Author: Tony Clements

PricedOut are a campaigning group who represent those unable to buy their own homes because of high house prices. I increasingly think they are a very good thing.
They argue for a more sustainable housing market, with lower prices and less volatility. They fight for better standards in the private rented sector for those no longer able to buy their own home. They also do a good job of highlighting the generational inequalities in the housing market, with most young (and even not so young people) locked out of a stable home long after their parents’ generation would have bought a place of their own.
As they say themselves:
We actively campaign the Government to increase housing affordability by:

• Increasing taxation on buy-to-let and multiple home ownership;
• Building more homes;
• Improving tenants’ rights;
• Improving the sustainability of the housing market, preventing a further boom in house prices.

In campaigning terms, they punch well above their weight, for a small, volunteer run organisation. They find themselves frequently in the national press making  a compelling case for unpopular reforms and arguing against accepted ‘wisdoms’.
 Now to be fair, they have somewhat of a market advantage over say Shelter or Crisis. Advocating the plight of a vulnerable minority is a tougher sell, than the mainstream ’cause’ of homeownership for young working people.
But to their credit, they do more than just argue for the narrow interests of the people they represent. They argue a broader case for a better housing system – such as better rights for private renters and lower prices. And they stick their head above the parapet to broach unpopular issues, such as taxation.
Join up, visit their website http://www.pricedout.org.uk/ and start following them on twitter @pricedoutuk

What’s the down-side to giving people who rent from private landlords longer and more secure tenancies? I think we should.
We know that life isn’t going to get any easier for first-time buyers: mortgages are still hard to get and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Life is getting worse for those that want and need social housing: fewer homes being built, more rents at near-market levels and more people being diverted into the private rented homes anyway.
Homes let by private landlords will become more important for those locked out of social housing and homeownership. The key point about these tenures (well traditionally) is that they provide long-term security and stability.
So how do we provide private renters with more security and stability as well? One simple measure would be to provide those who rent privately with more security in their home. If it has to be a home for the long-term, people need more rights in that home, especially if that is the home in which people raise their family. Why not have a minimum tenancy length of 3, 4 or 5 years?
Increasingly, I struggle to see the down-side. People talk about the impact on landlords. The burden of ‘red tape’ and the inability to get the property back immediately may cause them to pull their homes out of the rented market. But those homes are likely to then be sold, leading to more homes becoming available to buy, especially for first-time buyers.
In the past, buy-to-let landlords helped increase the number of homes being built. Developers knew they could sell their new homes to landlords ready to buy them. But that’s not a sustainable way of keeping housing supply up: it helped fuel the boom and it resulted in the empty city-centre flats in many places – when the landlords went away, no one wanted to buy them to live in.
If tenants were given more rights, those landlords who remained in the market would be those most committed to providing long-term and good quality homes for tenants. And it would give people more real choice by putting the different tenures on a more equal footing.

This Tory government seems to have missed the fact that their new ‘affordable’ rent regime creates massive disincentives for work and pushes people into the benefits system. For a government that considers people being helped and supported by the government as suffering from ‘dependency’, they’ve missed the fact that they’ve made the problem a lot worse for working tenants.
They are forcing people into claiming benefits by charging rents they can’t afford. That means they severely penalise people for working more, getting higher paid work, or someone else in the household finding a job. They’ve created a new benefits’ trap with very steep sides.
Since we had Cllr James Murray blogging for us a few days ago, let’s take what would happen to a modest earning Islington tenant as an example.
80% of the average Islington rent for a 2-bed place is £396 a week. If you earn say £20,000, that’s already more in rent per week than the £306 you earn. So, you get housing benefit and as a working household, there is no benefits cap, so you can claim what you need to cover the cost.  
All well and good isn’t it?
But what if you begin to earn more? For every extra pound you or your household earns, 65p of your housing benefit (as part of the new Universal Credit) gets withdrawn. Every new pound earned is actually worth 35p. 
So, get a promotion and take home £2k more? You’ll actually get £700. Do a week’s worth of overtime for £380, you’ll see £135. And if you have a partner out of work and they move into a job, bringing home say £8,000, you’ll effectively have only £2,800 extra, until you escape entirely from the benefits trap.
For comparison, average Islington social rents are about £85 – affordable within a weekly budget of £306. And every extra pound you earn you keep. Doing overtime, winning promotion or having someone else in the house get a job are all 100% worthwhile financially.
The point is that social housing doesn’t need to be a form of ‘dependency’. Low rents in secure homes can be the platform which allow people to earn modest salaries and stand on their own two feet without state benefits.

