The National Housing Federation’s statement, based on Oxford Economics’ Research, that home ownership will continue to decline, from 73 per cent of households at its peak to a likely 64 per cent in the next decade, brought Grant Shapps into the spotlight on the Today programme this morning.
Interviewer Evan Davies knows a little economics and that relief for the millions locked out of home ownership will only come from much greater housebuilding (interview available on iplayer). So he badgered our friend to say if housebuilding would increase as a result of the government’s various policies. Now you might imagine that the answer would be ‘yes’. But instead there was prevarication and several attempts to explain the intricacies of the New Homes Bonus, bottom up rather than top down, and the rest. It was a minor relief that he didn’t explain his houseboat strategy.
Davies, apparently unimpressed, pressed the simple point about whether building will rise. Yes or no? Our hero blustered… difficult to predict… try to make them go up… disappointed if not… pulling out all of the stops… Still the word ‘yes’ did not escape from his lips.
What can we read into this equivocation? Well, a cynic would say he knows that
housebuilding is not going to increase under his policies and may well fall into further decline. And even a friendly interpretation could go no further than to suggest the probable real truth. He has no idea. One giant experiment – scrapping the regional
framework of strategies and targets in favour of localism plus a little financial incentive – is leading to chaos and uncertainty and power being put in the hands of those opposed to housebuilding. No-one knows what the outcome will be, but we can all guess.
Amongst other indicators, the Oxford Economics report shows that the number of projects receiving planning approval – an important measure of the ‘pipeline’ for new build – has not recovered from the collapse caused by the recession. According to OE, the policy changes “are already having an impact on the planning decisions made by a number of local authorities – e.g. Bristol and the surrounding authorities, Milton Keynes and Leeds have cut their future housing allocations by a total of 88,000 according to the Home Building Federation. As such, we see only a gradual recovery in house building – it will take until 2020 or beyond for new starts to reach pre-crisis levels.”
The NHF is calling for more government investment in affordable housing to stimulate a wider, faster economic recovery, for suitable surplus public land to be made available for the building of affordable homes, for local authorities to regularly assess housing need and for ministers to make a renewed commitment to building the homes the country needs.
Categories
Simply messing about in boats
There has been a ground breaking housing policy development that Red Brick readers may just have missed. It’s the government’s Houseboat Strategy.
In genuinely out of the box, beyond the blue-sky thinking, the government plans to help more people live on boats.
In a new bout of press release-based policy making Grant Shapps has said that:
“new moorings could be eligible for the New Homes Bonus, which sees the government match council tax from new-build homes.”
Erm, so maybe not quite helping people live on boats, but saying that the government is considering something that’s just about interesting enough to be covered in the news.
British Waterways cut to the real heart of the issue and were “pleased to note the reassurance from Mr Shapps’ department that people can qualify for housing benefit for help with mooring fees.”
You’ve got to give it to Mr Shapps as a tactical politician: no band-wagon goes by unleapt on and every eye-catching line gets a policy thrown together behind it.
But surely someone in DCLG, No10, Cabinet Office, CCHQ must be concerned that at some stage the total lack of interest in any type of strategy, plan or vision may cause them a problem?
Categories
Myths about migrants
On Red Brick we’ve taken an interest in trying to test out and bust a few of the myths in housing.
One area where there are more myths than most is in migration policy and the access that ‘foreigners’ have to social housing. It’s interesting that social housing is often portrayed in the media as being the lowest of the low, except when it is occupied by immigrants, in which case it is a wonderful national asset that should only go to ‘British people’.
Migration Watch gets a lot of sympathetic coverage in some parts of the media and their latest use and abuse of statistics comes in their ‘study’ on social housing and migration in England, in which they claim that the social housing requirements of new immigrants will
cost the taxpayer £1 billion a year for the next 25 years. They say that “45 additional social homes would have to be built everyday, or nearly 1400 a month, over that period to meet the extra demand” and “The impact of immigration on the availability of social housing for British people has been airbrushed out for too long. Either the government must cut
immigration very substantially as they have promised or they must invest very large sums in the construction of extra social housing”.
At least I can agree with the last 13 words of that quote.
John Perry, who blogs at the Migrant Rights Network, has analysed Migration Watch’s claims and the Migration Observatory has published a detailed briefing on the real facts about migrants and housing.
Perry demonstrates that there is no automatic link between the number of new households that are projected to be formed by migrants and the provision of social housing. On current government spending plans migrants would have to take virtually all of the funding available and new homes provided for the claim to be true.
Yet few if any new migrants will actually get these homes. The percentage of new social lettings going to foreign nationals is 7%, most of whom have lived here for many years in
order to qualify. The Migration Observatory points out that 75% of new immigrants go into the private rented sector, and that is probably where the serious issues around migration and housing lie.
The veracity of Migration Watch’s analysis can be summed up by the graph they include which shows the ‘cumulative stock of migrants’ and ‘households on waiting lists’ on the same chart, as if they were correlated in some way. You might as well correlate Newcastle United’s league position and the frequency of cyclones in south east Asia.
With his Chartered Institute of Housing hat on, John Perry has also written a helpful guide on the role of housing providers in relation to UK migration and how to handle national policies and trends, published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The paper comments that “Migration policy often focuses on the number of new migrants entering the UK, but little is done to support neighbourhoods where migrants already live. Central government is withdrawing from these issues at a local level, placing more
importance than ever before on regional and local leadership”.
