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We Need to End National-Grid Lock

There are two existential threats to our country’s future: tackling the climate emergency and fixing Britain’s housing crisis. Future generations will not look kindly on us if we let these two systemic issues run on unresolved for another decade. They might seem like two distinct challenges, but they’re connected by one key piece of infrastructure: the National Grid.

Two Critical Priorities: Housing & Energy

In my hometown of Bracknell, the previous Tory council oversaw anaemic house building. Last year, only 390 houses were built. The situation for social and affordable housing is far worse. From 2017 to 2022, Bracknell Forest built only 8 homes for social rent. Meanwhile, 1,690 families are stuck on the council’s housing waitlist. 1.2 million families are on waiting lists throughout England.

Now, with a Labour council leading Bracknell since the local elections, there is real hope for change. But grappling the housing crisis requires national, as well as local leadership. And with a Tory government crippled by NIMBY activists in its own ranks, it is clear Rishi Sunak has no leadership to give on the issue.

Nationally, Labour has set forth a bold set of proposals to get Britain building, including reforming planning laws and putting an end to so-called “hope value” blocking public procurement.

Energy policy also requires both local and national leadership. Labour has ambitious plans to retrofit and insulate existing housing stock, to make it more energy efficient, and they will create GB Energy, a publicly-owned energy company focused on renewables.

At a local level, it is great to see Labour embracing co-operative and community energy schemes, which will empower communities and drive local economic growth.

Unlocking Grid Capacity

Tackling both climate change and the housing crisis require us to face up to a significant challenge.  The capacity of the National Grid is far too low, and creating new connections takes far too long. Any new house puts increased strain on the electricity grid; only compounded by the transition to electric cars, heat pumps and other green technologies. And new onshore wind farms and solar panels need to be actually connected to the grid if they’re going to help us reach Net Zero by 2050.

John Pettigrew, the Chief Executive of the National Grid, has said that “we will need to build about seven times as much infrastructure in the next seven or eight years than we built in the last 32”. Strategic planners have suggested the grid needs £54 billion of investment to meet green goals.

Housing projects are already being delayed or rejected because of local shortfalls in National Grid connectivity. The National Grid currently operates a first-come-first-served system for connecting new projects, which means any delays have a knock-on effect – and ready-to-go projects are facing years-long delays.

One problem is that expanding the National Grid to build more homes also requires planning permission. And just as house building can attract local controversy, so too can projects to expand the grid. An incoming Labour government needs to be ready for this.

The other major issue is, of course, money. That’s why it’s so welcome to see Labour committing to spend £28 billion on green investment by the mid-point of next parliament. A proportion of that will need to be spent on upgrading the National Grid.

As Keir Starmer said when unveiling Labour’s green agenda, “we’ve got to roll up our sleeves and start building things and run towards the barriers – the planning system, the skills shortages, the investor confidence, the grid.”

Only a Labour Government can show the leadership we need to end a National Grid-lock.

Peter Swallow

Peter Swallow is Chair of Ealing Central and Acton CLP and a researcher at Durham University

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Making the Moral Argument for Housing

Let’s start with first principles: housing is a fundamental human right. A right so central, so  fundamental, that it intersects with all others. An inalienable and essential need enshrined in  moral and natural law – though not yet in the statute books. Without it, all else suffers;  educational outcomes fall, inequality worsens, psychological and physical health  deteriorates, and human potential is capped and even drained. As Hashi Mohamed  beautifully puts in his book A Home of One’s Own, having secure and dignified housing  “allows the mind and soul to wander to more important matters; the growth of one’s  personality, the ability to dream and desire.”1It is the basic human need for shelter, without  which all other needs cannot be meaningfully met. 

We have all seen the figures that illustrate the scale of the problem. Over 100,000  households now in temporary accommodation, 64,940 of those with children. As of the start  of 2023, over 1.2 million households on local authority waiting lists, the true numbers of  those in need likely far higher. And underlying these statistics, the daily human tragedies that  flow endlessly from the national emergency that is the housing crisis. 

As a councillor in an inner-city London borough I have come face-to-face with the  desperation and devastation faced by those in desperate need, as well as the uncertainty  and anxiety of young people with no hope of laying down roots. Like many of us, I have also  personally faced the soul-destroying horror of housing insecurity and eviction – and the  displacement that comes with it. 

If we accept the truly destructive nature of the housing crisis across all metrics, and accept  that housing is a human right, the next question surely must be: will we do whatever is  necessary to fix it? Not for the sake of it, but because this is a matter of social and moral  justice. Holding our principles front of mind and recognising that the housing crisis is not just  a headline, we have no choice but to be bolder. Put simply, we as a Labour movement have  an ethical, not just practical, duty to be fearless in our efforts. 

Firstly, we have to slay some common myths on the progressive side of politics, namely that  we can fix the housing crisis simply by filling vacant homes (whether they belong to overseas  investors or not) and by building solely on brownfield sites in existing urban centres. I know  why these are common arguments – I understand why they are attractive fantasies. We care  deeply about inequality and reject the commodification of housing, recognising the  unsustainability and immorality of the notion of homes lying vacant during a housing crisis,  and we embrace our role as custodians of the environment, preferring to limit the impact of  human existence on nature

But as is often the case, these fantasies are the waking dreams that risk distracting us from  the real work required. The facts are sobering. The UK has the lowest long-term vacancy  rate in Europe, bar Poland, at just 1.1% of the total housing stock– a mere drop in the water. Building to full capacity on all the brownfield sites in the entire country would only  deliver 31% of the homes needed– a significant, but ultimately inadequate, amount. 

While no option should be taken off the table, it is clear these approaches taken in isolation  are not enough. Facing an estimated 4.3 million home deficit, only more radical, progressive  solutions will end the injustice and suffering faced by so many. 

Take the Green Belt, imagined by many as a noble, pristine ring embracing our cities while  in fact acting as a semi-industrial chokehold throttling supply. Here we have an opportunity  to make a radical, and observably true, argument – the Green Belt isn’t really green at all,  and has very little to do with the environment. It does not exist to preserve England’s green  and pleasant land but to restrict urban growth, and is already largely built upon with light  industry and low-density housing. It is estimated we could fill the entire 4.3 million home gap  by just building densely on under 6% of the Green Belt, if taken as the only solution.  Counter-intuitively, this would then have the effect of limiting urban sprawl and allowing us to  preserve and re-wild our actual natural landscapes. 

Or we can look to the related work of architect Russell Curtis, whose research has  concluded that we could provide 1.2 million homes by building solely around rural train  stations, where the transport infrastructure already exists. The knock-on benefits of this for  the economy and reducing reliance on cars are obvious, and would also require less new  infrastructure to be built. 

No argument about solving the housing crisis and fixing supply should ignore the need for  wider planning reform, though, beyond re-designation of the Green Belt and other measures – as long as our planning regime operates on a case-by-case, discretionary model, as laid  out in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, achieving the levels of supply required may  be prohibitively difficult. Our approach should therefore include a recognition of the need to  overhaul the system as it currently stands and embrace the radicalism that makes us  Labour: when systems are no longer fit for purpose, we build new ones. 

When those outside the Labour movement, or our political opponents, make similar  arguments about acting boldly to fix the housing crisis, they make them largely on the basis  of practical and economic necessity. Our movement has the opportunity, and the  responsibility, to make them with the moral necessity in mind and, while we do not have a  monopoly on morality, we must remember the reason we exist – to redress these injustices. 

It is why the Labour Housing Group and Labour Campaign for Human Rights came together  to clearly say “Housing is a Human Right”, bringing together housing and human rights  practitioners, and why our conference motion calls for housing to be front and centre of the  party’s campaigns. 

