Author: Tony Clements

I was catching up on Grant Shapps’ interview on the Today programme, where he managed to distract John Humphrys from the key questions for a good few minutes arguing about his diary.
The interview centred on whether he was trying to hide the recent appalling house building statistics behind the Housing Strategy launch or get the strategy out before the stats.
The minister claimed he knew nothing about the figures until after the strategy was launched. Ministers don’t see them before anyone else he told Radio 4 listeners. At the risk of falling into the trap of being too distracted by the ‘process’ – that’s only kind of true.
As with all government statistics, there is a pre-release list of people who get the statistics in advance of their publication. That doesn’t include the minister directly, but it does include his departmental officials and his political advisors. Here’s the copied text from this announcement:
 

Homes and Communities Agency National Housing Statistics
22 November 2011: Pre-release access list
 Homes and Communities Agency
Post
Chief Executive
Executive Office Manager
Executive Director – Finance & Corporate Services
Executive Director – Programmes & Deputy Chief Executive
Senior Manager – National Communications
 Department for Communities and Local Government
Post
Special Advisor to Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
Branch Head for Physical Regeneration, Coalfields, Brownfield and Land Stabilisation Programmes
Team Leader: Affordable Housing Delivery and Investment
Policy Officer, Affordable Housing Division
Team Leader: Finance and Governance
Press Officer

 So did all these people who work with the minster on a daily basis, his political advisors who, after all, are supposed to help him manage difficult media issues, did none of them think to mention the imminent release of highly damaging figures? Did he not think to ask?
Perhaps he was all too aware of needing plausible denial, but it all still sounds pretty implausible to me.
Process aside, the most remarkable thing about the interview was his breezy reaction to the figures. Imagine if he was a health minister announcing a 97% fall in cancer survival rates, or an education minister admitting to a 97% drop in GCSE passes, or a Home Secretary announcing that 97% of all passports were not being checked at our borders? He’d at the very least get a harder time from John Humphrys.
The point of a housing minister is to build houses for people. What is the point of one whose ‘reforms’ cause a collapse in house building within a year of taking over?

For those Red Brick readers not on twitter, you may have missed the piece of news the government tried to hide under its housing strategy. After a reasonable amount of media interest and a few good reports on housing on Newsnight and Channel Four news in recent days, the mainstream media didn’t give any attention to the impact that the coalition is already having on housing and affordable housing. It’s worse really than many critics (me included) imagined.
The number of new affordable homes being built for the first half of this year have fallen by 97% on the same time last year, to a mere 454 homes:

It can’t be a surprise that unemployment is rising, when one of our most labour-intensive industries is collapsing.
The government can’t blame that on the Eurozone.
Link to the official statistical release is here.

The government’s housing strategy has gone down like a bucket of cold sick and not just with the Left. Its most vociferous critics have come from the Right. James Dellingpole in the Telegraph and City Am’s Allister Heath are two examples.
The key thing to recognise in this housing strategy is that it isn’t a housing strategy. It’s a poor and desperate attempt at a housing stimulus to support a beleaguered economy.
The government has come round to extolling the economic benefits of housebuilding. We’re all Keynesians now. No wonder the Right don’t like it.
We’ve seen some U-turns previously: Labour’s Homebuy Direct providing equity loans to first-time buyers was a ‘very expensive flop’. The Coalition FirstBuy providing equity loans to first-time buyers is ‘supporting our construction industry to build more homes, create new jobs and increase the pace of economic growth.’
Now, we’re seeing a broader and more remarkable about-turn, overtly seeking to provide a housing stimulus to support economic activity and create jobs. Allister Heath even told the housing Minister on Newsnight, he was pursuing a ‘neo-Brownite’ economic policy. (Now there’s an endorsement to go on Grant’s CV).
But the government has tied its hands and the Keynesianism will stay in the rhetoric. The extremism of its deficit reduction plans (in the face of all the evidence of its impact) means they can’t commit real public money to a stimulus in housebuilding.
They dare not touch planning reform again, in case the political fall-out from their own voters does the same damage as their forest-sell off plans. This is despite the chaos of planning policies which resulted in a quarter of a million planned homes being stripped out of the economy, with the hundreds of thousands of jobs that went with them.
So what they’re left with is largely a package of re-announcements. What’s new are schemes designed specifically for (and by?) the large housebuilders to underwrite their risks so they’ll develop more. The government is underwriting mortgages for first-time buyers (for new build only), underwriting the risks of development by providing public land at no up-front cost, committing a fund of £400m to the industry and trying to get local authorities to strip out affordable housing requirements.
This has attracted plenty of criticism for helping simply to prop-up a dysfunctional system and keep house-prices too high. And neither will it work in its own terms. The fund of £400m is ‘small beer’ compared to the £4bn cut from the housing budgets, and will be subject to bidding on the basis of a prospectus to be issued at some point. Hardly the rapid economic impact we need. Public land is constantly cited as a solution, but how long will it be before the ‘buy now, pay later schemes’ will be on site and building homes? As for warming-up Right-to-Buy to generate capital for new homes, the impact will be small given the few social tenants who can afford and will be lent mortgages. That again is out for consultation first.
 As unemployment rises ever upwards, the economy continues to flat-line and the government faces home-grown and international crises, they’ve realised they need to do something. But they don’t know what. The most striking thing about this housing strategy is the whiff of economic desperation.

