Red Brick

Alan Johnson MP’s interview with Progress covered a lot of topics, including the future of trades unionism, but it was his comment about public spending that attracted my attention.
Let’s look at what was actually said in the Progress piece:

Asked whether Labour should commit to stick to the government’s spending limits for its first two years in office – as it did in 1997 – Johnson says it is ‘difficult to think what else you can do’. ‘We can’t get away from the fact that the fiscal deficit has got to come down,’ he argues.

Johnson is a sophisticated political thinker, even if I don’t always agree with his conclusions.  But throwaway remarks like this, and he isn’t alone in saying it, are unhelpful, because we have to challenge conventional thinking about public spending and, in particular, public borrowing to fund investment.
The oft-quoted example of Labour accepting the Tory spending plans for 2 years after 1997 to establish its credentials (remember prudence?) doesn’t work for me.  The Tories as much as admitted that Kenneth Clarke’s proposed spending cuts were designed to make it look as if his tax cut promises for the election were affordable: they wouldn’t have stuck to the spending limits if they had won.  Especially in relation to housing, accepting the Tory budgets set Labour on a bad course and a failure to build affordable homes that was not really overcome until 2008.
The position in 2015 will be very different from 1997.  By 2015 it is likely that output will hardly be any higher than 2008, we may have had the triple dip, and the economy will still be running seriously under-capacity.  Most people will be poorer and some people will be a huge amount poorer, especially those who were the poorest to start with.  Services across the board will have been decimated and needs will have increased significantly.  The housing crisis will have intensified even more, with homelessness rising rapidly and rents becoming increasingly unaffordable along with energy costs, travel costs and other basics.
To have policies fit for the circumstances Labour will need a radical new approach to tax and spend.  Contrary to what Alan Johnson said, it is relatively easy ‘to think of what else you could do’.  Ed Miliband’s notion of ‘pre-distribution’ caused some mirth (helpful explanations here) but is a vital concept in rebalancing public spending to limit the cost to the taxpayer of market failures.  For example, the idea of the ‘Living Wage’ resonates with people and is being taken up by a wide range of progressive employers, cutting the cost of income support.  The super-rich and mega-corporations have to pay their taxes and some new taxes (eg on the super-heated central London property market) will be justified.  The Banks carry on regardless and are still not paying for the profit-driven recklessness that caused the collapse.  Income and wealth inequality is greater than it has been for decades.
In housing, far from being ‘out of control’ the housing benefit bill is the direct consequence of policy decisions (eg not building social housing, dumping homeless people in the private rented sector) and the financial crisis (unaffordable home ownership leading to ‘generation rent’).  Building social rented housing and limiting private rent increases would help bring it down.  Housing investment pretty much pays for itself through increased taxes and reduced unemployment.  Better accounting practice across departments would allow investment in housing to be measured through savings in health and other budgets.  And, as we have argued before, changes to Treasury conventions, to bring the UK in line with international practice, could enable the public corporate sector to borrow prudentially and be much more productive.
There are many more ideas around.  But we are still a long way from a General Election and the point where the Labour Opposition has to make promises and detail its tax and spending plans.  In housing we already have some bankable commitments, notably the promise to fund 125,000 extra affordable homes (of which 40,000 would be social rent) through the bankers bonus tax and the sale of G4 licences.  But at this stage it is vital to challenge conventional views of public spending and the one-dimensional logic that the deficit can only be reduced through cuts in public services: it can equally well be reduced by a mix of policies on pre-distribution, reduced tax avoidance, targeted tax rises, and the promotion of growth and investment.
Just like challenging the dominance of the ‘scrounger’ narrative, this is another area where using the right language consistently will reap political benefits.
 

