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Howay The Lads

I really never thought the opportunity would arise to write a single blog post about both my passions at the same time – that’s housing and Newcastle United.  You have to admit it’s an unlikely combination, but writing it has cheered me up after last week’s defeat at Fulham.
The slightly tortuous link is that current Newcastle Manager Alan Pardew has opened Four Housing Group’s new £2.7m Sports and Social Integration Academy in Gateshead.
The Academy has been developed in conjunction with Gateshead Council and Gateshead Redheugh junior football club, which has 18 teams from age 6 to 19 playing in leagues or friendlies.  It is well known for producing top talent, including Paul Gascoigne.
The Academy will house 16-25 year old young people who are currently homeless, with 24-hour support provided by the Cyrenians, and will provide sporting facilities for residents and the local community.
Pardew said: “It’s a real honour to open the Academy. I genuinely believe the project will not only help improve the lives of people in the city but also provide opportunities for developing home-grown talent. That’s something we’re really passionate about at Newcastle United so it’s great to see initiatives like this. You never know, the next Steven Taylor could result from this project.”
The Redheugh Club will provide high quality sporting facilities including four full fixed football pitches and changing rooms. Eventually an all weather 3G pitch will be available for use, as well as badminton courts, boxing and table tennis facilities which will be open to all members of Gateshead’s communities.
So this story provides a unique opportunity to include a photo of Pardew opening the Centre with some fine gentlemen of a similar stature to my own.
And as a gratuitous extra, here’s a photo of NewcastleGateshead’s very fine bridges.

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Health and safety gone mad

Like benefit recipients and council tenants, Health and Safety gets a very bad press.  But the call from the London Fire Brigade to the Mayor to respond to the growing problem of ‘back garden developments’ or ‘beds in sheds’ as part of his revised housing strategy brings home the reality.
Their evidence should be compulsory reading for all those who knock health and safety regulations or believe that it is wrong to interfere in the market.  And it’s not just London – examples similar to theirs can be found in many cities and towns in the country.
The Brigade is issuing an increasing number of prohibition notices to prevent properties being used as housing.  Rita Dexter of LFB identified a range of ‘potentially lethal fire traps’ such as converted sheds, industrial units and garages being used as accommodation, with residents relying on highly risky methods of heating lighting and cooking.  ‘They are also being exploited by unscrupulous landlords who are happy to take their money without any regard for their safety’ she said.
Examples quoted include a death in a fire in a garage, a group of commercial buildings where 150 people were living, and an office block with 17 rooms with over 50 people living in them with no fire safety features at all.
The need to tackle dangerous housing was the central feature of the LFB’s response to the Mayor’s Housing Strategy and their lobbying of Government for stronger building regulations.  They identified a series of major risks, including the need for better compliance by housing authorities with their Housing Act duties, especially in relation to tall residential buildings and buildings with timber frames, fire setting in empty residential buildings, beds in sheds, and both overcrowding and under-occupation.
On under-occupation, they cite the problem of an increasing number of mainly elderly people retreating into living in one room and switching from traditional to ‘intrinsically more unsafe’ forms of heating.  On overcrowding, they called for the housing strategy to ’say more about the consequences of overcrowding’ because of the risk from overuse of electric appliances and blocked escape routes.
On the day when the ludicrous former Archbishop Lord Carey said the major moral dilemma facing the country was the deficit and tackling ‘welfare dependency’, one glance at the real evidence from the fire authorities of people who are so poor they have to put themselves at risk of serious harm makes you wonder what planet people like him inhabit.