The housing crisis is a catastrophe affecting all strata of society; young people forced into  HMOs and limiting environments well into their 30s, unable to flourish as they wish, millions  more of all ages and backgrounds in insecure and undignified housing up and down the  country, not to speak of the thousands experiencing street homelessness.

Failure to fix this problem – and failure to make this argument persuasively – is therefore a  moral failure. The recognition that we must do whatever it takes to end the housing crisis  should be at the front and centre of every debate, every political conversation, and every  policy consideration: not simply to boost economic growth, or to attract younger voters, but  because it is the right thing to do.

Omid Miri

Omid Miri has been a Councillor in Hammersmith & Fulham, and Chair of the Planning Committee, since May 2022. He is passionate about tackling the housing crisis and campaigning for housing as a human right, and particularly interested in re-prioritising social and council housing as a form of tenure.

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Labour’s Plans to Increase Home Ownership & Abolish the Leasehold System

The Labour Party will gather shortly at Liverpool to discuss the National Policy Forum’s report which is likely to form the basis of the manifesto for the next General Election.

Labour is seeking the support of aspirant home owners with proposals to guarantee the deposit of those who can obtain a mortgage. The party is concerned that the number of home owners is falling especially among young people.

The Leadership wants to see the proportion of all households who are home-owners reach 70%. The current rate is 65%. The last time it was 70% was in 2003. This target is therefore ambitious given the decline in wages and is dependent on a growing economy.

Labour will retain the Right to Buy for council tenants, though the discount rate will be reviewed. Council leaders will argue that this policy will not help their efforts to reduce the record numbers of homeless households in temporary accommodation.

Labour supports leasehold reform

The report sets out helpful polices to attract the support of the 4.86 million leaseholders who live in England and Wales. Scotland abolished their leasehold system in 2004.  Many leaseholders live in marginal constituencies.

Leaseholders do not own any bricks and mortar in their homes. They own the right to live in their property for a limited period. Once their lease runs out, they will become mere tenants if they do nothing. Service charges disputes are commonplace. Freeholders can recover their legal costs from leaseholders even if they lose at court. Virtually all the former UK colonies no longer have a leasehold system.

In 2002 Labour introduced the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act. This was designed to replace the leasehold system with commonhold. It failed due to opposition from many vested interests. 

There are only a handful of commonhold sites in England and Wales. Commonhold is not just for flats. It also applies to interdependent buildings with shared facilities and common parts. On the Isle of Shepey in Kent, the owner of a mobile home site gave the land via a commonhold company to the site residents who now manage the site themselves.

The Law Commission’s proposals to replace the feudal leasehold system with the modern commonhold tenure will be implemented in full at minimal cost to public funds. Commonhold will become the default tenure for flats.  Such proposals are very timely as the Government has decided to drop their own plans in this area. The Conservatives will deny that this is linked to nearly 40 % of their donations coming from developers.

Fire Safety

All leaseholders will be protected from the costs of remediating fire safety defects for cladding and non-cladding defects. All dangerous buildings will be identified, registered, and made safe. In September 2021 there were over 1000 unsafe buildings in London alone. The current government still does not know how many blocks are unsafe. The rate of remediation is painfully slow and there are non-qualifying leaseholders who are ineligible for help  under the 2022 Building Safety Act. Such proposals are welcome.  

The report refers to the rate of remediation being accelerated. However, there is no mention of who will pay for such work or how it will be carried out. This area needs to be sharpened up though the financial implications are challenging. 

Flat sales are falling due to the complexities around the Building Safety Act. Some conveyancers  will not act for leaseholders who are forced to sell at a loss at auctions. 

Further work needed

There are other problematic issues for home owners that need addressing. Shared ownership needs to be reformed. How can this be considered as a form of ownership when such residents can be evicted for two months’ worth of rent arrears and lose all any equity that they have built up?  There is currently a Commons Select Committee inquiry into shared ownership. It is likely to be critical.

The estate charges that house owners pay on unadopted private estates to volume builders are controversial. Home owners can lose their homes if they ignore such charges. These are known as fleecehold. The former Labour MP for Bishop Auckland Helen Goodman produced an excellent 10-minute rule Bill in 2017 (see her YouTube video here).  Her Bill is outside the scope of the Law Commission’s work though the  Competition and Market Authority are in the process of investigating such charges.  

The situation for the owners of mobile homes is crying out for reform. They own the property but not the land it sits on. They have to pay 10% commission to the site owner if they wish to sell.

Attitude of Party members

Labour outside Westminster appears at times to have a cultural problem with owner occupied housing. Although leasehold reform has been in nearly all Labour election manifestos since the war, this issue has seldom been discussed at Labour conference. None of the progressive think tanks have produced reports on leasehold reform, though see this report by the Welsh Government. 

One of the reasons for the failure of the 2002 Act was the lack of support outside Parliament. Unfortunately, the work of the leasehold reformers such as the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, the National Leasehold Campaign and Commonhold Now are seldom discussed in Labour circles.

Devolution

Labour will introduce a Take Back Control Act. This will devolve power away from London. It is not clear what the implications are for housing. The NPF envisage that new development corporation will lead in partnership with developers and local councils in the drive for building new homes. Will Sadiq Khan be empowered to require developers to introduce a commonhold scheme as envisaged in previous manifesto? Will “fleecehold residents “be able to require local councils to adopt communal facilities on their estates? 

The NPF report is strong on the need to build more homes. Potential home owners will be attracted to the Labour Party by the thought of a guaranteed deposit. However, doubts remain whether young people can obtain a mortgage when the average property in London costs over £600,000.  Reinvigorating commonhold will attract political support. The Labour leadership needs to provide support to Labour parliamentary candidates on how to campaign on leasehold reform.

Dermot Mckibbin is on the Executive Committee of Labour Housing Group, and will shortly become a member of the new Beckenham & Penge CLP

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Housing: Labour’s Sixth Mission?

The ‘Final Policy Documents’ from Labour’s National Policy Forum for Labour Conference include the core housing policies from which Labour will draw its Manifesto for next year’s general election. It is therefore probably the most important statement since the 2019 Manifesto and the Housing Green Paper ‘Housing for the many’ produced by John Healey in 2018.


It is right that our national housing policy should be comprehensive, dealing with all tenures and tackling issues that affect people across the range of incomes and stages of life. So, I welcome the fact that the document looks across the housing landscape. However, I also remain convinced that the big-ticket item in housing is how to provide many more homes for social rent, and the document is not impressive on that front.


The document addresses access to home ownership and proposes a mortgage deposit guarantee scheme for first-time buyers, a good proposal that is long overdue after years of inflationary and hugely expensive Tory demand subsidies. There are good proposals to reform stamp duty and to back schemes like ‘first dibs for local people’ on new developments (first pioneered by Islington).

I also fully support the emphasis given to reforming the feudal leasehold tenure – about which Dermot McKibbin has written persuasively for Red Brick. The document repeats the target of 70% home ownership, with no timescale, but not the previous commitment to restore social housing as the second biggest tenure. The latter was a statement of intended direction, and its disappearance is a big concern.

The proposed reforms to planning, flexibility around the green belt, scrapping the infrastructure levy, and the ‘unleashing’ of ‘patient capital’ into housebuilding, and higher disability standards, are all outlined, although the devil will be in the detail of each of these and the word ‘reform’ is used too often without saying what and how. Planning needs to stop being so reactive and developer-led so I hope it is true that we will ‘pioneer new models of strategic development’ – but we need meat on the bones.