For many people the Government’s attacks on housing benefit have been something to do with people getting £100,000 a year from the State to live in the posh bits of London.  David Cameron repeated the point only last week.
Campaigning against this powerful image, repeated endlessly by the Government’s spin machine, has been an uphill task.  But it seems to me that the campaigning is beginning to pay off.  The message is gradually getting through that the HB caps, the overall benefit cap, direct payments, and now the 1% cap on benefit increases, are hitting far more than a few people in central London.  And as more case studies and examples of extreme impacts on families come to light, it is becoming common to hear people say ‘I thought it was about scroungers not people like them’.
The issue that might become the battering ram for opposition to the reforms is the ‘bedroom tax’ on social tenants.  Although causing damage nationally, the impact of the bedroom tax is greatest in the North where ‘having a spare bedroom’ has historically been less of an issue than in the south and London.  Now hundreds of thousands of people are being informed by their landlords that their benefits will be cut in April and the huge effect this will have on families is gradually reaching the media, where the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, and Channel 4 have highlighted some truly appalling cases.  Callous seems a timid kind of word to describe the collective punishment being visited on people who dare to occupy more space than the Government says is allowed.
The National Housing Federation has campaigned brilliantly on this for some time and their briefings and website reports are excellent.  Social landlords up and down the country have been warning their tenants of what is to come and raising the alarm in the media – although some of them could be more vocal on behalf of their tenants than they  have been so far.
So I agree with the drift of the argument put forward by Penny Anderson in the Guardian that the bedroom tax could ‘light the touchpaper of protest’.  She asks if this issue could become the poll tax of today, but that may be going too far because the poll tax affected everyone whereas the bedroom tax is more targeted.  But I do think it could be the issue that forces the Government to retreat as MPs of all parties face constituents in their surgeries that have a very strong case for an additional bedroom above that allowed by the miserable policy, and as tenants realise that they can’t get a transfer to smaller accommodation.
Tories need to be faced with the victims of this policy.  How many will dare do what Lord Freud did on radio and tell a woman whose son is joining the armed forces that she should get a lodger while he is away from home?
And if you only have time to read one article about the bedroom tax and its implications, I recommend this from John Harris in the Guardian.
Update: Or if you have time to read 2, then here is Jules Birch’s brilliantly researched piece on the same theme.  Not sure how he has time to read all that stuff!!

Nick Clegg has been on the media a lot in the last few days saying, amongst other things, that the Government should not have cut capital expenditure so fast in the early days of the Coalition.  This is a welcome statement although not accompanied by an apology for getting it so disastrously wrong – in housing, the cut was 60% and it has caused immense damage.
On the Marr Show today, he said the Government was committed to finding ‘innovative’ ways of raising funds for capital investment but ruled out a return to the ‘bad old days’ of traditional Government borrowing.  But, he added, ‘if people have ideas about how we can provide further capital investment into our infrastructure, without breaking the bank, of course we are open to that.’  Red Brick is glad to help.
It seems everyone is talking about getting capital investment through ‘innovative’ methods of financing these days – although it flags up in my mind the experience of ‘funny money’ loans in the 1980s (interest rate swaps and sale and leaseback of council buildings come to mind) and the expensive disaster of the Private Finance Initiative in the last two decades.  The pressure is on because the Chancellor’s economic strategy is so obviously failing and growth is nowhere to be seen, so they are casting around desperately for new ways of financing capital that are somehow consistent with ‘Plan A’.
The best questions are often the most straightforward ones.  Recently we have asked ‘why do we stick to borrowing rules that clearly discriminate against public corporate investment?’ and ‘why do we not do more housing investment when the ‘multiplier’ effect is so strong that the Government gets its money back?’  Today’s question is ‘what is wrong with borrowing anyway?’
A blog last year by leading economist Jonathan Portes, Director of the NIESR, provides most of the answer – there is nothing much wrong with borrowing even when there is a large deficit.
Portes sets out his basic argument like this: ‘with long-term government borrowing as cheap as in living memory, with unemployed workers and plenty of spare capacity and with the UK suffering from both creaking infrastructure and a chronic lack of housing supply, now is the time for government to borrow and invest. This is not just basic macroeconomics, it is common sense.’
His logic has a number of steps:

• First, the economy has shown no growth since Autumn 2010 and may not regain its 2008 position until 2014. In the UK it is now a far longer period of depressed output than the Great Depression.
• Secondly, public sector net investment has been cut in half over the last 3 years and will be cut further over the next 2. Falling construction output has become a central factor in the lack of growth and a key reason for the double and possibly the triple dip.
• Thirdly, the cost of borrowing is historically low and below the rate of inflation.  It costs basically nothing.
• Fourthly, the Government could fund a £30 billion (2% of GDP) investment programme through the traditional method of issuing gilts for a cost of about £150 million a year.  Or as Portes says, it could be funded through the ill-fated pasty tax or closing a few loopholes in the tax regime.

We need to get out more and take these arguments to the public.