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Pinocchio hits the airwaves

On the day that the Lords’ debate on the Welfare Reform Bill reaches the total benefit cap, which has huge implications for housing and homelessness, Red Brick favourite Iain Duncan Smith has hit the airwaves big time.  Unfortunately interviewed mainly by people who don’t know their arsenal from their elbow, his extraordinary statements are largely unchallenged.
As readers will be aware, Pinocchio was prone to fabricating stories and creating tall tales, but his nose grew longer and longer as he did so.  After his interview on the Today programme, I’ll be surprised if Mr Duncan Smith managed to get out of the studio without serious rhinoplasty.
His first major claim was that the total benefit cap will lead to ‘no increase in child poverty’, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  It seemed that the main reason he could claim this was that the Department of Work and Pensions had not even modeled the change in poverty because ‘you can’t directly apportion poverty to this measure’ and they don’t believe it will increase because they ‘will work with families to find a way out’.  Evan Davies has plainly never heard a whackier claim for a product since Dragons Den.
The second claim was that the poor deluded Bishops – he really doesn’t think much of Bishops – were wrong to say that families would be losing child benefit (they argue that CB is not a means tested welfare benefit therefore should be excluded from the cap).  Ludicrously, he said this is because the total benefit cap applies to all benefits therefore you can’t actually say that they will be losing CB when they reach the cap.
Thirdly, IDS said there will be no increase in homelessness ‘as the public understand it’ – whatever that means.  He accused opponents – again including the unfortunate Bishops – of ‘bandying about’ a definition of homelessness that included counting anyone as homeless whose children shared a room.  Personally I have never heard anyone say such a thing.  Nobody he said would be made homeless without a home to go to but nor would the Government ‘trap people… in homes they can’t afford to go to work from’.
It would seem to me that the definition of homelessness that should be used is the one set out by the Government itself in considerable pieces of legislation.  By their own definition, and in the admission of one Eric Pickles, welfare reform will increase homelessness by at least 40,000 and that excludes people who will fall outside the definition of priority groups.
There are vital amendments down today, including the exclusion from the total benefit cap of child benefit and the exclusion of homeless households in temporary accommodation being promoted by Labour front bench spokesperson Lord Bill McKenzie.
I hope Labour Peers will turn up in force to stand up for the tens of thousands of children who will be driven into poverty and the tens of thousands who will be made homeless by these measures, whatever Pinocchio claims.
Update 24 January: The Lords passsed the amendment moved by the Bishop of Rippon to exclude Child Benefit from the total benefit cap.  The Government has said they will seek to reverse their Lords defeats when the Bill returns to the Commons.  The amendment to exclude homeless households in temporary accommodation was defeated.  Many good points were made in the Lords debate and all of the speeches can be found here.

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Retribution for the riots: some common sense at last

The news that Wandsworth Council has backed away from its decision to pursue the eviction of the mother and 8-year-old sister of Daniel Sartain-Clarke, who was convicted of burglary during the August riots, is an important victory for the Labour opposition in Wandsworth and a defeat for the vindictive and punitive wing of the Tory Party, including Cameron and Shapps and their local henchman, Council leader Ravi Govindia.  The decision has greatly disappointed the Daily Mail.
Immediately after the riots, when the idea of evicting the families of rioters who were social tenants was first raised, I argued on Red Brick that this approach ‘may allow politicians to sound tough.  It may be what people want.  But it isn’t justice.  It’s double punishment, it’s guilt by association, it’s discrimination on the grounds of tenure, pure and simple. ‘
Such was the furore raised by the right wing media, a bandwagon immediately jumped on by Cameron and Shapps, that it was a brave decision by the opposition in Wandsworth to stand against the decision in principle.  The disgrace is that the Council moved against the tenant before her son was convicted of anything and before the circumstances of the case, and whether there was any mitigation, became clear.  The Tories, nationally and locally, were driven by the cheap headlines they could get and the desire to find someone, other than themselves, to blame.  As ever, social housing tenants were an easy target as people like Iain Duncan Smith tried to place the blame on ‘estates’.
I know nothing about Daniel apart from what I read in the press and on Wandsworth Labour’s website.  An 11 month sentence certainly seems to comply with Cameron’s instruction that rioters should all go to jail.  But I would commend a brilliant blog post by  Jules Birch on the double standards involved, comparing and contrasting the treatment given to Sartain-Clarke and another double-barreled thief, Antony Worrall Thompson, who was a repeat offender but a celebrity who got away with a caution and an apology.  Certainly no-one argued that Worral Thompson’s family should be evicted from their home.
It is unclear whether any other council or housing association is still pursuing the eviction of a tenant because of a riot-related conviction, currently the law would appear to allow this if it could be classed as being in the neighbourhood of the property concerned.  It is also uncertain whether Shapps and Cameron will actually pursue their plan to extend the law in a move that would entrench the double punishment of the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and discrimination against social tenants.
Stop press: a good update from Wandsworth Labour Councillor Leonie Cooper here.