I like the proposed reform to compulsory purchase orders and there is a hint of awareness of the underlying problems caused by the land market and developer profits, but overall the package of land-related reforms seems weaker than the 2015/2017/2019 Manifestoes. As there is little discussion of the public investment needed to purchase land and build infrastructure, it is not clear how the package will transform the planning process in practice to secure the claimed major uplift in housebuilding. In an era of Metro Mayors and at a time when councils are itching to build themselves, I am not convinced by the idea of new development corporations. No-one wants to wait for new administrative structures to be established.


Following the Tories’ huge cuts to social housing grant, planning gain (the mechanism of s.106 agreements) has produced half of all affordable housing. More could be achieved but maximising affordable supply – especially achieving social rent rather than sham affordable tenures – through planning rather than accepting what is offered might also require additional subsidy. One key change not addressed is to end the abuse of the specious ‘viability test’ through which developers pay too much for land and understate their likely profit to escape their responsibilities to the community by arguing that affordable homes are not viable in the resulting development.


I like the promise raised by the Warm Homes Plan – which will ‘upgrade all the homes that need it’. It’s a critical issue on the path to net zero but, as elsewhere in the document, additional spending is implied without being it being clear where the funding will come from. Homeowners and landlords are unlikely to put up the money without a lot of central government help, and it would take up the bulk of the green investment budget to upgrade all homes. There is a commitment to ‘improve the quality and safety of existing social homes’ but we need clearer guarantees in the post-Grenfell era and following the spike in damp/mould problems in the stock.


Any comprehensive strategy must address the private rented sector. Here the document has good ambitions and quite strong proposals – a Renters Charter, ending no fault evictions, a binding decent homes standard and action against poor landlords, banning discrimination against those on benefits and a national landlord register. My first worry is that there is no assessment of what will happen to the market if all these changes are made: we need to understand what the outcome might be and to plan the further interventions that might be needed. Secondly, all these changes, excellent in themselves, require local authority intervention and enforcement, and on a large scale. It will not happen without the resources – in the form of tenancy relations officers and environmental health officers especially – to implement it, and there is no mention of resources. And thirdly, nothing is said about rent levels or about the iniquitous impact of the Local Housing Allowance and total benefit cap levels: none of the proposals will meet the document’s claim that it will make private renting more affordable.

So, what about the delivery of homes directly to people in housing need, the 100,000+ households in temporary accommodation and the millions on waiting lists or stuck in the misery of the private rented sector who need a secure genuinely affordable home? Except for those who retain a quaint belief in trickle down – ie that the poor will eventually benefit from building market homes – most people understand that only social rent meets these needs. Yet this is the tenure that is addressed least in the document – and this is its greatest weakness.

It starts ok: ‘Labour will also put genuinely affordable housing, and in particular social housing, at the heart of our plan to increase housing supply.’

But what are the specifics? Let us remember that we were committed to gearing up to building 150,000 additional social rent homes a year, including 100,000 new council homes. The commonly accepted minimum requirement is for 90,000 social rent homes a year. Gearing up to any of these figures would be a challenge over a Parliament and very substantial increases in grant and local authority/housing association prudential borrowing would be required. We know that councils have been itching to build many more homes, it is only central government and funding that has held them back.


Making the case for housing investment is a constructive challenge to Labour’s economic as well as housing policy. There have been many studies over the years which consistently demonstrate the positive economic impact of housing investment, including by the SHOUT campaign, all of the housing organisations, and most economic researchers. New social rented housing should never be considered as simply a cost, it also generates an income stream for ever, reduces the cost of benefits, and creates real productive growth.


Regrettably, the document has no targets for affordable or social rented housing. Its key proposal is that Labour will ‘Reprioritise government grant by reforming the Affordable Homes Programme’. The current AHP runs from 2021-2026 and by late 2024 it will be very largely committed. Even then, extra subsidy (grant) would be needed to shift the very final stages of the programme from, for example, ‘affordable rent’ to ‘social rent’ homes – but there is no promise of the extra spending needed to go with the idea.


The ‘reprioritisation’ commitment would have more credibility if it targeted the totality of housing expenditure programmes rather than just the AHP, because some remaining housing demand subsidies could be repurposed.

And what about the years beyond 2026 – the last 3 years of a Labour Government? On current Tory spending plans, capital spending on housing falls off another cliff at that point. With no new AHP announced for 2026 onwards, the UK Housing Review reports that predicted spend on affordable homes will fall from £2233m in 2025/26 to £529m in 2026/27. If Labour sticks to Tory plans there will few affordable homes of any kind. To avoid huge further cuts and to maintain a programme – even at the current inadequate size – Labour must commit to additional spending on housing over and above current Tory plans.

Although reforms to restrict the right to buy are proposed, the policy will continue in some form. Adding in demolitions, losses will continue but at a reduced level. There is a hoped-for increase in social rent from planning but an inevitable reduction in output of new homes from the AHP after 2026. On balance it seems unlikely that the document’s proposals will lead to a net increase in the social housing stock until well into the Labour government, and possibly not at all. This is unconscionable.


Even if we provide the additional spending needed for a new AHP the homes will take some years to produce. We face a housing emergency where we are currently unable to meet the need for temporary accommodation let alone the increasingly urgent need for permanent homes. With 130,000 children living in temporary accommodation, we know the costs of bad housing and homelessness are huge in health, education, well-being, and life chances. The only effective short-term response to the housing emergency will be a major programme of acquisitions, bringing homes into the social rented stock for early use.

One final gripe. The document has only a few words on homelessness – we will have ‘a workable strategy’ which will ‘transform lives’. But it appears to be only about one aspect of homelessness – rough sleeping – and is platitudinous. It is miles away from what is needed if a new Labour government is genuinely to tackle homelessness.

The NPF document’s first words in the housing section – ‘Housing is a human right’ – should be at the core of Labour’s policy making, but there is no commitment to put the human right into law. As they stand, the policies set out will not take us much nearer to achieving that aim.

There are some good ideas and proposals, but the document is seriously deficient in failing to identify serious targets, means of delivery and, above all, resources. It is particularly weak in failing to adopt a target for additional social rented homes or even a sense of direction or some hope. There is a serious risk that, by the end of Labour’s first term, trends that have become entrenched under the Tories – rising homelessness, increasing housing need, and growing unaffordability – will not have been reversed.

Housing investment contributes positively to all Labour’s Five Missions. It secures growth; it makes a major contribution to achieving net zero; it promotes good health and well-being; it builds safe communities; and it breaks down barriers to opportunity. Housing should be Labour’s Sixth Mission.

Steve Hilditch was a founder member of LHG when it formed 42 years ago. He worked as a housing professional and consultant and advised the last Labour Government, various Select Committees and many Labour Councils on housing matters. He recently carried out a detailed housing review for the new Labour Westminster Council. He edited Red Brick blog for 10 years, publishing a compendium book of 100 posts in 2020.

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If Not Now, Then When? The Campaign for the Right to Adequate Housing

The Chartered Institute of Housing Cymru, Tai Pawb and Shelter Cymru are the Back the Bill coalition in Wales. It has been campaigning to incorporate the right to adequate housing (RTAH) in Wales since 2019. This June, following a Programme for Government commitment between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru a Green Paper on securing a path to adequate housing, including fair rents and affordability, has been published. The leaders of the three organisations fronting the campaign, Matt Dicks, Ruth Power, and Alicja Zalesinska, look at why introducing the right to adequate housing should be a key response to the housing crisis in Wales.

“If not now, then when?” is a question we often ask ourselves as campaign partners. When there are almost 90,000 people on social housing waiting lists and 10,221 in Temporary Accommodation, the housing crisis in Wales is inescapable. Too many lives are blighted by inadequate homes. As well as ruining people’s lives, poor housing costs the NHS in Wales £95 million per year. It is widely recognised that Wales is the birthplace of the NHS solving a 20th Century endemic issue of poor (public) health. Our predecessors did not wait for enough hospitals doctors and nurses to form the NHS – they recognised legislation would drive it and got on with it. That’s the approach we should take now and incorporate a right to adequate housing in Wales. 