It was a good headline for the housing minister in the Daily Mail the day before Remembrance Sunday. It’s just a shame there wasn’t a bit more action to go with the press release.
Ex-service men and women frequently face housing problems when leaving the forces. Salaries for the majority aren’t high enough to save for a mortgage and social housing is in short supply. In the past that’s seen very high numbers of ex-service personnel sleeping rough. In the mid-90s the Royal British Legion estimated that 20% of London’s single homeless populations were former service men and women. They estimate that there are still 1,100 on the streets now.
The government’s measures won’t help them and won’t help those leaving the services that much either.
The minister proposes to ‘issue guidance’ to councils to prioritise former service men and women in their social housing allocations. Unfortunately, it’s not a problem that’s going to be solved by Grant Shapps producing a piece of paper.
Councils can already prioritise ex-service personnel for social housing. Labour run Manchester for example does. Who knows whether more will on the basis of the minister’s missive?
The government also propose to put ex-service personnel at the top of the ‘First-Buy’ queue – the government’s low-cost homeownership scheme. Given that the starting pay of a soldier is a bit over £17,000 and even a sergeant gets around £33,000, there are going to be many that can’t get a mortgage even for shared ownership. It also depends what their job prospects will be like – will the 11,000 the government is making redundant find jobs to pay a mortgage in a flat-lining economy?
Our former soldiers and sailors are likely to find themselves in the same position as many others in need – benefits that don’t meet the costs of rent, an unregulated and expensive private rented sector, long housing waiting lists and no long-term security when they do get a social home.

People who own second homes aren’t evil. I agree with the Telegraph on that. If you’ve got the means and can afford a home on the coast, why not? And it would seem perfectly rational behaviour during the last decade as you felt confident that increases in house prices would make your holiday home a decent investment too.
There’s  nothing wrong with someone buying a second home, but that doesn’t mean it’s good public policy or that it should be encouraged or subsidised by the government. So, it’s good to see second homes getting the same council tax treatment as any other home. The government proposes to give councils the power to abolish the council tax discounts on second homes, which currently are between 10 and 50 per cent. Of course, it will be up to individual council to take up those powers.
Should a government go further than that and tax second homes at a higher rate, perhaps to reinvest into new housing? That’s a move the Telegraph would definitely call evil and unjust.
But it’s also pretty unjust that there are more 50-59 years olds with a second home (17%), than there are people in their twenties with one home*.
Until we have enough homes the distribution of the homes and who gets access to them matters and not just in the social sector.
(For an unexpected champion of the intergenerational cause, you may want to check this out by Jeremy Paxman in, of all places, the Daily Mail.)
 
*I feel sure this is right and have written it elsewhere. But I’ve completely lost the source. Any better informed readers than I may like to stick it in the comments.  Otherwise, I fear that I’ll have to stop quoting it.