One of the most consistent themes on Red Brick has been to highlight the economic benefits of housing investment.  The strong multiplier effect means that there are much wider benefits than just the original investment.  And in terms of deficit reduction, housing investment tends to pay for itself by creating employment and reducing benefit requirements.
These lessons are well rehearsed in a report published by the Northern Housing Consortium, researched and written by Sheffield Hallam University, which analyses in detail the impact that housing organisations (housing associations, councils and ALMOs) have on the economy of the north, both in terms of their day to day activities and their investment activity.
Based on surveys of organisations managing over 1 million dwellings (over 90% of the north’s social housing), who built more than 8,000 homes in 2011/12, the report estimates that they had net income (mainly rents and fees) of over £6,000 million, spent over £121 million on community investment, £1,373 million on refurbishment, £1,227 million on repairs and maintenance, and £834 million on direct employment of staff.  About two-thirds of construction spending was retained in the north.  Sheffield Hallam estimate that the organisations supported a total output of £10,269 million in the north and 116,900 full time jobs.
The report assesses the future outlook for the organisations and the beneficial economic impact they have, and highlights a number of major risks:

• Welfare reform – especially the bedroom tax, which will affect 240,000 tenant households in the north, and direct payments, which could increase rent arrears from 3% to 7% of the total rent roll.
• The ‘affordable rent’ programme, which is reducing grant input to development in the north, requiring a higher level of borrowing to fund schemes and raising rents (the relationship between social rents, affordable rents, and market rents is a major issue in the north).
• Concerns over Supporting People funding which is estimated to provide 2% of organisations’ income and which is used directly to support tenant services.
• More positively, council housing finance reform is making more money available for investment although some authorities with a ‘decent homes’ backlog face serious risks.
• And the Localism Act 2012 may provide new opportunities for organisations to deliver public services.

As the number of people employed by housing organisations in the north is as high as the number employed in car manufacturing and call centres combined, the report demonstrates that the Government’s stated policy that it wants to balance growth throughout the economy and encourage more activity in the north could be seriously undermined by its policies towards the housing sector.

By Monimbo
Each year the UK Housing Review maps the recent past and future prospects for public expenditure, focussing on housing.  What does it tell us about prospects for housing investment if there is a change of government?
If you listen to the Chancellor, you’ll have the impression that the last Labour government was profligate with public money.  But in fact, as the last edition of the Review shows, Total Managed Expenditure as a proportion of GDP was lower under Labour than under the Tories for the first seven years, and only rose above it by about one percentage point for four further years, until the economic crisis pushed spending up in 2008/09.  In effect since then governments have been struggling to reduce expenditure as (in the same year – 2008/09) government borrowing and government debt both shot up as a proportion of GDP. Looking ahead, while borrowing is now forecast to fall fairly sharply, the trajectory for gross debt is that it will continue to grow.
New projections will be set out in the next edition of the Review, due out shortly, but I wanted to speculate about the position that a new government will be in, after the 2015 election.  On present forecasts, in 2014/15 spending will be running at a higher level (as a proportion of GDP) than at any time over the period 1997/98 to 2007/08.  In fact, if we compare public spending (always as a percentage of GDP) across recent governments, the last Labour government turns out to be the least profligate, even compared with the Thatcher-Major governments.  This is shown by a useful graph from Colin Talbot’s Whitehall Watch blog.
Public spending as percentage of GDP under different governments (1965-2015)

The obvious point to be made about this graph is that, since the economic crisis, GDP has fallen, and so spending as a proportion of GDP has risen, quite apart from the extra spending resulting from the crisis itself.  However, the Review’s table 13 also shows that actual spending, in constant prices, was lower in the years 1997/98-2007/08 than in any year since.
I don’t want to suggest that the next government won’t face harsh challenges and hard choices.  But the figures do underline the point that Labour in power achieved much without historically high levels of spending, until hit by the economic crisis.
One of the challenges in housing must of course be to restore some balance between bricks and mortar investment and spending on benefits.  Looking back on a typical pre-crisis year under Labour, 2004/5, of total expenditure some 56 per cent was allocated through Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL) and the remainder through ‘annually managed’ budgets, a large share of which is benefit spending.  The Budget 2012 showed that DEL is expected to fall to just 47 per cent of total spending by 2016/17, a significant shift away from departmental spending programmes, of which of course housing is one.
It is probably wrong to make too much of these comparisons, but in terms of the potential for boosting social programmes such as housing, they do suggest that priorities within public spending from 2015 may be as important as actual levels of expenditure.