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Housing helps Ken pull ahead

The latest Yougov poll for London shows that Ken Livingstone has caught up and overtaken Tory Boris Johnson in the race for Mayor.
It has always seemed to me the case that the polls would turn in Ken’s favour as the campaign got under way.  Johnson has had 3 years of photo-opportunities, uncritical media coverage (witness Paxman’s pathetic so-called ‘interviews’) and orchestrated rows to distance himself from Cameron, and has developed an unparalleled degree of recognition amongst the public.  But his ability to avoid real debate on policy has left him largely unchallenged.
The latest poll only gives Johnson a lead over Ken on the grounds of charisma, where the Tory mayor’s figures have only ever been matched by Basil Brush, another mischievous character with a posh accent and manner.  Indeed you could almost imagine Boris adopting ‘Ha Ha Ha, Boom! Boom!’ as his catchphrase.  As someone remarked to me recently, Dame Edna Everage is so popular in her (?) home town of Melbourne that they named a street after her, but the people of the city would never contemplate voting her in as mayor, because charisma alone is not enough.  Ken is well ahead on ‘who has achieved more as Mayor’, being in touch with ordinary Londoners, being decisive, strong and good in a crisis, which seem to matter more.
The outcome of this election will depend on the differential turnout of the Parties’ supporters.  Affordable housing is one of the top five issues identified by Londoners, alongside crime, transport, jobs and the cost of living, and will have a great bearing on the outcome.  Many more of Ken’s supporters name affordable housing as a key issue than Johnson’s and housing seems to be a key factor in achieving the turnout that is required.
The strong headway that Ken has made comes after two big campaign policy pronouncements, on fares and on housing.  London being a city of commuters, fares is likely to have had a much bigger impact.  But Ken’s housing policies – calling for more regulation of the private rented sector, campaigning for a London Living Rent, and floating the idea of a new not-for-profit agency to link landlords and tenants – have attracted a lot of attention and have provoked debate.  As we get nearer the election, and the Tory Mayor’s housing failures become ever more apparent, it is reasonable to expect that housing will have more influence over Londoners’ voting intentions and boost Labour turnout.
As the most high profile election this year, the race to be London Mayor will have a crucial bearing on the fortunes of Ed Miliband and David Cameron.  Miliband, Ed Balls and Livingstone show every sign of working well together, and progressives in London should be hugely motivated by the possibility of dumping Johnson.  Just close your eyes and think it’s Basil Brush.

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Thatcher, ideology, and elderly home owners