Former Labour advisor and Deputy Director of the think tank NLGN, Anna Turley launched a new blog last week – ProgLoc. Impressive early contributions and it’ll become a must-read for anyone interested in local government and localism on the left.
Check it out
“ProgLoc is a new independent blog dedicated to providing a voice for the centre-left in local government. It seeks to provide a platform for open debate and to become a hub for the best new thinking amongst progressives at local level.
The aims of ProgLoc are:

• To develop a forum for sharing new thinking and ideas on local public services and local government and to reclaim the localism agenda for the centre-left.
• To tackle reactionary approaches and negative briefing against local government and local public services; standing up for the sector when required but also developing challenging new ideas about how to deliver better local services.
• To support a new generation of local government leaders. So many great progressive politicians in the past have heralded from local government – we want to highlight good political leadership at local level.
• To unite progressive forces at the local level. We will examine what the barriers have been in creating progressive partnerships and look to ways of building new alliances between progressive forces.
• To enable a new approach to the relationship between the elected politician and the community. To help those on the left reinvigorate local democracy, and to ensure local government is focused on empowering people to bring about change in their community.
• To be a bridge and broker between local government progressives, the voluntary and community sector and trade unions to align rather than fragment or contradict campaigns.
• To support the creation of a new relationship between local government and the business sector. In the current climate it is vital that progressive councils form a new partnership with business to combine economic growth and social progress.”

I branched out my blogging career this week, and published a post on the excellent Southern Front. A lot of attention has been paid to what happens in London as the housing changes kick-in, but more needs to be paid to the impact on the areas where people will move to. There will be inevitable pressure on services as poorer families move to Basildon, Hastings, Harlow, Grays. But there will be a great deal of rapid demographic and social change in local communities and in the past Labour has not always articulated well people’s worries about such changes. Full post below:
Migration from London is a housing time bomb for the South
David Cameron tried to make electoral headway last week with his much publicised speech on immigration. But migration isn’t just about foreigners. In the next few years, towns in the south and east are going to see far more new arrivals from London than they will from overseas, as the government’s housing policies push poorer families out of the capital.
From Boris Johnson to Polly Toynbee, there’s been plenty of coverage about what will happen to London when social housing and benefits changes bite – the end of mixed communities in the capital.
Too little attention has been paid to what happens in the places where people move to: the towns and districts around London, which are some of Labour’s key battlegrounds in winning back the south.
People have an instinctive aversion to the overblown rhetoric which some have used to describe these changes, such as ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’ or ‘final solutions’. But nevertheless, we should be clear on the scale of what’s going on.
London Councils, the body representing the 32 London Boroughs, undertook a study using DWP’s own figures showing that London would see 82,000 families forced out of their homes because of the cuts to housing benefit in the private sector. That’s the equivalent of every household in Basildon and ten thousand more on top, packing their bags and hitting the road.
That’s just in the private rented sector. In social housing, the government is pushing housing association rents up to 80% of the market rate. That makes social housing massively more expensive in London than in surrounding towns and counties. To take one example: 80% of market rent for a three bed social home in Bethnal Green in Tower Hamlets is £416 a week, which is £238 more than in Harlow or £256 more than Crawley per week.
Many families in need of housing will find their only choice is to get on a waiting list outside of London or rent privately in south eastern towns.
These new arrivals will be the families on the lowest incomes, placing greater pressures on shrinking public services in towns around London. There will be even greater pressure on social housing. Campaigners know the importance of housing as a source of anger and frustration across key seats in the south, and how easily it is linked to issues of race and immigration. These problems may get a lot worse in the coming years.
Families moving out from London will disproportionately be from ethnic minority groups. Anyone familiar with the BNP’s campaigns across the east and south east will know that the campaigns were made credible by something that people did see around them; a rapid increase in ethnic minority families. This was, in many cases, the result of people being re-housed temporarily out of London while major regeneration schemes (for example in Canning Town) began or while they waited for social housing to become available in their home borough.
That will now take place on a far larger scale but this time, with no right of return.
This will be a big challenge for activists, councillors and candidates. We need to raise early the concrete concerns about new pressures on housing and public services. We should put the Tory MPs and council leaders on the spot: do they think these policies are right? Have they lobbied their government for resources to manage the change? What provision are they making for housing, schools and health?
And, we must also be the first to articulate people’s legitimate concerns about the nature, speed and scale of change in their community. We didn’t do that in the past as part of the immigration debate and neglected to address the feelings people have about change they can’t control and the sense of powerlessness that can create. We can’t afford now to be caught flat-footed on an issue that the right and far-right can capitalise on.
At the same time, we need to be advocates of those forced out of London and make them part of the campaign. Active local Labour parties are well placed to see first where new families arrive, what their needs are and how best to engage with them. We should help foster through local institutions, community and faith groups the integration of those moving into south eastern towns from London – any separation will only breed distrust.
In the south, Labour should tackle this issue head on and make it a key campaign which unites existing communities and those leaving London. It should be a campaign against a Tory government’s market fundamentalism that thinks nothing of uprooting tens of thousands of people from their families, neighbourhoods and jobs and forcing them into areas and communities which are not well placed to receive them.