I suspect most people who read Red Brick have not been invited to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland this week. Forum members are, after all, (according to WEF’s website) typically ‘one of the world’s foremost 1,000 enterprises with a leading role in shaping the future of its industry or region, a solid projected growth potential and a turnover of a minimum of US$ 5 billion’.
According to Larry Elliot, Davos was put on the map by Thomas Mann with his book The Magic Mountain about a sanatorium treating people with incurable sickness.  He draws some interesting comparisons between the book and next week’s inhabitants – who will include, mingling with the Forum’s members, Angela Merkel, David Cameron and George Osborne.
Will Hutton in the Observer derided the Forum’s theme of building a more resilient and dynamic capitalism.  As he notes, stagnation in the world’s economy has coincided with profits as a share of GDP in most western countries reaching record highs, along with executive pay, while real wages for the vast majority have been falling. Nothing will change at Davos, he comments, because  the system already works so nicely in the interests of the super-rich – and against the interests of the 99.9% and the broader economy.  The attendees are the very people that have destroyed capitalism’s dynamism.
Hutton says: ‘I was stunned to read in a recent IMF working paper, with the hardly catchy title Income Inequality and Current Account Imbalances, that the whole – yes the whole – of the deterioration of the British current account deficit between the early 1970s and 2007 could be explained by the rise in British inequality.’
In its report published to coincide with Davos, ‘Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All’ Oxfam calculates that the increasingly vast fortunes being made by the world’s richest 100 billionaires, who are accumulating at an unprecedented rate, not only drive up inequality but actively hinder the world’s ability to tackle poverty.  Astonishingly, they calculate that the world’s poorest could be lifted out of poverty several times over should the richest 100 billionaires give away the money they made last year – around £150 billion.  Just closing tax havens could yield an additional £118bn in additional tax revenues.
So, next time you hear anyone say that austerity is inevitable, we’re all in this together, etc, etc, just remember the super-rich bankers, industrialists, media magnates and politicians living it up in Davos.  And our message to them should be simple: there is a better way.

Hundreds of years of animosity between Newcastle and Sunderland, from the Civil War onwards, is now largely focused on the rather bitter Magpies v Mackems football rivalry.
It’s pretty unusual for a lad from Newcastle, who has followed the football club for over 50 years, to give any credit at all to anything that comes from Sunderland.
But today it’s a well done to the Gentoo Group for coming second in the national league table of all employers for its inclusion policies for lesbian gay and bisexual staff (LGB) in the Stonewall 2013 Workplace Equality Index (WEI).  Gentoo has been in the ‘top 20’ for five years but this is believed to be the highest position ever achieved by a housing organisation.
Stonewall’s WEI is a tool for employers to measure their efforts to tackle discrimination and create inclusive workplaces for lesbian, gay and bisexual employees.  Around 400 employers entered this year, using Stonewall’s criteria as a model for good practice.
Julie Kelly, Assistant Chief Executive of Gentoo Group said: “This is a fantastic result for Gentoo. It is immensely important to us that we value difference in our staff. One of our values is ‘Give us all you’ve got’ and to do this you need to be comfortable being yourself.
“We aim to make a real difference to the way people live their lives and if our staff are able to bring their whole selves to work and live authentic relationships, they can give us 100%. This is not only a great result for us as a Group, but also great news for our customers. Our result sends a clear message to our staff and customers and we are proud to be leading the way.”
The Index is based on a range of key indicators which include a confidential survey of lesbian, gay and bisexual employees.  This consistently revealed that the satisfaction levels of gay staff were highest at the top-ranking organisations in the Index.
Gentoo has an established staff network group, B-GLAD, for lesbian, gay and bisexual employees which has clear links into the formal structures so that it can influence policies and practice, as well as providing advice and support to colleagues and raising awareness.
Honorable mentions also go to Metropoltan, who were 10^th this year, St Mungo’s who were 24^th, and Genesis, 37^th.  Your Homes Newcastle also made it into the top 100, showing that the north east is doing something right.  15 Councils were included in the top 100.