Yesterday, I went to the launch of ‘Homes for Citizens’, a pamphlet from the Fabian Society, supported by Crisis and the housing association Moat.
Like all housing associations Moat are trying to pick their way through the government’s ‘affordable rent’ package and assessing what their role should be.
They are maintaining security of tenure for their tenants. However, they propose housing should be made more flexible by allowing landlords to change how much people pay for their home depending on their level of income. Tenants could also change their tenure to one of shared ownership if they could sustain those costs.
There’s plenty that’s attractive in this vision. In all cases, the tenant stays in their home as long as they wish. A scarce resource (homes with low rents) is more efficiently distributed and those who pay higher rents provide extra revenue for the housing association to invest. It seems a fair way to expand social housing to those not in the categories of greatest need so that it serves a wider range of people.
The operation of this however sounds like a nightmare and it’s a brave housing association who’d take it on, even if the law allowed it. Brian Johnson, Moat’s Chief Exec, said rent re-appraisal would be done on a periodic basis, perhaps every 2-5 years and could go up as well as down. This would risk mirroring the work disincentives of Grant Shapps’ mad plan to expel the employed from social housing: if you get a job, we’ll hike up your rents. And it would significantly change the relationship that a housing association has with their tenants. They’d need to assess household finances, means test and work out who was hiding income.
It did remind me however of a conversation I had with an area manager of a housing association in Newcastle. That’s Newcastle Australia. She described visiting her tenants on a regular basis to check the condition of the property, provide information about work and training and ask about any repairs that needed doing. She also calculated their rent while she was there, which was 35% of household income (so no work disincentive cliff-edges). If their income had changed since the last visit, she’d recalculate and that would be the rent until the next visit or unless the household notified her of a change.
I’m sure in Newcastle plenty of people try to hide income to keep their rent down and the arrival of your local housing officer after someone in the house has just found a job isn’t entirely welcome. But, secure tenure in a home, with finances that flex with your circumstances isn’t impossible to do and has a lot going for it.

On my way to work today I passed a new development where the scaffolding has just come down.
The hoardings are still up bearing the logo of Building Britain’s Future, launched by Gordon Brown in 2009.
Does anyone remember ‘Building Britain’s Future’? It provided £1.5bn extra for housebuilding during the recession, on top of the £8.2bn for affordable housing that was invested over the four years to that point.
Today, CLG published figures which showed for the year 2010/11 more new affordable homes were completed than for any time for 15 years.
Investing in housing unfortunately does not pay-off within a political timescale: they take a long time to build. But, the decisions taken by a Labour government in the aftermath of the recession in 2009 are still delivering new affordable homes now and have been keeping people in work building them since then.
This government came into office and took a knife to affordable housing and the fiscal stimulus. They unleashed a planning chaos which meant plans for 200,000 homes from private developers were withdrawn. As a result the number of new affordable homes being started is falling rapidly.
Now with the economy flat-lining and unemployment rising, the government has suddenly rediscovered housebuilding as one of the most labour intensive forms of economic activity you can get. Perhaps their plans to give land to private developers or re-heat Right-to-Buy will see housebuilding increasing again – more likely they won’t.
However, it’s too little, and sadly too late, for thousands of construction workers who could have kept their jobs over the last year if the government had stuck to a more moderate and less ideological economic policy. That means thousands of people who could have supported their families, kept their skills up-to-date, helped keep the economy going and helped keep the benefit bill (and government debt) down. And it’s too late for those on waiting lists and first-time buyers who desperately need new homes.
Labour didn’t do enough on housing over 13 years, but it did do a lot – and any new homes you see being finished today are due to Labour’s past commitment.

Ed Miliband and Caroline Flint are pursuing the right strategy for social housing as the announcement to give working people more access to social housing shows.
It is right that Labour members, supporters and councillors should be concerned about those vulnerable and in need. There is absolutely no denying that if a working household gains access to a social home it is quite possible that someone facing greater need will not have that home.
But there is a stronger political argument that goes beyond the policies of dealing with housing need today to ensuring the state can provide for all in the future.
Risky thing to say, I know, but here goes:
The public provision of housing, services and welfare is under sustained attack from the right. Those attacks are proving successful, because those public goods and in particular government’s administration of them has been losing legitimacy in the eyes of the majority.
This is not a fact to be disputed – polls show it and set up a street stall in your local high street and you’ll hear it. People believe they pay in more than they get out and believe public services disproportionately benefit ‘others’: liberal professionals, the poor, benefit claimants, ethnic minorities, those in the biggest cities, migrants and asylum seekers – take your pick. That is especially so for low and middle earners. Remember at the last election, Labour held its working-class vote (socio-economic groups D+E) and its middle-class vote at the top (groups A + B), but experienced a massive swing to the Conservatives among low and middle earners.
That’s why Ed Miliband is right to focus on the squeezed middle. It’s why he’s right to align the interests of the worst off in society and low and middle earners behind the institutions that make us a fairer and more equal country. Social housing is one such institution and it needs to support those in the middle as well as those at the bottom.
The most successful progressive institutions in Britain are those which have broad and deep social support across many parts of society. Look at the uproar over the dismantling of the NHS – an uproar which may de-rail the government yet – compared to the near-silence over the dismantling of social housing.   
To risk an over simplification: If the choice we make is to ‘defend’ social housing against access to it by those working on low incomes, we pit the bottom of society against the middle and the top. That’s an argument we’ll lose. If social housing supports the majority at the bottom and the middle, not just in theory but in practice, we win.
The choice is not between social housing for those in need versus social housing for those less in need, but between the existence of social housing as a public good versus its continued erosion and dismantling.
At the Labour Party Conference, at the many housing fringes and events, people attacked the lack of political will to make housing a priority, rightly identifying the root of the problems we face now. The view seemed to be that, until supply of new affordable homes dramatically increases, giving social housing to working people was a luxury we can’t afford.  
They’ve got it the wrong way round: making social housing now a public good which serves the British people as a whole is a prerequisite to building the political will and public support for the dramatic policy changes we need.
That’s why councils should be free to balance the interests of low earners with those in housing need when deciding who gets social housing.
 