It looks like Boris is going to be able to boast that he hit his target of 50,000 affordable homes built over the course of his term.
Of course, we can point out that many of those homes were in the pipeline from Ken’s days anyway; he stretched the length of his original pledge from three years to four years; and that much of the money came from the Labour government’s investment in housing during the recession. But, the claim will pass muster and get in the press without much criticism.
He’s got a problem however with the next four years as he prepares for the election campaign. It’s going to be very obvious that under this government affordable housing in London is going to plummet. Housing associations are putting in their bids now for how many homes they’ll build over the course of the next four years. By late this year, we’ll know the four-year programmes of London’s biggest housing associations, be able to add them up and see (I predict) a fairly grim picture for affordable house building in the capital.
The current profile for new affordable homes is in the graph below. The government’s programme won’t pull it out of this nosedive.

With supply only coming from housing associations, the Mayor will struggle to explain how he’ll increase those numbers and from where. And worse for a Mayor who made so much of family housing, we’re likely to see very few larger homes in those figures.
This will be an open goal for Ken Livingstone. And Ken will run heavily on the fact that the new ‘affordable housing’ isn’t actually affordable in many parts of London, especially where there is most housing need. 
So, what will Boris do? He can campaign and lobby for more cash/help for London. He may seek to portray himself as the one who can get concessions from central government, in a way Ken can’t. Or, he can distance himself from the government, criticise the policy and join the voices showing the damage being done in the capital. He has plenty of form on this, but will a belated criticism work? The one thing I can’t see is him defending government policy and making the case for it.
The task for Ken will be to explain how he’d do better given the policies of the current government and the state of the public finances. And if he wins he’ll actually have to do something about it.

Housing professionals and campaigners definitely know their onions. I’ve been to a lot of seminars and events recently. The standard of debate is always exceptionally high, as is the level of technical knowledge and evidence to back up people’s point of view.
At each one I’m reminded more and more just how much housing policy there is out there – from land taxes, to land auctions, to further radical planning reforms, to different funding models etc.
But, as contributors often point out many of these ideas never see the light of day and that’s because of a lack of political will or leadership. Politicians, the housing pros bemoan, are too afraid to challenge the central tenets of homeownership, of social housing or whatever to solve the housing problem.
Let me stir up a bit of a hornet’s nest and defend the politicians.
The politicians lack any space in which to move on housing policy. Even the attempt to open up the debate finds them lambasted, even before they get near policy (for political balance, here and here). For people with jobs reliant on public opinion, who are responsible directly to the general public that’s a tough place to be. The housing sector will wait forever for a politician to strike out on their own.
Those who don’t rely directly on the electorate need to do more of the heavy lifting.
Unless more space and debate about the fundamentals is created beyond the policy roundtables, the politicians are stuck where they are. Think tanks need to champion radical solutions and provide solutions to how those ideas can get traction with the public. Campaigning organisations should target public opinion, the media and civil society in a more committed and constructive way. Then politicians can speak up without being outliers on the edges of a conservative debate, where they are easy to pick off by the right-wing attack dogs in the press and government.
Reports, articles and seminars which end with lists and lists of recommendations for the government are not going to get anywhere. There is no lack of ideas or suggestions for the policy reforms, in Whitehall, ministerial teams and shadow ministerial teams – they read the think tank articles and go to the seminars too.
We also need to be more positive. Simply pedalling a narrative of despair about how no progress is ever made and how the system’s been bust for decades, just creates the impression that all is hopeless in housing. We need to make a better case that change is achievable. Don’t get me wrong – people need to be made more aware of them problems but also need to know that radical change is within our capacities and not a punt in the dark. 
The answer to the housing crisis can only be political, it’ll never be technical, but the responsibility for political leadership extends beyond the politicians.
Then the shelves of unused and untried housing policy, developed over the decades by passionate and intelligent people, who understand housing and the people who lose out, might just get a look in.