By Monimbo
After Eric Pickles showed that he doesn’t understand housebuilding statistics, it was hardly surprising that he was wary about quantifying the extra housing demand that might result from Bulgarian and Romanian migrants.  He was challenged as strongly on this on the BBC’s Sunday Politics as he was about housebuilding performance, and his defence was that he couldn’t comment on the likely result of these countries’ citizens gaining ‘free movement’ in 2014 until he was more confident about the projections.  Unfortunately, in trying to avoid another statistical trap set by the persistent Andrew Neil, he ended up looking even more like a beached whale. Let’s see if we can help him to refloat.
First of all, his best line of defence was that many people have already been able to come here from Bulgaria and Romania since they joined the EU in 2007. Admittedly, they have had to qualify under various categories, notably the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme.  Some categories of migrant already have housing rights.  So the position of Bulgarians and Romanians in 2014 will not be directly comparable with that of Polish and other ‘A8’ nationals who were able to seek work in the UK for the first time (in many cases) in 2004.
Second, he could have said that many potential migrants have already gone to places like Germany, where admittedly there have also been strains on public services.  He might have argued that Germany has been a much more popular destination than the UK, given that less than 100,000 Romanians and less than 50,000 Bulgarians have chosen to move to the UK so far.
The problem with helping Eric with any further arguments is that they open up uncomfortable issues that the government prefers not to face. While it was fair game to point out that Labour miscalculated (by a long way) how many Poles and other A8 nationals would come here after 2004, he’d need to admit that it is extremely difficult to guess how many people might use their freedom of movement in a year’s time, when perhaps most of those people haven’t even thought about it yet. While Labour’s 2004 estimate was badly wrong, no one at the time knew quite what the effects of EU enlargement might be.  Furthermore, Labour did learn from its 2004 experience, putting tighter restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian immigration after 2007 with the aim of taking some of the pressure out of the system before those countries gained full freedom of movement.
Pickles could also help himself by getting properly briefed on dealing with the media on these issues.  He seemed blissfully unaware of the build up of media pressure prior to the 2004 EU enlargement.  In his book Immigration under New Labour, Will Somerville says that in February of that year the Sun ran 45 articles on immigration, over half of them about EU expansion.  The Daily Express joined the feeding frenzy, claiming on its front page that ‘1.6 million Gypsies’ were ready to ‘flood in’.  It’s hardly surprising if Pickles’ obfuscation on Sunday provoked press reaction.  If he continues in the same vain, he can expect much, much worse.
Given that the interview was mainly about housing, he might have thrown Neil off course if he’d said (correctly) that while nationals from the new EU countries are entitled to housing assistance few of them use it initially, getting private lodgings (often provided by employers).  Instead he set himself another trap, by seeming to agree that his department had some preliminary figures and had started looking at the effects on housing – but then he wouldn’t say what they might be. He also suggested that he would issue an estimate once he could confidently do so. By this stage he was clearly flailing, digging himself deeper into the sand.
The reality is that ministers are collectively trapped by an immigration policy which they’ve trumpeted on every possible occasion and which is going to backfire.  While they’ve succeeded in reducing net migration, mainly by cutting student numbers, it only needs a small extra influx from Bulgaria and Romania to turn that round and start pushing the figures up again.  There’s nothing surprising about this: at least Labour could claim in 2004 that everyone was taken by surprise by the extent to which Poles, in particular, used their new rights.  That argument won’t hold in 2014.
It would also help, of course, if Pickles’ department was still estimating housing needs and had robust plans to tackle the severe housing shortage which he had to admit exists.  Instead we have ministers who seem to think that almost insignificant measures like New Buy will solve the problem, and anyway can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.
On one thing Eric was right: when he said he needs to be ‘reasonably confident about the figures’ he could have been starting to write his ‘to do’ list for his next interview.  He must be hoping it’s with someone who is not as conversant with the facts about housing and migration as Andrew Neil proved to be.

It’s a common complaint that housing issues get very little coverage in the British media.  Sometimes it seems even worse when it does get some air time.  So this was a relatively good weekend.
Of all the TV interviewers, Andrew Neil seems to do some prior research before his interviews and isn’t immediately befuddled by a few well-rehearsed stats thrown into the argument by the interviewee from a crib sheet.
Today on Sunday Politics, Eric Pickles looked at a chart (check here on i-player, about 27 minutes in) put up by Neil, sourced from the official ONS statistics, which clearly showed housing starts declining since the Coalition came in.  No, said Eric, they’ve gone up.
Neil couldn’t believe his eyes or ears, and deserves an accolade for not only doing the work beforehand but also pressing the point as Pickles became increasingly obscure in his answers, ultimately being made to look a fool.  In one extraordinary moment, Pickles said: ‘I’m not going to go onto a prestigious show like this and not know what I’m talking about.’  Well, Eric, yes you did and no you don’t.
Impressively, subsequent tweets show that Andrew Neil really had done his homework and knew, for example, the difference between the stats for starts and completions and the stats for new housebuilding as opposed to increases in the housing stock (which also take account of conversions and demolitions, for example).
Eric seemed very relieved when Neil moved on from housing starts and the impact that east European immigration might have on housing demand (dunno, I’ll let you know later, said Eric) to whether the Government is going to end fines for leaving the wrong rubbish in the wrong bin.
Similar obfuscation about housebuilding figures helped make housing the dog that didn’t bark during the London mayoral election last year. Affordable housing has collapsed, the figures show. Oh no it hasn’t said Boris Johnson, we’re going to build record numbers. And there was no challenge as he switched from starts to completions, and from history to the future, from housebuilding to affordable housebuilding, whichever suited his case the best.  Eventually, the figures become meaningless, the media couldn’t be bothered, and there was no accountability for performance.
The other encouraging bit of media coverage this weekend was some fairly straight reporting of what Ed Miliband said on the regulation of the private rented sector – see the Guardian, the Metro, PoliticsHome, and Daily Mail for example.  Like Andrew Neil, he gave the impression that he’d researched his topic and taken note of the detailed work done by Jack Dromey on the policy.  So here for posterity is the key bit of Ed’s speech:
Ed Miliband