In Wales, Many of us Agree Housing is a Human Right

We’re fortunate in Wales that we have governments with a history of looking at the bigger picture, whether it’s through the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, becoming an anti-racist nation or incorporating the rights of the child. In housing too, our 2014 Housing Act has been praised for its focus on prevention and replicated elsewhere in the UK.  So, the positive starting point is that Welsh Government recognises the challenge of the housing crisis and the importance of the right to adequate housing. Indeed, earlier this month, the Minister for Climate Change, Julie James, told the Local Government and Housing Committee, “…it’s a fundamental human right that you are adequately housed, and that is the mark of a civilised society that we can adequately house our citizens.”

Human Rights Must be Placed at the Centre of Housing Reform

Perhaps given this standpoint, it is surprising that the recently published Green Paper is a bit underwhelming, missing the transformative potential of incorporation and the benefits of progressive realisation in delivering it – essentially introducing the right over time alongside additional resource and increasing housing supply.  While the Programme for Government references ‘a right to adequate housing,’ there is an absence in the Green Paper of a strong discourse on human rights. And this matters. If adequate housing is a human right and the mark of a civilised society, it stands to question how it hasn’t been achieved by now. 

This Matters Because…

It’s not just enough to talk about human rights, but important to embed, protect and nurture them. Rather than talk about housing as a human right – a statement nearly all of us will agree with – it’s necessary to incorporate these rights to drive through change. This is how we secure a long-term, joined up and sustainable solution to the housing crisis. Unfortunately, this is not recognised in the Green Paper, which is almost silent on incorporation, and importantly, the value of incorporation. Instead, there is a focus on what adequate looks like – which while welcome fails to understand the full benefits of incorporation including tackling inequality and participation for communities in housing. 

While the Green Paper sets out a number of well-informed proposals to implement progressive policies, these are in effect reduced to discretionary priorities which are vulnerable, as policy always is, to changing priorities. There is no solid legal foundation that future generations could use as a basis to argue for progressive housing policies in Wales. 

The Green Paper stage is all about evidence and concepts – for the right to adequate housing, the most fundamental concept is that of progressive realisation, where the full right is introduced over time. We feel the Green Paper also misunderstands the role of progressive realisation in securing incorporation. Rather than seeing incorporation as the driver of change, the individual changes required are presented as barriers to incorporation with a right to adequate housing presented as the culmination of change; completely missing the point of incorporation.

For housing in Wales, ambition is critical.  However, as we stand now, the housing crisis is deepening. Tinkering around the edges with individual reforms hasn’t worked to date, so there can be no reason to expect it will in the future. We feel a right to adequate housing is the foundation of ambition, driving the long-term, joined-up and wholesale change required. Incorporation can drive the changes required to ensure everyone has a safe, suitable home they can afford.

We’d be naïve to not recognise legitimate concerns to our alternative vision but hear us out – none of these are insurmountable. 

Of course, the right to adequate housing will cost money – but independent cost-benefit analysis has shown that it will deliver savings of £11.5 billion for the Welsh public purse against a cost of £5billion over a 30-year period. 

It will mean change for housing and support providers, including local authorities – but this change means doing existing things better and leveraging in additional resources. All local authorities want good homes for their citizens and taxpayers without having to use inappropriate, expensive and unsuitable hotels as Temporary Accommodation.

We also recognise the fear around increased litigation. However, progressive realisation means the right to adequate housing is realised over time – not overnight. And with the maximum available resource committed, there will be no immediate increase in litigation, nor is there any international evidence to suggest it. Indeed, the outcome is greater supply and better standards across the board. Fear and risk of immediate litigation could also be mitigated through a ‘sunrise clause’ in any future Act, giving the government and public bodies time to progress their policies before the right is justiciable and fully recognised. 

For us, it is clear that the time to act and bring about positive, long-lasting change is now.   We believe that legislation to incorporate the right to adequate housing into Welsh law is the starting point that provides the paradigm shift in the way we view housing and the investment and prominence it is given in the wider public policy debate in Wales to deliver the long-lasting change that we, as housing professionals, all aspire to delivering.

Matt Dicks is Director of CIH Cymru; Alicja Zalesinska is Chief Executive of Tai Pawb; Ruth Power is Chief Executive of Shelter Cymru. Together, the three organisations represent the ‘Back the Bill’ campaign.

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The Lost Progressive Potential of Local Plans

What are Local Plans?

Local Plans are the bedrock upon which the entire UK planning system is based. Prepared by local planning authorities (councils) they essentially establish how land should be utilised in a given area. Once agreed, they are used to determine planning applications. 

The current Local Plan system properly emerged with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. This implemented for the first time a ‘plan-led’ system whereby anyone wanting to develop land had to first seek planning permission. 

Despite their importance Local Plans are often treated with at best detached apathy and at worst visceral animosity. 

One reason for this is their complexity. Local Plans respond to a myriad of needs. How can enough housing be provided? How can the local economy be stimulated? How can the climate crisis be addressed? Responding to these needs means that they often amount to hundreds of pages of convoluted, Kafkaesque policy.

Reading’s Local Plan is 251 pages long1. Northumberland’s is 404 pages2. Southwark’s is 601 pages3. Most people have neither the time nor willpower to wade through such gargantuan documents. In Dorset less than 2% of the population provided feedback during the recent consultation on their Local Plan4. In Portsmouth less than 1% of the population provided feedback5. 

A second reason is their association with new housing. Local Plans must identify sites where sufficient homes could be built to meet independently assessed housing needs. Unsurprisingly, people often disagree with the location of these sites. In 2021 more than 8,000 people objected to the housing sites earmarked in Ashfield’s Local Plan6. In 2022 more than 10,000 people objected to the sites earmarked in Hertsmere’s Local Plan7.

‘It begins as a house, an end terrace in this case, but it will not stop there’

– Simon Armitage, Zoom!

The coalescing of these two factors, complexity and an association with new housing, means that despite their importance Local Plans are rarely up to date. Recent research by CPRE found that two thirds of Local plans are out of date8.

Why is the lack of up to date Local Plans a problem?

The most obvious impact is upon housing. Local Plans provide a degree of certainty as to where new housing is permitted. If they are not up to date this certainty is limited, meaning that housebuilders may be less willing to submit planning applications. Between October and December 2022 the number of planning applications received fell by 13% to 93,000 versus the same quarter in 20219. This figure is clearly insufficient given the scale of the UK’s housing crisis. A recent Centre for Cities report suggested that compared to other European countries the UK has a deficit of 4.3 million homes10.

However the impact of out of date Local Plans stretches beyond housing. As the National Planning Policy Framework states, Local Plans should not only address housing needs but also ‘other economic, social and environmental priorities’11. This alludes to the progressive potential of Local Plans.

‘The urban landscape, among its many roles, is also something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in’

– Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City

This progressive potential has existed throughout history. Ebenezer Howard in the nineteenth century introduced the idea of garden cities, marrying the positive elements of both town and country. He argued that ‘human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together’12. Patrick Abercrombie’s 1940s plan for London, based around the idea of neighbourhood units, is unmatched in its extensive scope. He hoped to allow for ‘a greater mingling of the different groups of London’s society’13. Richard Llewelyn-Davies, appointed in the 1960s to plan Milton Keynes, welded the theory of garden cities with the American grid system. The aspiration was to provide freedom with which ‘the people who come after us [can] plan and build a future’14.

If Local Plans are not up to date this progressive potential cannot be realised.

What is to be done?