Thirty-odd years ago in Haringey we had a great scheme for helping elderly home owners manage their affairs.  If it was their wish, the council would buy their family home at market value and, in exchange for a specified discount on the price, we would provide them with a home in a sheltered housing scheme or similar.
The scheme benefitted everyone.  The council now owned an asset it could invest in and rent to a family, giving up a unit for which there was less (although still substantial) demand.  The home owner was released from the burden of managing and maintaining a large house, often on a fixed income, and got a rented home with the support of a warden as well as a significant capital sum they could invest.  The policy tackled both under-occupation and overcrowding.
The scheme was, of course, brought to a halt when Meryl Streep became Prime Minister in 1979.  For ideological reasons the Tory government stopped ‘municipalisation’ and all the benefits of the scheme were lost.  Elderly home owners were deprived of the opportunity to become residents of sheltered housing, which many of them aspired to do.
I suppose I should be pleased that Grant Shapps has started to reinvent the wheel to encourage older people to ‘downsize’ in a voluntary and non-coercive way.  It contrasts sharply with Government’s bullying bedroom tax for social tenants who under-occupy.
Unfortunately the ideological objection to municipal ownership remains in his new scheme.  In what passes as a Government announcement these days, Shapps told the Daily Telegraph that, instead of selling their home to the council, the elderly home owner would move into suitable rented or sheltered housing (which regrettably is in decline following changes in the Supporting People regime) and the council will lease their property, taking responsibility for maintaining and letting the property at ‘affordable rates’ (which I presume means well above social rent levels).
Based on an existing pilot scheme in Redbridge, the council would pay the costs of moving, renovations and financial advice.  The former homeowners would receive the rental income and retain ownership of the home for their estate.  As the council does not own the home, it will be willing to take on management and maintenance costs but will not want to invest in the property for the long term.
One issue is that it remains unclear whether Shapps intends that the rent received by the former owner would be net of management and maintenance costs; this would seem obvious but the (Lib Dem) Deputy leader of Redbridge Council wrote on ConservativeHome that “The home owner retains ownership of their home which is leased to the council to provide us with additional social housing.  The owner receives all of the rent as income, as well as free property management.”  ‘All of the rent’ seems to me to be not the right thing to do, and undermines the viability of the scheme.
Another issue to be resolved is the tenancy terms on which the new tenant of the family home occupies it, and what happens to them if the owner dies and the home is part of their estate.  I assume the tenant will only be given a fixed term tenancy but they should have some reasonable guarantee of their security and period of notice.
Subject to seeing such details of how a national scheme might work, this looks like a reasonable step forward.  It’s just a pity that an entire generation of home owners wishing to downsize, and an entire generation of families wishing to rent a home, have been denied the opportunity because of Thatcher’s ideological purity.

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Beware Blue Tape

You have to watch the Tories like a hawk.  Their latest gimmick is a review of a series of housing regulations under the guise of their ‘Red Tape Challenge’.   As if it were all a little joke, Baroness Hanham (the Lords’ CLG Minister) ‘is asking people to vote out policies they think are the weakest links’ in the country’s housing laws.  Everyone is invited to look through a long list of regulations and make suggestions as to what should go.
The danger in this exercise is illustrated by the Government’s examples of the ‘unnecessary red tape’ that they have already removed, which includes for example regulations on houses in multiple occupation and the supposedly liberating sections of the Localism Act.
Over 200 housing and construction regulations are covered by this latest red tape challenge – see the list here – covering the private rented sector, social housing, construction and building regulations.  You are asked to comment on whether they should be scrapped altogether, changed from a regulation to a voluntary code, reformed or left as they are.
The problem with this kind of jumbo exercise is that the Government will get out of it what it wants.  In the long list are important provisions protecting private or social tenants or building stndards that they will no doubt want to remove under the cover of having consulted in this meaningless way.  We complained once before that the Government had included the whole of Equalities legislation in a single red tape challenge exercise – showing precisely how important they think equalities is.
Glancing down the housing list, most of the regulations mean little to me and they will sound technical and even trivial to most people.  For example, I have no idea why there are so many Assured Tenancies (Approved Bodies) Orders, but some of our readers may be able to say why they matter.  It would be surprising if there was nothing in the list that could and should be scrapped, but it is worth remembering that most will have been introduced to further a specific objective or to solve a particular problem.
Regulations included in the list cover issues such as:

  • the procedure covering demoted tenancies
  • protection for social tenants when a registered provider becomes insolvent
  • the forms of notice to be served on secure tenants when the landlord seeks possession
  • the suitability of accommodation offered to homeless households
  • the procedure governing registration as Commonhold land
  • the use of Empty Dwelling Management Orders, and
  • the management of houses in multiple occupation.

All of these are important issues in housing and most of the ones I have cited will be important to retain.  But the device of reviewing all of them at once as part of a Cabinet Office exercise means that the eyes of the housing world are unlikely to be focused on any of them until, Bingo!, the Government concludes that a particular one should be removed or amended, which will probably be bad news for tenants somewhere.
So – a task for a night when sleep is avoiding you – have a look at the lists and see which of these regulations, if removed, would have a serious adverse effect.  Then bung in a response to [email protected] saying briefly why it matters and why it should be retained (or strengthened).  Then at least the website won’t be dominated by Tories and the Government won’t be able to say that there is no opposition to their conclusions.