Jonathan Primett from Chatham wrote to us recently, complaining about rogue landlords at a time when the private rented sector is growing fast in our country.  Today I want to respond to him.
Britain is in danger of having two nations divided between those who own their one homes and those who rent.  If we are going to build One Nation, people who rent their homes should have rights and protections as well.
That’s about rooting out the rogue landlords.  Stopping families being ripped off by letting agents.  And giving new security to families who rent.
So we will introduce a national register of landlords, to give greater powers for local authorities to root out and strike off rogue landlords.  We will end the confusing, inconsistent fees and charges in the private rented sector.  And we will seek to give greater security to families who rent and remove the barriers that stand in the way of longer term tenancies.

We should rejoice that today marks the point at which the Coalition is half over.  From now on there will be fewer days of suffering ahead of us than there are behind us.  As Cameron and Clegg do another relaunch, it is salutary for a housing blog to look back at the Coalition Agreement and see how what they have done compares to what they promised.
This is easier said than done, because the Agreement had little to say about housing and nothing to say about many of the more controversial policies they have pursued in power.  And that is the root of my central criticism of the LibDems – if the Agreement is what they signed up to, with no obligation to support other policies not contained therein, why did they subsequently embrace enthusiastically so many Tory policies that were not in the Agreement and diametrically the opposite of what was in their own Manifesto?  Were they weak or stupid?  It must be one of those.  More than in most areas, housing policy has been developed according to a private agenda within the Conservative Party and the LibDems have chosen to go along with it when they could have taken a much more oppositional stance without breaching the Coalition Agreement.
Some of the policies included in the Coalition Agreement have been pursued, such as: scrapping regional spatial strategies; reform of the housing revenue account; bringing empty homes into use; increasing the right to buy.  And there are others where progress is more debatable: continuous improvement of energy efficiency; creating new community trusts to provide homes for local people; ‘maintain the green belt’ (remind Planning Minister Nick Boles about that one).
What is astonishing is the lack of mention of a long list of policies the Coalition has since pursued: the ending of new homes for social rent; the creation of the ‘affordable rent’ tenure at up to 80% of market rents; the 60% cut in public housing investment; flexible tenure; the bedroom tax; reducing the homelessness safety net; cancelling Labour’s plans to regulate the private rented sector – to name but a few.  It is also worth mentioning that the Agreement does not even mention the phrases ‘housing benefit’ and ‘local housing allowance’ and the word ‘cap’.  Nowhere is there any reference to the overall benefit cap.
There is no doubt that the LibDems would have been well within their Coalition rights to oppose or to refuse to support these policies but were too feeble to do so.  Indeed, LibDem Minister after Minister – in CLG and DWP – stood up to defend them and to support policies that are wholly contradictory to historic LibDem policies or even the new and excellent LIbDem housing policy adopted at their last conference.
The reason for being so disappointed with the LibDems is that it was well known before the Election that a private housing agenda was being developed by the Tories with the help of leading figures in the housing world: in particular, the infamous Localis pamphlet set out clearly the direction the Tories would take towards market rents and the denial of rights to social tenants.  The LibDems should have known what was coming and had a clearer strategy for resisting it.
There is a general belief that the Coalition will be brought to an end before the General Election so that the Conservative and LibDem parties can develop distinctive policies during the campaign.  No doubt at that point the LIbDems will revert to their previous and current policies, which on paper are excellent and attractive.  But the real measure will be ‘what did you do in Government?’.  The Coalition has been disastrous for housing policy and the LibDems have been fully complicit.  Whatever the paper policies, they should not be trusted again.