How could a Labour government tackle the problems caused by a dearth of up to date Local Plans?

There have already been substantial movements in relation to the housing crisis. A plethora of policy interventions from the left have suggested ways to build more homes and counteract the drag caused by out of date Local Plans. These have begun filtering through to Labour’s leadership. Starmer recently announced his intention to back ‘the builders, not the blockers’15. He has detailed plans to restore housing targets, allow more green belt development and empower councils to purchase land without factoring in the ‘hope value’16.

Unfortunately there have not yet been similar movements in relation to the progressive potential of Local Plans. 

The housing crisis is not the only crisis afflicting the UK. Inflation sits at 8.7%17. GDP growth this year is forecast to be just 0.4%18. On current trajectories the UK will not meet net zero by 205019. After thirteen years of Conservative rule the public sphere is decimated, with loneliness rising and community engagement falling20.

Labour’s recognition of the housing crisis is positive. But it is not enough. 

Howard, Abercrombie and Llewelyn-Davies’ plans were not perfect. Howard’s conception of town size limits, Abercrombie’s rigid zoning system and Llewelyn-Davies’ prioritisation of car transport are all now obsolete.

Nevertheless it is not the plans themselves which are significant but the way in which the plans were conceptualised. All three individuals recognised the progressive potential of plans and in addition to building homes they all strove to tackle other crises. Howard hoped to reconnect people with nature. Abercrombie sought an entire societal transformation post-WW2. Llewelyn-Davies attempted to resolve the perceived failures of earlier new towns, such as Stevenage and Harlow.  

This recognition of the progressive potential of Local Plans, and a desire to use them as a way of addressing crises, should be adopted by Labour. 

Firstly, Labour should seek to change the narrative surrounding Local Plans. Steps have been taken in this direction. Labour openly discuss planning reform and expound the benefits of house building. They should go further. It is inadmissible that less than 2% of the population engage with Local Plans given their importance to the planning system and their progressive potential. 

Secondly, rather than simply encouraging and cajoling councils to build more homes Labour should encourage and demand councils, via their Local Plans, to build a better society. Local Plans shape the physical world in which we live. Consequently there is a huge opportunity for them to corroborate Labour’s policy agenda. This opportunity cannot be missed simply because council’s lack up to date Local Plans. 

A Labour government is potentially less than a year away. The UK faces multiple crises. Local Plans are critically important and, as demonstrated throughout history, have a remarkable progressive potential. By embracing this importance and progressive potential Labour could use Local Plans as a crucial component in their attempts at solving crises and moving the UK forward. 

Sean Eke works in housing policy and public affairs for The Terrapin Group. He is a Labour member in Tower Hamlets.

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Shared Ownership: The Consumer Perspective

Shared ownership sharply divides opinion. Is it a “great product” as claimed in a Shared Ownership Market Review 2020? Is it a ‘scam’ – an accusation that at least one housing association apparently feels obliged to counter on their website: “Rumour has it though… Shared Ownership must be a scam – it seems too good to be true!” Or does the truth lie somewhere in-between?


It’s undeniable that many shared owners are extremely happy with their home purchase. And yet… In December 2021 Housemark published analysis revealing that only 57% of shared owners were satisfied with their landlords.

My report – Shared Ownership: The Consumer Perspective – explores gaps between aspirations and outcomes. It does so by assessing claims made for the scheme: that it is affordable, a pathway to full ownership, fair, user-friendly and a good product for the market to deliver. The report concludes that, despite the benefits of the scheme, there are also hazards arising from the characteristics of targeted homebuyers, the complexity of the model and of ownership structures, a lack of standardisation and consistency, inadequate information provision and weak regulation of marketing and delivery.

Here I touch briefly on three key underlying themes: long-term outcomes, consumer protection and value for money.

Long-term outcomes

Somewhat surprisingly for an affordable housing scheme launched over four decades ago, there are significant gaps in national data. How many shared owners staircase to 100%? (Excluding ‘back to back’ sales where a homebuyer purchases 100% by purchasing the shared owner’s share and the landlord’s share at the same time.) How many transition to full home ownership via a gain on sale? Is shared ownership financially sustainable over the long-term? What are the whole-life costs, and what are the opportunity costs if shared ownership turns out to be significantly more expensive than buying on the open market?

And without this information how can we possibly evaluate whether shared ownership is delivering for entrants to the scheme? Consequently the report recommends that Government and the Regulator of Social Housing undertake robust data collection, evaluation and reporting on the outcomes that matter to shared owners themselves: ongoing affordability and/or transition to full home ownership.

Consumer protection

Shared ownership can be tricky to get to grips with. The costs aren’t ‘shared’ and it’s not exactly ‘ownership’ either. Moreover, the ubiquitous marketing slogan – ‘part buy, part rent’ – was recently deemed to be misleading by the advertising watchdog, the ASA.

The ASA also found that adverts that do not “include material information relating to the costs of extending a lease” are likely to mislead. How many shared owners didn’t receive the facts they needed at the point of sale in order to make informed purchase decisions, taking into account likely future lease extension costs?

Of course, it’s impossible to turn the clock back. But many shared owners now face a double whammy. If they can’t afford to extend their lease, even selling may not provide the panacea they hoped for. The new model for shared ownership, quite rightly, requires a significantly longer 990-year lease term. But this could create a two-tier market further disadvantaging existing shared owners. Surely it’s only right to level the playing field by funding lease extension at a nominal flat fee for all those shared owners persuaded to buy a short lease and not informed, at the time, of the implications.

The complexity of shared ownership means that sometimes even the experts get it wrong. It’s an open secret that many shared owners have overpaid Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) on simultaneous sale and staircasing. Unfortunately, HMRC currently imposes a 12-month deadline for refunds of SDLT overpayments meaning shared owners could unknowingly be left out of pocket as a result of incorrect professional advice. It’s a situation that clearly shouldn’t be allowed to drag on.

Value for money (VfM)

Value for money for shared owners

The Government’s annual rent review policy ensures that shared ownership rent rises faster than inflation, on an ‘upwards only’ basis. Hence Savills’ assessment that – although shared ownership provides the cheapest entry point into home ownership – ‘monthly costs will rise faster than for full ownership’ which ‘ultimately leads to shared ownership becoming more expensive than full home ownership by the end of the mortgage term’. Many shared owners also report rapidly rising service charges.

As one shared owner explains in Shared Ownership: The Consumer Perspective: “I had to pass an affordability test with the housing association initially to see if I could afford to pay for the share of the flat and its associated costs. But now, nobody cares whether I still can afford it. If I could sell, I would… but I cannot. Absolute and utter madness.” 

Staircasing can also represent poor value for money. Unlike other instalment payment schemes where the initial cost is spread over a number of payments, shared ownership requires the prevailing market rate to be paid for each and every share. If property prices have increased since they bought their initial share, shared owners could pay considerably more in total than had they been able to afford to buy that home on the open market in the first place.

Value for money for taxpayers

Only around half  the shared ownership homes built to date remain categorized as shared ownership. Staircasing to 100% is, in some respects, a measure of success. It was, after all, the original intention that homebuyers purchase their home in full.  But 100% staircasing could be argued to be counterproductive in transitioning scarce social housing stock to the open market. As one senior housing professional pointed out on BBC Radio 4’s Money Box in 2020. “How high would you want those figures to be because what you’re doing is you’re losing affordable stock if people staircase out to 100% all the time.”

There appears to be even less justification for transfer of social housing stock to the open market via ‘back to back’ sales. What’s the likelihood of those homes ending up in the private rental sector, possibly subject to the unaffordable rents that drive many households to shared ownership in the first place?