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Cameron makes it up

If Ed Miliband had said anything as ludicrous as David Cameron’s claim that private rented sector rents are going down he would have been all over the news facing demands that he apologise with detailed analysis by pundits of the figures that show he is wrong.
In response to a question by Joan Ruddock MP, Cameron had the nerve to claim that the housing benefit reforms were bringing rent levels down: “what we’ve seen so far, as housing benefit has been reformed and reduced, is that actually we have seen rent levels come down. So we’ve stopped ripping off the taxpayer.”
Cameron’s statement was contradicted by everyone who has ever done any work on private sector rents.  Chartered Institute of Housing quoted National Valuation Office Agency data showing that LHA baseline rates, which are based on market rents, have increased or stayed the same in 853 out of 960 local authority areas since March 2011.
However the apparent misleading of Parliament never made it big in the mainstream news.  The fact is that Cameron gets away with saying things that aren’t true and gets an easy ride from the media.  No 10 set out the case for the defence.  They told Inside Housing “We are hearing of cases where in return for direct payments to landlords our reforms are beginning to work” but, as IH notes, the spokesperson “was not able to provide numbers to back up the claim, saying that the Government will publish data on the impact of LHA reforms later in the year”.
If Miliband had tried such a pathetic explanation as that deployed by No 10  – “we’ll let you know in a few months” – he would have been ripped to shreds.  “Hearing of cases”?  What cases, where, how many, publish the data!
It is interesting, though, that commentary on private sector rents now often includes reference to Ken Livingstone’s idea of the London Living Rent, even if it is often misunderstood.  Ken is seeking to open up the debate about rents by setting a benchmark – after due research – for the proportion of income that should reasonably be taken by rent if households are to retain sufficient income to meet their other needs.  As the idea develops it should put pressure on social landlords who are beginning to charge excessive rents under this Government’s policies, but also kick off a debate about how to exert an element of control over the private sector as well.
The countries with the most successful private rented sectors have a stronger measure of rent control than we do, and better security of tenure as well – but it is difficult to work out how we get from where we are to where they are.
Apart from saving cash, which they look increasingly unlikely to do, the argument deployed most frequently by Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud, and repeated by Grant Shapps, was that the HB changes would bring down rents.  It’s how markets work, they explained.  We argued at the time that this was nonsense economics: the policies would do nothing to bring rents generally down as there was excess demand in the system, but would put upward pressure on rents in the lower end of the market as more people chased fewer affordable homes.
Labour Housing spokesperson Jack Dromey MP has been chasing Cameron over his mis-claim, but it would be good to see it feature in a future PMQs so that Labour nationally can show, as Ken Livingstone is doing in London, that someone will stand up for private tenants on low incomes.

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In praise of DIY: SOS

I love Nick Knowles and his DIY SOS: The Big Build programme sums up my core attitude to housing policy.  In it, people who have had a hard time get descended upon by a nice gang of builders who do up their house.  The final scenes are normally the same: a grateful family, in tears of joy, say their lives have been changed forever.
And for the rest of the population, that’s why we have housing policy.
Knowles leads us through it with expert explanations of what’s going on, what the design hopes to achieve, how the plumbing works, and also holds interesting interviews with the family asking how they got into this position – in a nice non-judgemental way – and what difference a proper home will make to them.  He has a natural ability to explain how fulfilling the most basic of needs – a decent home – can be transformational.
I have no idea how much it costs the BBC to put it together but they must be running the government close in the number of homes completed in the first 6 months of the year.
You can apply to be on the programme.  As the BBC says, it is looking for major domestic construction projects to feature, and that they may be able to help ‘if you’ve had an unexpected change of fortune’.  Well, tens of thousands probably qualify to come forward – people in temporary accommodation, overcrowded households, people who can no longer afford their accommodation due to HB cuts, etc.
If only the BBC and Nick Knowles could manage 100,000 projects a year.  We’d be sorted.

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Who gets subsidised housing?

