The National Planning Policy Framework, the final version of which was published – and comes into effect – today, is good at polarising opinion. As someone who thinks we haven’t built enough homes for a generation, under Governments of both Parties, the apparent determination to build more houses is appealing. A small part of me admires Planning Minister Greg Clark’s willingness to take on some traditional Tory interests in his attempt to do so.
By Lord Whitty
This is the 300th blog post on Red Brick since our launch. We are delighted to welcome Lord Larry Whitty as the guest author of this landmark post.
Larry is Chair of Housing Voice, the affordable homes alliance. Members of the Alliance include Citizens Advice, the National Housing Federation, UNISON, CPAG, TPAS, TUC, CDS co-operatives, NUS. He previously wrote about Housing Voice on Red Brick here and we covered the launch of their inquiry here. 
The independent inquiry into the affordable homes crisis being carried out by Housing Voice is now at its mid point. Evidence has been received from a wide range of housing bodies, tenants groups, unions and advocacy organisations. Hearings have been held in the South and the North. We have two further hearings to go – in London on 29th March and in Birmingham on 30th March – register here . In addition to the hearings, the inquiry continues to receive hundreds of completed questionnaires from members of the public, who have participated on-line, or via paper surveys provided in Citizen Advice surgery waiting rooms.
When the Daily Mail turns against the Chancellor for ‘picking the pockets of pensioners’, accusing him of making four million elderly pay for his tax giveaway to the rich, you know that the budget was a failure at least in PR terms. It’s amazing the difference a smart phrase makes: the ‘bedroom tax’ made headlines and now the ‘Granny tax’ will haunt George Osborne.
There was something artificial about the furore over the non-payment of Stamp Duty by extremely rich people buying extremely expensive houses. I might be the suspicious type, but George Osborne attacking a practice indulged in by the rich set bells ringing. Some of the debate afterwards gave the impression that the 50% tax rate, the mansion tax, the tycoon tax and ending the Stamp Duty dodge were just alternative ways of getting the rich to pay more: any one would do the trick.
Tenants fighting the controversial sell-off of estates in Hammersmith and Fulham are celebrating the long-awaited publication of the draft regulations for the Right to Manage and Right to Transfer.
The regulations, when finally approved, offer the real prospect that the tenants will be able to fulfil their wish to take over the estates themselves, scuppering the Tory Council’s plan to sell them to private developers as part of the massive redevelopment of Earls Court. It is a reprise of the story of the Walterton and Elgin estates in Westminster, where residents also used Conservative legislation to take control of the estates under tenant control. Community organiser Jonathan Rosenberg, who led the W&E campaign in the 1980s, is assisting the Hammersmith tenants today.
When Ken Livingstone’s idea of setting up a not-for-profit lettings agency first surfaced I have to admit I thought it was interesting but hardly a world beating proposal. Since then I have not only warmed to the idea as a way of protecting tenants and stopping lettings agents from manipulating the market for their own ends but have also found that it really strikes a chord people who are amongst the many thousands using agents every week. It has obvious advantages for tenants but landlords will also benefit: they feel let down and ripped off by agents as well.
Monimbo
There are plenty of books on the history of housing policy but few are as readable or as short as The Housing Debate by Stuart Lowe. It has other advantages, too, asking questions like ‘why didBritain andGermany, with massive housing shortages during their industrial revolutions, go about solving them in such different ways?’
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.