The Shared Ownership: The Consumer Perspective report is aimed at decision makers in government, its agencies, regulators and housing providers, and makes a total of 18 recommendations. The Executive Summary and full report are available here.  A suggested donation of £8.50 helps support the Shared Ownership Resources project.

Sue Phillips (FCCA) is a writer, retired charity finance manager and former shared owner. She launched Shared Ownership Resources in 2021.

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Can sub-dividing properties help to meet housing need within carbon budgets?

All those engaged in the debate about the shortage of decent housing, and lend support to the building of new houses, should be taking into account the carbon emitted in housebuilding and the associated services and infrastructure.  “Building not blocking” might be a great electioneering slogan but suggests the Labour is looking to side step the need to reduce carbon emissions. 

Embodied and operational carbon attributable to housing is a significant contributor to the UK carbon budget and all housing strategies should include measures to reduce this to zero.  Research led by Dr Zu Ermgassen, from the University of Kent has shown that the emissions from building 300,000 houses per year would amount to 113% of the country’s whole carbon budget. He concludes that, “…England can’t go on building new houses forever, and needs to start thinking about better and more systematic solutions as to how we are going to house everyone within our environmental limits”.

These findings mirrored those of the UK Green Building Council Net Zero Carbon Buildings Framework 2019 which points out that, “Annual embodied emissions alone are currently higher than the Green Construction Board’s target for total built environment emissions by 2050.” And it is far more urgent to reduce embodied carbon that, being emitted in the short term, stays in the atmosphere while operational carbon from new and existing stock can be avoided or mitigated in the medium and longer term.

The Communities Select Committee looked at housing and concluded that,  “To meet its target to eradicate the UK’s net contribution to climate change by 2050, the government should embrace every opportunity to reduce carbon emissions. It should be ambitious in setting carbon reduction targets for the built environment both during construction and in use (emphasis added). The building regulations should set more stringent energy performance targets for homes to take into account achievable levels of energy efficiency. Modern Methods of Construction (MMC – or prefabrication) should be used to deliver more efficient homes now to avoid costly retrofitting of homes later to comply with more rigorous energy efficiency targets.”

But there is no sign the Department will rise to the challenge of its own Select Committee. The latest revision to the building regulations does not include embodied carbon since it is not considered to be a matter of safety or how the buildings are used.

Homes England (HE) Strategic Plan 2023 -2028 sees the need for an, “indicator to be developed on embodied carbon of HE supported development.” But HE also say that will be the job of the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities who have consistently kicked it down the road, to be dealt with after the Future Buildings Standard comes into effect in 2025. Progress is being made on developing the reliable metric that DLUHC use an excuse for the delay but meanwhile, new building continues using materials with high carbon intensity.  At the same time new housing is skewed towards the private demand for larger and instantly under-occupied homes rather than the general housing need for 2 bedroomed properties requiring less carbon to both build and maintain.

This is a challenge to those who think that building 300,000 new dwellings in England each year is the way to address the housing crisis/shortage, particularly if these involve new settlements with even higher carbon costs for infrastructure.  Furthermore, buildings with added PhotoVoltaics (PV) may represent the best chance of reaching ‘carbon negative’ or ‘energy positive’ given the problems being faced by transport, manufacturing, power generation, agriculture and the military. Finally, climate justice dictates that the UK has to lead while expecting less from countries that never benefitted to the same degree from cheap fossil fuels.

If new housing is to continue, there will have to be a scaling up of the use of timber (subject to trusted sustainable supplies), stone, slate, lime based mortar and renders, and low/zero carbon renewably powered MMC.  There are unlikely to be low carbon substitutes for the cement, steel, aluminium, glass and the concrete being used in services like roads and drains. 

Rather than expecting new building to solve the housing crisis, and continuing to complain about the planning system, the shortage and cost of suitable land on which to build houses, the cost of materials and the shortage of suitably skilled labour, there should be greater focus on the potential for sub-dividing existing under-occupied properties.

There are about 28m dwellings and about 27m households, confirmed by the English Housing Survey research which estimates there to be 1.2m empty or underused homes.  That research does not reveal the ubiquity of under-occupancy where about 50% of bedrooms are not being used as such.  Under-occupation is not just confined to villages and rural areas where the most common form of housing has two spare bedrooms. One way to redistribute the housing space that already exists, almost all of which is in need of a deep energy refit during the next decade, is to concentrate resources, finances, fiscal policy and regulations on subdividing existing properties.   Research carried out for The Intergenerational Foundation suggested that there are over 4m dwellings suitable for sub-division that would amount to over 12 years’ supply of low carbon dwellings if the need is for 300,000 per year.  The need is greater for these smaller dwellings but the process would include down-sizing that would release a good number of family size dwellings.

In 2016 the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People received evidence that there could be as many as 8 million households looking to downsize and waiting for attractive smaller dwellings to become available.  Some of these households could be keen to downsize–in-place enabled through sub-divisions, some of which could accommodate some of the increasing number of concealed households comprising young adults living reluctantly with their parents, and provide them with greater independence and financial security than enjoyed as lodgers.  The increase in residential densities could also fit the agenda of those advocating for 20min or lifetime neighbourhoods. The many other co-benefits are described in this blog.

A requirement is set out in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 (as amended) to grant planning permissions for sufficient serviced plots to balance the registered demand for self or custom build housing. Without a serious review this statutory requirement will remain unrealistic, little known and discredited.  However, if those languishing on the statutory self-build registers, with diminishing prospects of being found a serviced plot, can assist in this process of sub-division  (by ‘custom-splitting’), then the transition to low, zero, and then negative carbon housing could have multiple benefits.  Councils could assist in this process by keeping a register of those with space to spare they would ready and willing to share. Grants and/or loans could be made available for sub-divisions to cover the costs of feasibility studies, surveys, specifications and planning and building regulation applications.  These upfront costs could be recovered as a charge against the properties were one or both to be sold on.

Daniel Scharf MRTPI is a director/volunteer at one Planet Abingdon Climate Emergency Centre and blogs at www.dantheplan.blogspot.com

  1.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922002245
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Renters Reform (Bill): finally, but there’s still more to do

By Jamie McGowan

On 15 April 2019 the Government pledged to abolish Section 21 evictions. Four Prime Ministers, three Housing Ministers, and 52,800 Section 21 eviction notices later… the Renters (Reform) Bill 2023 is here. For tenants this is broadly good news, but as Matthew Pennycook, Shadow Minister for Housing & Planning, observed last week[1], “As drafted, the Bill contains numerous loopholes that disreputable landlords can use to exploit tenants and jeopardise their security of tenure.”

The proposed Bill would be the most significant overhaul of the private rented sector in over 40 years. It includes provisions for a landlord database and portal, the establishment of a private rented sector Ombudsman, and restores tribunal reviews of private rents. The Bill proposes to provide a prescribed way for tenants to request a right to keep a pet which a landlord cannot then unreasonably refuse. This might seem like one of the more frivolous points, but there are more households in the UK (62%) with pets, than without, and this will be a welcome development for many.

The Bill has several parliamentary stages to go through and Labour will have ample opportunity to make calls for it to be strengthened. All of the proposals mentioned above will require substantial scrutiny, in particular the operation of the ‘Private Rented Sector Database’ and the Redress Scheme which are certainly worthy of dedicated future blog posts! However, the most significant headlines relate to security of tenure and grounds for possession and this is what I have focused on in this post. I have briefly set out what the Bill does (or enables to be done later by secondary legislation), what it doesn’t do, and what it could (and should) do better.

