to deal with rogue landlords and encouraging local authorities to make full use of the robust powers they already have to tackle dangerous and poorly maintained homes.’ ‘Looking at’ is not good enough: it means the Government has nothing at all to say to private tenants. As it is the only tenure that is growing in numbers, it demonstrates that this is not much of a strategy.
This document proves once again that writing down lots of little policies in one place is different from writing a strategy. A strategy should have a vision for where you want to be, a detailed analysis of all the trends and information, clear objectives and an ordered set of priorities. This document has none of these.
In a strategy that uses the word ‘radical’ so often, I give the final word to Campbell Robb of Shelter, so right but very understated when he says ‘Unfortunately these aren’t the bold and radical solutions we need to solve a housing crisis that’s been decades in the making.’
The Government has been trailing the fact that they will finally publish their delayed national housing strategy next week. It is likely to be launched by David Cameron, which at least shows that the issue is rising up the political agenda.
The spin so far is that the strategy will be announced with a little bit of new money for housebuilding. Any boost will be welcome, but given that the coalition started with a 60% cut in the housing programme, it will just be a small offset. There will also be some details about how the revised right to buy will work and whether, and how, the capital receipts might be used. There has also been some interesting spin that there might be proposals for a bit of ‘light touch’ regulation to the private rented sector.
New money, reinvesting receipts, and PRS regulation would all be significant U turns from the Government. But if it is to be a genuine housing strategy, there are bigger issues at stake. A strategy should be needs-led, with a thorough-going analysis of the housing requirements of the country leading to detailed policies which will impact on those needs over time. I suspect this strategy will be policy-led, by which I mean that they will justify the policies they have already adopted and gloss over the needs that they are not interested in meeting.
Here are 10 questions for the Government, questions that I think the strategy must address if it is to be of any value at all.
- Will there be a full assessment of how many homes are needed in England over the next 20 years and how and where they will be provided, with a proper emphasis on the differences between regions?
- What approach will they take to long term property and land values, the underlying but fundamental issue in the housing market?
- Will there be a strategy for reforming taxation and subsidy across tenures in housing both to encourage investment in all sectors and the greening of all our homes and to discourage wasteful over-consumption?
- What will they do to provide homes to people on the lowest incomes, whether in or out of work, who cannot afford ‘affordable rents’, private rents, or home ownership?
- Will they be frank about their policy of virtually ending new build for social rent and will they phase out security of tenure and ‘target rents’ for existing social rented housing?
- How will they ensure that the private rented sector is modernised and joins the rest of the economy in the 21st century with a clear set of rights and responsibilities for landlords and tenants based on consumer protection principles?
- Given that they set a target for reducing the housing benefit bill, what will they do next to achieve the cuts given that many of their policies are leading to increases in HB costs not reductions?
- How will they respond strategically to the rapid rise in homelessness that has taken place over the last year?
- Will there be a real policy to tackle overcrowding or just more of the same in punishing underoccupiers in the rented sectors?
- How will they help first-time buyers and in particular will they boost the supply of mortgages and support new deposit protection schemes?
I fear we will have many pages of Pickles prejudices and Shapps spin, But it will be interesting to judge whether there is a strategic attempt to address needs – or more of the same.
Government Ministers have consistently argued that the changes in local housing allowance would lead to reduced rents in the private rented sector and would not lead to more homelessness.
Labour MP Karen Buck spoke at the launch of the NHF’s Home Truths report this morning, and writes exclusively for Red Brick below.
Guest post by Karen Buck MP, Labour MP for Westminster North
A year ago, Iain Duncan Smith said in the House of Commons debate on Housing Benefit:
“The purpose of these (HB) changes is to give a real impetus to getting the rents down to make affordable housing more available in some areas…… Through the emergency Budget and spending review, we proposed a set of housing benefit reforms designed to bring back under control a system that has been out of control. I accept that the responsibility of Government is always to get the balance right as we protect, incentivise, and ensure fairness in the system. Critically, for housing, that means getting the rents down….. There should be no need, with the discretionary allowance, for people to be made homeless. That is just the nonsense with which Labour Members want to scare everybody.”
One year on, we now know that the mean rent increase in London was around 12%.
We are facing an unprecedented crisis of supply and affordability. This has not all occurred since May 2010 – and some of the present problems have roots in the decision to
switch subsidy from ‘bricks and mortar’ to personal subsidy three decades ago. Still, recent developments have intensified the problem acutely.
