In yet another announcement by leak the Government has let serious media outlets (well, today’s Sunday Express and the Star) know that David Cameron will tomorrow announce a further increase in the maximum discount available for the right to buy (RTB), from the £50,000 announced before Xmas to £75,000. It appears the new discounts will come into effect almost immediately.
Once again Boris Johnson has refused to answer important questions about the ‘Affordable Rent’ programme in London. Written questions by Nicky Gavron AM have failed to elicit informative or even intelligible answers to key questions such as the rents to be charged.
It is now widely accepted that the last Labour Government did not give enough priority to building new affordable homes. It made the planning system more proactive and it had a good record in some areas of housing investment, especially in tackling the enormous inherited backlog of repairs and improvements to the social housing stock. And its classical Keynesian response to the recession put large extra amounts of investment into new homes from 2008 onwards. Unfortunately, that investment – homes started under Labour but completed under the Tories – has obscured the disastrous collapse of the genuinely affordable housing programme since May 2010.
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Fanfare for the common.. hold*
Apart from impoverishing tenants through changes to the Local Housing Allowance, the Government has made it clear that it is no part of its philosophy to interfere with the operation of the private rented sector market, by regulation or by other means.
Today’s report from the London Assembly’s Housing and Planning Committee, following an inquiry led by a Conservative member, shows that the Government also has no intention of intervening to help improve the operation of the leasehold management sector.
In response to the news last week of a big increase – 23% – in the number of people sleeping on the streets, the Minister chose to emphasise the proportion who are not UK nationals. He issued a warning to ‘aspiring Dick Whittingtons’ from across the continent not to come to London because ‘the streets of London and our other cities aren’t paved with gold’.
Grant Shapps has always professed a profound personal attachment to the cause of homelessness and rough sleeping:
“When a family is made homeless or someone has no choice but to spend a night sleeping on the street, they become some of the most vulnerable people in our society. I am shocked and saddened when I see people bedding down for the night on our nation’s streets, or hear of a family spending another night in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation. Tackling homelessness and rough sleeping is what first got me into politics.”
One of the best projects I’ve been involved with over the past few years was chairing the group that led to the creation of the National Tenant Voice. The NTV was the third leg of Labour’s regulatory system for social housing – the smallest and cheapest part – together with the Tenant Services Authority and the Homes and Communities Agency.
By Nicky Gavron AM Labour spokesperson on Planning and Housing on the London Assembly
Three years ago this month, the Tory Mayor Boris Johnson pledged to end rough sleeping in London by 2012. Today, faced with a perfect storm of unemployment, funding cuts, welfare reform and housing market failure, even more people are sleeping rough on London’s streets.
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Octavia Hill cries wolf?
As my family hold 3 National Trust life memberships I feel emboldened to add a few words to this week’s spat between Inside Housing blogger Colin Wiles and the National Trust’s Assistant Director of External Affairs Ben Cowell over the draft National Planning Policy Framework.
Monimbo
Red Brick has commented before on the influence which the think tank Policy Exchange has on government policy, which prompted me to wonder if its reputation is deserved. Certainly on economic policy it has come a cropper, since it confidently predicted in August 2010 that the necessarily heavy spending cuts and recession would be quickly followed by a ‘big boom’, in which growth through most of 2011 will be ‘the strongest seen in the UK since the 1980s’. Probably not even George Osborne expected that to happen.