Possession grounds

So the flagship achievement of the Renters (Reform) Bill, if passed, would of course be the abolition of Section 21 notices. These are currently the most common way in which people become homeless in England. The Bill also simplifies the types of tenancies so that (nearly) all private tenancies will be periodic assured tenancies. It does this by abolishing fixed-term assured and assured shorthold tenancies. Although ‘periodic’ might actually sound like it offers less permanence, what really affects the security afforded by a tenancy is the reasons it can be ended by a landlord. These are known as possession grounds.

It is worth pointing out that abolishing Section 21 would not, as it is widely being reported, mark the end of ‘no fault’ evictions. There will still be grounds for possession which involve no ‘fault’ from a tenant such as a landlord wanting the property back for a family member to live in. It would however, be the end of ‘no reason’ evictions which, notwithstanding the notable loopholes discussed further below, represents a major landmark on the road to a private rented sector that can provide genuine stability for tenants.

Alternative grounds

The Bill preserves, alters and creates a whole raft of alternative possession grounds. Some proposed changes are subtle but their interpretation could prove significant. For example, amending the existing anti-social behaviour ground 14 to apply, not where something is ‘likely to’ cause nuisance or annoyance, as is the case currently, but where behaviour is simply ‘capable of’ doing so.
All of the remaining possession grounds need to be scrutinised carefully to ensure they can only be used for their intended purposes and when it is fair to do so. Here I have addressed the two which appear to be the most open to abuse by landlords in undermining the removal of Section 21s.

Grounds 1 & 1A ‘Landlord requires property’

These are two separate grounds which enable a landlord to recover possession of a rented property because they require it as accommodation for themselves or a close family member (there’s a list) or because they intend to sell. The inclusion of both of these grounds was inevitable but there are big problems with the proposed mechanisms.

The first problem is that the proposals in the Bill would simply require a landlord to demonstrate an ‘intention’ to use the property to live in or sell before they are able to gain possession. It does not stipulate what evidence should be used to demonstrate this. Once possession has been obtained on these grounds, a landlord is prohibited from re-letting the property for three months or could face a fine of up to £5000.

In Scotland, where ‘no reason’ evictions were abolished in 2017, a similar ground has been abused by landlords and research from last year[2] found that nearly one third of landlords who had obtained possession in order to sell the property had not actually done so within a year.

The second main problem is that these are mandatory grounds, which means that if the criteria are met, a judge hearing the case would have no discretion to consider the tenant’s circumstances and a possession order for the property would have to be made. So, for example, even if a tenant could prove that a landlord had relied on this ground to regain possession from multiple successive tenants at the same property, waited three months on each occasion, and then simply re-let the property, a judge would not have the power to decide ‘perhaps this is disingenuous’ and refuse possession.

So the first and most simple improvement which could be made to these grounds is to make them discretionary so that the courts can consider all the circumstances of a case before making an order. It would also be less open to abuse if there were greater up-front evidential requirements, *before* an order could be made. Otherwise we very much risk seeing the same misappropriation of such grounds, as in Scotland.

Grounds 8 & 8A ‘Rent arrears’

Currently, Ground 8 entitles landlords to a possession order if the tenant was in two months’ arrears when notice was served, and remains at two months’ arrears (or more) at the date of the Court hearing. This ground for possession is both modified and extended by the Bill.

The proposed amendment is that any amount of Universal Credit which is owed but not yet paid to a tenant, should be disregarded when calculating the level of rent arrears. This would be a welcome development, although it should be clarified whether those on legacy benefits and in receipt of Housing Benefit are intentionally excluded by this. This overturns the effect of a very disappointing Court of Appeal decision in 2004 that, even though a tenant was in arrears because of Housing Benefit delays, the Court should make a possession order and not adjourn.

Then there is the new mandatory rent arrears Ground 8A. This entitles a landlord to a possession order when a tenant has fallen into eight weeks’ arrears on three separate occasions during the previous three years. Although the same Universal Credit disregard applies, this new ground wouldn’t even allow for the order to be avoided by reducing the arrears by the day of a hearing, as the existing Ground 8 does. This, coupled with the fact that it is mandatory, makes Ground 8A particularly harsh.

Discretionary grounds do not prevent a Court from making a possession order, they simply allow it to consider the right outcome for both landlord and tenant in all the circumstances. Most importantly, discretionary grounds allow the Court to make suspended orders. These provide landlords with nearly all the reassurance of immediate possession, but if the tenant repays the arrears at an agreed rate, they keep their home and the landlord recovers the rent owed. Labour has called for the mandatory Ground 8 to be made discretionary in the past and hopefully these efforts will be resumed in respect of both of these grounds now.

Beyond the Bill

The substantive content of the Bill aside for one moment, there is the small question of how the protections afforded by it will actually be enforced. Councils are expected to do a huge amount of the enforcement legwork, yet local government has seen the biggest cuts of all the public sector over the past 13 years. The fact that Environmental Health budgets have been reduced by over 50% under the Tories limits their ability to use existing powers. For example, DLUHC research[3] from last year found that very few local authorities were utilising ‘Rent Repayment Orders’ (a potentially significant sanction for certain landlord offences), citing constraints on resources as a factor.

Enforcement by individuals through the justice system will also be significantly hampered if nothing is done about the huge backlogs many courts are facing, which last year reached an all-time high for civil cases[4]. Tenants in some areas will also face huge difficulty in accessing a lawyer for advice and representation. Sustained cuts to the level and scope of legal aid have resulted in only 41% of the population having access to a housing legal aid provider[5]. The effectiveness of the Bill will be significantly dampened without wholesale improvements to access to justice and Labour should ensure this point is made.

And finally, as Matthew Pennycook has been quick to point out, there are various other anticipated provisions which are entirely absent from the Bill. A legally-binding Decent Homes Standard for the private rented sector, a ban on landlords refusing to rent to those in receipt of benefits or with children (‘No DSS’ practices), and measures to strengthen councils’ enforcement powers have all been promised. Labour needs to ensure that, if these are not included in the Bill, the Government is kept to the task of bringing these measures in elsewhere and, ideally, in less time than honouring their Section 21 pledge has taken.

Jamie McGowan is a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, works for a Labour MP, and is a Young Legal Aid Lawyers co-Chair. This blog was supported by contributions from other members of the SLL Housing & Levelling up Group.  

[1]https://twitter.com/mtpennycook/status/1659216248776036352?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

[2]https://www.scottishhousingnews.com/articles/a-third-of-scottish-landlords-evicting-tenants-to-sell-up-fail-to-make-a-sale

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-authority-enforcement-in-the-private-rented-sector-headline-report/local-authority-enforcement-in-the-private-rented-sector-headline-report#use-of-enforcement-tools-and-powers-to-address-poor-standards-and-conditions-in-the-private-rented-sector

[4] https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/commentary-and-opinion/delays-in-our-civil-courts-have-now-reached-crisis-point/5113664.article

[5] https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/laa-fails-to-attract-sufficient-bids-for-housing-legal-aid-contracts/5115133.article

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Abolish or reform Right to Buy?

Image of block of council flats with balconies

At the Labour Housing Group AGM in February 2023, we debated whether the Right to Buy (RTB) for council tenants should be reformed or abolished. The majority of members supported reform. 

The mover of the motion to abolish RTB, Martin Wicks, wrote a blog criticising the outcome.

I proposed the amendment making the argument for reform, so feel I should reply. 

The Conservatives have been in power for 13 years and I think that a motion aimed to mandate the Labour leadership to adopt an unpopular policy is a mistake. The right wing press will attack us for being against homeownership, and working people aspiring to gain more financial security. In addition, we should not be seen to be telling 1.4m working class families who have bought their own home that they have done something wrong.

Due to the political risk there is little chance of the Labour leadership prioritising the abolition of RTB. However, there is a realistic chance of the leadership signing up for reform, especially if proposals reinforce their devolution agenda.  