Monimbo
In Steve’s trenchant critique of the proposals by Frank Field and David Davis to boost the right buy, he raises the ever-topical issue of whether social housing is ‘subsidised’ and, by implication, the wider question of whether other sectors are, and if so by how much?  This is an issue regularly addressed by the annual UK Housing Review, and armed with a sneak preview of this year’s edition I’ve been checking it out. (Unpaid advert on behalf of authors Steve Wilcox and Hal Pawson – it will shortly be available here).
Let’s start with the sector that’s really cushioned by the government.  Yes, that’s right, it’s you owner-occupiers, especially if you have paid off your mortgage.  How so?  Well the benefits to mortgage payers were wiped out when tax relief ended in 2000, but all owners enjoy capital gains tax relief now worth £5bn (net). Those with no or only small mortgages also benefit from not being taxed on the value of their home (as used to be the case through Schedule A).  This is worth an astonishing £11bn.  Add back in the taxes that owners do pay, and the net subsidy is a romping £12bn.  Even if you dismiss the tax on the imputed value of a home as an academic notion which shouldn’t enter the balance sheet, then the outcome is that owners pay no net taxes at all.  But as Steve Wilcox points out, the existence of these tax advantages means that house prices are far higher than they might otherwise be, benefitting existing owners and adding to the hurdles faced by first-time buyers.
Private landlords don’t enjoy the same tax advantages as homeowners but they benefit from a less restrictive regulatory regime, which means they can access interest-only mortgages.  Furthermore, the recent growth in numbers of landlords who own only one or two houses is undoubtedly fuelled by homeowners who can afford a deposit to buy another house to rent out.  Taken together, Wilcox argues that the effects of the tax and regulatory regimes benefit existing owner-occupiers most, then landlords, with first-time buyers (especially those who can’t afford a deposit) at the bottom of the pile.
Let’s turn to subsidy for renting.  All tenants, of course, are eligible for housing benefit.  The average HB payment for private tenants, at £114p.w. inEngland, compares with £82 for housing association tenants and £73 for council tenants.  Obviously, this is largely a function of higher rents.  But those who claim that social housing is ‘subsidised’ because it charges lower than market rents often fail to point out the costs that then fall on government through the HB budget.
How much is the economic subsidy due to lower social rents actually worth?  Well, quite a lot, given that social rents run at about 60% of market levels: some £7bn annually. But again as Steve Wilcox points out, the gap will close (slowly) as the government’s ‘affordable’ rents kick in. And this will in turn have a knock-on effect on HB costs.
It could however be argued that the ‘economic subsidy’ for social housing is as artificial as the implicit tax reliefs for homeowners, given that no (sensible) government would raise social rents to full market levels.  But, oddly enough, those who go on about this subsidy to social housing don’t tend to draw attention to the similar one for owner-occupiers.
But surely social housing gets direct subsidy?  We are all aware of the social housing grant for new homes and historic subsidy for council housing, but as Steve Hilditch pointed out much of this has been paid off, given that average council debt is now only £17k per house.  And council housing has now been making a ‘profit’ since 2008, recognised by the handsome payment to the Treasury implied by the debt settlement that will take place when council housing gives up all future subsidy on 1st April this year.  Council housing in Scotland has meanwhile been running without direct subsidy for years, and Scottish councils have been building lots of houses recently, partly from their rental income.  As will increasingly happen in England, Scottish council tenants are themselves cross-subsiding new tenants.
And finally, we shouldn’t forget to add into the reckoning the direct subsidies to homeowners. They get renovation grants, support for mortgage interest (for owners who lose their jobs), right to buy discounts and shared ownership schemes, together worth a princely £1.7bn in 2010.
This all means that the only straightforward answer to the question ‘who gets subsidised housing?’ is that everyone does, from the Queen downwards.  Singling out council and housing association tenants as ‘subsidised’ may be politically convenient to the likes of Field and Davis, but it doesn’t square with the facts.  As I’ve argued here before, let’s argue for the introduction of self-financing in England on 1st April as the date on which everyone should stop calling council housing ‘subsidised’.