Over the last year, homelessness has risen sharply, reversing a fairly steady medium term decline. The recent pattern by which homelessness/temporary accommodation has been diverted via the prevention and relief of homelessness strategy is faltering, because families are reluctant to abandon future security as the PRS becomes increasingly unaffordable. (Meanwhile, there are over 100,000 households to whom local council accepted homelessness duties but then diverted them into the private sector who will be
at risk of re-presenting as rents rise and benefits fall).
The central issue remains one of the supply of affordable homes, especially for rent, but whilst we are seeing the final wave of new supply coming through as a result of the Labour government’s investment, the future looks less hopeful because of the Orwellian ‘affordable rent’ model and housing benefit cuts.
‘Affordable rents’ as the means of filling the grant gap mean not just places like Westminster become unaffordable – an ‘affordable rent’ set at 65% of market rents would require a household income of £65k to cover the cost without benefit – but so do poorer
places like Haringey and Newham. In Haringey, a rent set at 80% of local market rents would require a household income of £31k for a 1 bed flat, and in Newham a 2 bed flat would require a household income of £27k. This at a time when the median income for social housing tenants is £12k.
The Household Benefit Cap and Housing Benefit cuts, meanwhile, are estimated in a recent report by London Councils to leave 133,000 households unable to pay their current rents.
Even if this proves to be an over-estimate, staggering numbers of households face a dramatic shortfall in their income and are at risk of upheaval and homelessness as private rents continue to soar. Boroughs with lower housing costs can anticipate a sharp increase in numbers of incomers, many with high service and support needs.
It is worth noting that unemployment, the freeze in real wages and rising housing costs have already contributed to a rise in the number of private sector Housing Benefit
claimants, especially in the suburbs- the London Borough of Redbridge, which includes part of the constituency of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, saw a 65% increase in Local Housing Allowance claims in a little over a year, the largest increase in the country. Some of the areas facing the biggest cost pressures are not the Knightsbridge’s and Mayfair’s of popular myth, but places like Hillingdon and Croydon, whilst Newham will be amongst the places worst hit by the overall Benefit Cap.
Supply may be the solution over the medium and longer term, but in the very short term we need DCLG and DWP to sort out their differences and develop an integrated approach
to housing need and homelessness before they escalate.
The affordable homes alliance Housing Voice has launched its National Inquiry into the affordable homes crisis and will hold its first regional hearing at Exeter University on 9 December.
The aim of the Inquiry is to gather the views of civil society through oral
hearings, submitted evidence and an online survey. It aims to publish its report
around May next year.
Housing Voice is supported by Citizens Advice, CDS Co-operatives, Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), National Housing Federation, National Union of Students (NUS), Sitra – the charity for supported people, TUC and UNISON.
Chaired by Lord Whitty, Housing Voice aims to champion the need for more affordable homes to buy or rent. With the shortfall in housing projected to be 750,000 by 2025, the average house price more than 8 times the average salary, more than one 1.6 million households on waiting lists, the average age of a first time buyer being 37 and rents in the private rented sector continuing to grow faster than incomes in many parts of the country, Housing Voice believes NOW is the time to tackle the affordable housing crisis.
For information about supporting organisations, how to submit evidence and the regional
evidence sessions, go to the website at http://www.housingvoice.co.uk There is also an online survey.
Categories
Roxy Come Home
Albert Square is the only place in London where the housing market appears to be stable and there is a plentiful supply of homes for anyone separating from a partner or being kicked out of their last place. Phil Mitchell and Ian Beale appear able to buy homes in the Square at will, normally with the relevant amount of cash.
The show normally prides itself on its ‘gritty realism’ and its research into controversial topics, trying to get the facts right, and frequently advertises help lines when distressing stories are being broadcast – for example, around the cot death of Ronnie Mitchell’s son James or Whitney Dean being forced into prostitution.
However they never seem to concern themselves with housing. Last week no help lines were advertised when Janine illegally evicted Roxy with no sign of a legal procedure, just walking in and removing her stuff. In previous weeks, the landlady attempted forcible entry and clearly harassed poor Roxy and her small child. Parents might also be perturbed at the rather cavalier way a children’s officer took Roxy’s daughter off her and gave her into the care of Jack Branning under what was said to be a Temporary Residence Order. Shades of Cathy Come Home.
When we talk about rogue landlords we would do well to keep Janine Butcher in our mind. Not that Roxy deserves much sympathy, having done similar things to previous tenants of her own before she squandered her inheritance from her Dad, the beautifully evil Archie Mitchell. (It’s also a mystery as to why Janine refers to Roxy as a Chav when her Dad was a successful rich criminal who lived in a very large house on the south coast before moving in with Peggy, but I’ve gone off at a tangent).