A comment by Tim Williams on my previous post, I thought worth putting up here in full. More from me shortly on the need for the political space needed to allow for change:
I’m the ‘colleague’ Tony referred to who wrote about housing in Sydney on my blog. I was a special advisor to David Miliband on housing, regen and local government and advised all subsequent housing ministers on some aspect of housing or other. So my fingers are all over this. Essentially, the housing department had no control over Treasury and we confused housing need (real enough but not scientifically quantified) with housing demand(which was being stoked up by over-lax policies by Treasury and under-regulation by its agencies such as the FSA). So housing need was growing because housing demand was being whipped on by too low interest rates, rising house prices preventing lower income and younger folk from accessing homes! Then the house-builders’ business model kicked in as they effectively constrained supply in order to keep their margins up. Oh and then planning and environmental policies inhibited the supply of land to said builders which further limited housing numbers and raised prices.
Not all of this applies in Australia. The demography is real enough with population growing. I think management of the financial institutions has been better in Oz though I suspect the federal treasurer is about to raise interest rates (already 4 points ahead of the UK’s flatlining level) to choke off demand. House prices are already stabilising it seems to me. Despite the scary graphs I think they might just have enough policy and brain to fend off a drop of about 15% which the UK has seen in prices. Maybe we are about to see that most mystical of beasts in housing: the soft landing.
Having said that, what goes up must come down and soft landings rarely happen. The deeper point is of course what did governments think they were doing by enabling the market to flood society with such cheap money. Centre left governments thought they were helping poor people access equity – as well as wanting to be as pro the aspirational or as they say in Australia, the ‘battlers’. There was a politics to home-ownership on the centre left as well as the right, in the UK, the US and Australia.
A space should have opened up after the Global Financial Crisis to provide alternative tenures and justify them politically. Tony and Toby (now of Shelter) will know I pushed this as an advisor, as did Tony. More tangibly I don’t think the silly, easy money of the noughties is ever coming back to housing finance. That is the view of many in the game and look at the moribund state of the house-builders three and a half years on from the start of the crisis. Zombies.
So new models (rented, shared ownership, cooperatives) have to be found anyway to deliver supply. So where’s the Labor/Labour Party with a narrative about this?
In Australia the Labor government gave a huge stimulus to the social housing and private rented market by their economic package to fend off recession. That worked economically amazingly well though they get no political credit because dumped the prime minister who did that (without explaining very well why). It has had the perverse(?) incentive of persuading mums and dads to get further into property speculation (via owning a few private rented units) though it has not created the conditions for a high quality, big, private rented sector, attracting institutional money of the kind we need, I think. It has however transformed community housing providers and some of them are on their way to being big UK style RSLs.
Advice? Raise interest rates sooner rather than later. Incentivise private rented. Syphon off economic demand from the capital cities. Lower entry level costs for housebuilders so that small guys can get in to shake up the market. Think through the brown-field-greenfield issue and be more flexible about building on the latter. Develop a narrative about the benefits of alternatives to ownership, helped by the fact easy money is not coming back. Read my blog!

If only we’d seen it as a property bubble. If only we’d realised price rises can’t go on for ever. If only we’d have woken up to the fact that house prices seven times the average income was a crash waiting to happen.
Hindsight is a valuable thing. We didn’t take seriously any of these possibilities during the boom. Not Whitehall, industry, government or opposition. There were some sane and far-sighted voices in the wilderness, such as Shelter’s new Head of Policy, but they were certainly the exception.
With this new wisdom even a Tory government is saying government should have intervened in the housing market and would use in the future ‘levers’ to ensure a bubble did not inflate again.
It seems highly likely to me that rapid house price rises will resume again as soon as lended loosens up (which could take a while admittedly). But we don’t have to wait until then to try out our new wisdom.

A colleague recently drew my attention to house prices in Australia, a country considered to have managed its economy well and escaped the worst ravages of the global recession. However, if you look at their house prices, it looks like they have simply delayed their crash:

Australian house prices are booming and escalating higher still with broadly the same factors that drove the unsustainable increase in Britain and with households taking on similarly huge amounts of debt.
So with new-found wisdom and confidence that we can deflate any future bubbles, what should we advise the Australian Labour government to do, that would a) work, b) not cause the bubble to burst quickly  and c) carry enough popular support so that it can be done by a government with a majority of one.
We’ve got a real life exam question here; I’m still not sure we have a credible answer for Australia now or Britain again in the future.

Those wags at Inside Housing are in the April Fools Day Spirit clearly, with their news that Grant Shapps will release a cover of the Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ to coincide with the Housing Benefit cuts.
Good joke, to highlight again a deadly serious issue for thousands of families.
Steve adds:
A friend told me a few minutes ago that there’s a text going round saying that Gaddafi is arriving in Newcastle this morning for talks.  Newcastle owner Mike Ashley thinks he’s a new cheap centre forward to replace Andy Carroll.
But the best April Fool hoot this morning was Lord Freud on the Today programme.  He made me lol by saying that the government has put ‘a lot of money’ into local authorities to enable them to help people facing housing benefit cuts.  The government is making housing benefit payments ‘realistic’ he said.   It took me a minute to realise what the date was.
What a card the man is.  And what a fun way to start the new financial year.