I do not ‘oppose the campaign to end the Right to Buy’, as suggested by the title of Martin Wick’s blog. I support a campaign that involves talking with working class people, debating the issue and if possible winning the argument. We have to be aware of the charge that we are a largely middle-class party telling working class people what is best for them. 

A nationwide ban on RTB is a blunt instrument. The housing crisis is experienced differently in different areas. Whilst the case for stopping RTB is compelling in areas of high housing stress, there are other areas where social housing is less in demand and RTB has stabilised communities. Reform directed towards reducing the negative effects of aspects of RTB will be harder to vilify than a blanket ban. Reform has to be based on the principle that if the Labour leadership supports RTB, because it supports homeownership and giving some working class families greater financial security, it must be prepared to compensate those facing the negative consequences, families on the waiting list and council tenants living in homes that desperately need investment. 

In her conference speech, Lisa Nandy talked about council housing being a locally controlled and collectively owned asset. If a government requires this asset to be sold in order to meet wider policy objectives then it should step in to replenish it. This means a commitment to replace the homes sold and providing councils with the funding they need to maintain their housing stock. If it seems a big ask for a Labour government to prioritise spending public money on reforming RTB, the Chartered Institute of Housing estimates that the Treasury has made £47bn from RTB. A small fraction of this amount coming back to councils will make a massive difference. A way to reduce the public money required to compensate communities is to require homes to be sold much closer to their market value; the effect will be to reduce the discount.  

The principle of compensating communities for accommodating national priorities, such as infrastructure projects, new houses, industry and wind farms, is increasingly accepted.  

RTB represents a huge transfer of wealth to 1.4m working class people over a 43-year period – albeit that the transfer happened in a random way, with those living in the most popular council housing benefiting to the greatest extent. For the first time, some working class people had an asset that they could use to help their families when they hit a crisis. 

RTB allows working class people who want to own their own home to stay within their communities. Paul Watts in his book Regeneration and its Discontents[1] writes that  some working class people view RTB as strengthening for them and giving their children the ‘right to stay’ in their home. Council tenants have a secure tenancy, but the 2016 Housing and Planning Act demonstrated that this security could be taken away by a hostile government.

An issue to consider is differential financial outcome between council tenants who exercise the RTB and those that do not. Council tenants who have paid their rent for 40 years have effectively paid off the cost of building their home. However, when they die, they will leave no asset for their children. We could consider a cash bonus for long-term council tenants.

This Tory Government has been tightening succession rights, so adult children who have lived their whole lives in a council home are sometimes forced out when their parents, the tenants, die. We should certainly restore succession rights.

Resident activists have struggled heroically to maintain the liveability of their estates in face of funding cuts and Conservative Governments who believe that council housing should be the tenure of last resort for ‘needy’ families. Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal work the Death and Life of Great American Cities[2] understood that to bolster under-threat neighbourhoods you needed to encourage those earning a little bit more to stay within, rather than flee, their community. 

A policy solution could be to continue to allow existing tenants to be able purchase their homes. However, introduce a requirement that if they want to move out, or their children want to sell the property on their death, that the local authority should have the option to buy-back the property, with an appropriate allowance for the increased value of the property in the intervening years. 

The exception to the continued RTB for existing council tenants should be for those moving into new build properties. These homes are particularly precious and should not be lost at a discounted price. 

We need to confront the negative effects of RTB. It has resulted in the transfer out of local, democratic ownership of 1.4m homes, at a time of acute housing shortage. Whilst the focus on the housing crisis has been on urban areas, council housing is a precious resource in rural areas. Access to a council house is often the only way that families can stay in the area in which they grew up. In areas of high housing stress, the abolition of either RTB or the discount is entirely reasonable. The other alternative is for the government to fund the gap between the RTB sale and market value, so that councils can build replacement homes.

We also need to consider the effect on other council tenants of sales below the market value. When a property is sold the council loses the rental income. The RTB discount is £87,200 nationally and £116,200 in London. The sale price is based on a tenanted rather than vacant possession valuation. The valuation can be held for up to 18 months, which means that the benefit of house price inflation is lost to councils. Councils have to predict expected major works costs for five years after the initial sale and have to follow complex leasehold legislation. If they get either wrong, leaseholders cannot be recharged for works and tenants have to pick up the bill. 

A consequence of the underfunding of council housing is that when major works do happen the recharges to leaseholders are high. Many councils have schemes whereby tenants fund a three-year interest-free loan to leaseholders to help them pay their charges. When major works recharges have been particularly high, some councils have capped recharges to leaseholders, requiring tenants to cover the shortfall. Council tenants are required to cross-subsidise leaseholders more affluent than them. There is important research to be done on the total cost of selling homes at less than their market value and subsequent undercharging. It is a crude assumption, but if we assume that the combined cost of the under-valuation and under-charging is £50,000 per property, at today’s costs, on total of 1.4m sales the amount lost is £7bn. This amount could have made a significant difference to the upkeep of council homes, and probably saved Michael Grove from having to emote about the ‘deplorable condition of some council homes’.

The current Government has caught council housing in a perfect pincer movement. Whilst being responsible for underfunding maintenance it is offering to act as the tenants’ champion against their ‘incompetent landlords’.

Housing Associations have resisted the imposition of mandatory RTB because it would undermine their business plans, but no such consideration has been given to councils. 

Over the last 20 years, whilst the number of social rent homes has been declining, the private rented sector has been growing, to the extent that there are now more properties in the private rented sector. The consequence is that hundreds of thousands of people who need the security and affordability of social housing are now living in the unregulated private rented sector.  Lisa Nandy committed a Labour Government to reversing this trend in her Conference speech, with a pledge that there will be more social rent homes than those in the private rented sector by the end of the first term. For this to be achieved, in addition to new council house building, tens of thousands of homes need to be transferred from the private rented sector to councils and cooperatives. If left unchecked RTB is a powerful engine to frustrate this aspiration. Nationally, 40% of RTB properties are now in the private rented sector, with most London Councils reporting over 50%. An incoming Labour Government will need to legislate to include in the lease of future RTB sales a covenant prohibiting the renting out of the property. 

What is particularly unpopular with other estate residents is when ex-council properties end up with slum landlords, short-term lets or as AirBnB properties, all of which work against the efforts of resident representatives to sustain communities. 

With regard to RTB properties already rented out, covenants cannot be introduced retrospectively to stop this. However, the opportunity to buy properties back will arise. The majority of council housing is over 50 years old; an incoming Labour government will need to invest a substantial amount of money to make these homes liveable, safe, damp free and energy efficient. Leaseholders will need to contribute to these significant major works costs. For many buy-to-let landlords their asset will no longer be profitable and they will welcome the option of a sale back to the council. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has found that adding to the stock of social housing through buy-backs is often less expensive than building new homes. 

Whenever the state undervalues an asset and underfunds the administration of its disposal, it invites fraud and dishonesty. Companies and criminal gangs have preyed on vulnerable and cash-strapped tenants. In addition, families have funded aging relatives to exercise the RTB so that they can benefit financially when they die. An incoming Labour government should commit to funding a more robust vetting regime.  

LHG member Steve Hilditch reports that Westminster Council is forced to buy back RTB properties that it sold at a discount, at five times the original cost to help meet its obligations to people who are homeless. A Labour government committed to sound public finance should not allow this to continue. 

In this blog I have argued for the range of policy initiatives, such as halting RTB in high housing stress areas, reducing the discount, placing restrictive covenants on future RTB sales, central government compensation for lost council income and finance to replace and buy back homes. The effect will be to devolve decision-making powers and finance to local democratically elected representatives, reinforcing Labour’s devolution agenda. 

[1]  Paul Watts: Regeneration and its Discontents (2021)
[2]  Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)