Another recent storyline, involving young squatters, seemed well out of touch with reality as the property seemed to be transformed magically into a care home of some sort, by an amazing stroke of luck the squatters got to live there (I admit I may have missed an episode and misunderstood something here, or I may have happened upon the E20 spin-off, but the same principles apply).
Unfortunately, Walford Council is never much help. They do not appear to have a housing advice or tenancy relations service, and it looks like the CAB has never made it to Walford either. The council only ever appears in a bad light, run either by corrupt or otherwise unhelpful and stupidly bureaucratic officials with the single policy of doing whatever annoys the residents of the square. I do have a distant memory of one storyline when (I think) Michelle Fowler went off to work in the housing allocations department of the council, where there were strange goings-on. It didn’t end well.
So, here’s a plea to EastEnders producers and the BBC. When there is an illegal eviction, please remember that this is an experience many people in this country have every day. And just as you do for other difficult storylines, putting Helpline information on the screen at the end of the show is the minimum you could do.
It would be even better if a charming Housing Officer come along to prevent the eviction, accompanied by a Police Officer willing to make an arrest.
Categories
The build up to HRA reform
Monimbo
With self-financing for council housing just 139 days away we can expect a plethora of reports and advice to councils on what they can do to maximise the benefits. The latest has been produced by Navigant for London Councils, which adds to an earlier one by PwC for the Smith Institute. CIH has been producing bulletins for members and has teamed up with CIPFA to create an online resource on self-financing. What are they all saying?
As everyone knows, the big prize from self-financing is that councils get to control their rental incomes for the first time (or, at least, for the first time in recent memory). PwC emphasises the magnitude of this by assessing the total income as being more than £300bn over the next thirty years, though of course the real figure could be very different from this.
However, as everyone also knows, the big snag is the cap that will be imposed on each council’s borrowing, which will vary in its effects: some councils will have very little ‘headroom’ above the cap for extra borrowing on top of the new level of debt they have to service, others will have quite a lot.
For the first time, there are real political decisions to be made about setting rents and using the revenue they generate. Not surprisingly, this is also causing real tensions. First, do you put rents up to maximise income and borrowing, or do you keep them down to reflect tenants’ difficult financial circumstances, particularly those who pay rents from their own incomes? There is no formula that can give an answer to that conundrum and each council will have to decide for itself, hopefully in full consultation with tenants.
The second tension is how to spend the spare cash. There are multiple choices here too:
completing decent homes programmes where there is still a shortfall, doing works to improve the security of and amenities in estates, starting to make the stock energy-efficient through retrofit programmes and – of course – new build.
A common feature of all the advice being published is that the key to maximising resources is creative asset management. Until now, council haven’t had the same incentives to manage their assets constructively as housing associations have had, and there are still limitations on what they can do, but for example it might make sense to demolish some stock that is no longer in the highest demand and is costly to improve. It is also going to be vital to reconfigure planned maintenance programmes so that they take account of the need to radically improve energy efficiency, factoring in outside resources such as the Green Deal.
These are demanding tasks, and the key question is whether or not the resources expected to be available from April onwards will be enough to satisfactorily manage and maintain existing assets, before even contemplating new build.
The London Councils report suggests that some boroughs (the public document doesn’t say which) will struggle to balance their business plans, ie. both meet the new debt costs and effectively invest in and maintain their assets. Most, though, will have some headroom, limited of course by the cap.
What is clear though from the various reports is that no one has yet come up with an idea for adding to councils’ resources beyond the basic options that have always applied, which are:
- fully use the funding you will have in the self-financed HRA – including potentially build new homes with grant from the HCA if you are willing to go for ‘affordable’ rents
- lever more funds into the existing stock through PFI
- transfer the stock
- use land and other assets to bring in affordable housing through other routes, mainly via housing associations.
Even the new options for ALMOs, which I blogged about in June, involve transfer, albeit to a community-led body and maintaining a close link to the local authority. The London Councils report suggests transfer as an option, too, but focuses on the merits of using it for parts of the stock – either good stock that will bring in some money, or poor stock that will remove a liability. But will partial transfer be attractive either to councils or to tenants?
My conclusion from reviewing this material is that the choices largely remain as they were when the current self-financing deal was put on the table. Given that the government (like
the previous one) insists on sticking to the current borrowing rules, the options for bringing in resources that are ‘off balance sheet’ are essentially the same ones, with their respective pros and cons.
Councils without ALMOs are well-advised to concentrate on making the most of what they have already got, and be as well prepared as possible to finalise and start to implement their business plans when the final debt levels are known in the New Year. For councils
with ALMOs the advice is the same, but those who are planning to close their ALMO down should be aware that – whatever the other arguments – they are foregoing options that just might be attractive once self-financing gets underway.