And, on some of the policy points that have been swirling around – let me address a few:

• Need and employment are not mutually exclusive. In most London Boroughs for example there are enough people in reasonable preference categories and in employment to take up the available lettings for many years to come.
•  The rent levels in social housing are more beneficial to working tenants than those out of work. It doesn’t matter to an individual what the rent is if it’s covered by benefit. It does matter if you pay for it from your own means. We lessen the extent of the benefit trap hugely by giving working people or those in intermittent employment rents they can afford without recourse to the benefits system.
•  Social housing is limited and there is a choice how we use this public good to best effect. Using it to support employment when these households might not otherwise be able to work is an impactful way to use this resource with wider social benefits. It isn’t ‘wasting’ it on people who don’t need it.
•  It goes without saying that more homes must be built and that is the fundamental way out of these problems – as Ed Miliband and Caroline Flint would both argue. But that doesn’t mean we should live in a policy vacuum until then and make no choices. The supply we need will take a long time to come.

The considerable presence of housing associations at the Labour Party Conference I described in my last post has, I hear, been replicated at the other party conferences. What explains the new-found interest in public affairs from our big housing associations?
Housing Association Chief Execs assumed the ‘mad’ and ‘disruptive’ policies that would ‘never work’ coming from Policy Exchange and Tim Leunig and others would be dropped as Ministers got into office and saw how things really worked.
As it is, they find themselves with the New Homes Bonus, a planning system being ripped up, being pressured to conform to Freedom of Information and having their pay publicly condemned – not to mentioned affordable rent, welfare cuts and fixed term tenancies. And they labour under the misapprehension (in my view) that a few housing associations who engaged early with the Tories in opposition and quickly in government helped design the current framework.
This time they don’t want to be left out of the game and it’s a matter of extreme self-interest to be part of Parties’ policy-making.
Despite the considerable sums they are collectively splashing  on warm white wine, soggy canapés and sponsoring think tanks in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, it’s a good thing for them to be more involved.

 I’m spending a few days at the Labour Party Conference this week and it’s remarkable how much focus there is on housing. Over the coming days delegates and visitors can attend:

•  2020 Vision: Housing, with IPPR and Family Mosaic
• Are we still in it together: Welfare and Housing Reform Strategies, from Moat
• Homes For The Future – reviewing possibilities for Labour’s housing policy from the Labour Housing Group and SERA
• Housing Associations and Local Government: Partnerships for Change, from the Smith Institute and L+Q.
• Housing the Nation- Making the case for better homes, from Places for People
• Building our future: Will planning and housing reform deliver the communities we want? from the TCPA
• A Tale of Two Cities: The impact of housing reform in Liverpool and London, from the Peabody Trust
• Social Housing: Fixing the current mess, from Policy Exchange.
• How will we deliver affordable housing in the future and improve people’s lives? From Hyde Group

 And these are just the events going on during the few days I’m here and don’t include planning related events. I don’t envy Caroline Flint and Alison Seabeck who are succeeding on covering all of these – all credit to them for engaging with such a wide range of topics, organisations and members.
 Conference delegates have also just voted to make housing one of only four motions to debate this week.
 As I said, you can’t move for housing policy at this conference.