It then highlights the ways in which housing providers have already taken steps towards better neighbourhood cohesion and integration and suggests ways in which they could do more because they are well placed to do so. It also explores the perceived and actual
competition between migrants and host communities for housing.
Migration is a complex and emotive topic where exaggeration is rife and ‘facts’ are often exploited by the media to promote a particular political agenda. The housing world generally and many individual providers have a terrific record in promoting community coherence, work that is needed more than ever after the events of the last few weeks. There is an appetite in the sector to do even more and the CIH/JRF guide and the MO briefing are invaluable and highly recommended tools.
The latest fault line in the Coalition seems to be developing around taxation.
Chancellor George Osborne is ‘reviewing’ the top 50% income tax rate, much to the annoyance of the LibDems, whose priority in income tax terms is to raise thresholds to take the lowest paid out of tax altogether. The LibDems have the Coalition Agreement on
their side and Danny Alexander is on the record as saying: “The idea that we are going to shift our focus to the wealthiest in the country at a time when everyone is under pressure is just in cloud cuckoo land.” But Osborne faces a lot of pressure from the Tory right, including Boris Johnson, who has called loudly for the 50% tax rate to go.
The LibDems’ Vince Cable has admitted that the top rate of tax should be removed, because the Coalition are united against high marginal rates of tax, but that it should be
replaced by a tax on wealth or on highly valued property, not a position that will endear him to the Tory right. Cable was a strong advocate for the LibDems manifesto promise (which didn’t make it into the Coalition Agreement) to introduce a Mansion Tax.
Last weekend Eric Pickles joined the debate (or bitter in-fighting, whichever you prefer),
arguing that the 50% tax band was only a temporary measure to reduce the deficit and lambasting the Mansion Tax idea: “It would be a very big mistake to start imposing
taxation on the back of changes in property values, particularly with big regional variations”….”People will suddenly find themselves in a mansion and they hadn’t realised it was a mansion. If it is only going to be mansions, the kind of thing you and I would regard as a mansion, it ain’t going to raise very much.” But he also makes clear he is against any increase in taxes on ‘the middle class’. As he is also against taxes for the rich, that doesn’t leave many options other than more cuts.
The LibDems’ original proposal for a 0.5% annual Mansion Tax on properties valued at £1 million or more was quickly revised when they realised how many people in LibDem target seats in London and the south east already owned homes that were over the threshold. Their revised proposal – a 1% annual tax on homes over £2 million – hit far fewer people and attracted more support – including from David Miliband during the Labour leadership election. The tax was estimated to raise £1.7 bn a year and Miliband claimed it would avoid the need to make savings in the housing benefit budget.
Taxing wealth, property and land has been a shibboleth for many in the Labour Party over
the years. The Labour Land Campaign has argued long and hard for the introduction of a Land Value Tax saying, in principle, that land is a finite resource, that increases in value are created by the society as a whole not the individual landowner, and that the community as a whole should benefit.
An excellent pamphlet by Toby Lloyd published by Compass in 2009 called ‘Don’t bet the house on it’ looked at the ways major reform of property taxation could help tackle our dysfunctional housing market and the crisis in housing supply. He detailed the advantages of introducing a LVT, making possible a total reform of the complex array of property-related taxation in this country.
Whether Labour’s housing policy review will venture into this territory will have to be seen. It would not be good if the LibDems managed to push the Coalition into adopting a Mansion Tax or any other additional property tax as part of a deal over removing the 50% tax band but Labour had not even got round to considering the matter. The argument about Mansion Tax could raise some fundamental issues about the housing and land markets that all parties have dodged for many years. Even if the Tories don’t like it, there may even prove to be a progressive majority in favour of a big reform.
Categories
Inconsistent opinions
I’ve suffered from conflicting responses to the riots. After seeing rioting round the corner from me and the TV pictures from across London, I find myself with some sympathy with the toughest penalties. Then I find myself in disbelief at the harshness of a 4 year sentences for a Facebook message about criminal disorder which didn’t even take place. (As a regular twitterer, blogger and Facebooker, I hope the precedent of tough measures against those who say stupid things online does not spread.)
Tony Blair wrote in the Observer yesterday:
“some of the disorder was caused by rioters and looters who were otherwise ordinary young people who got caught in a life-changing mistake from which they will have to rebuild.”
It’s hard to see how custodial sentences for such mistakes will make rebuilding possible.
But enough of my flaky opinions. There’s some real research out now about what people think about the riots broken down by ‘social grade’. It shows that people at the lower end of the scale back tougher penalties that those who are better off.
36% of ‘C2DEs’ think the sentences being carried out are ‘too soft’ and 9% too harsh, the rest ‘about right’.
That’s pretty striking.
It means those most likely to be living in social housing (they are most likely to be C2DE) are among those who want to see custodial sentences for riot-related Facebook messages. Passing the now peaceful Pembury Estate yesterday, it can hardly be surprising that those who suffered most from the looting, violence and criminality want to see the perpetrators put away – and have less sympathy for explanations relating to poverty and disadvantage.
In ‘defending social tenants’ and those in poorer neighbourhoods by arguing against evictions, cuts to benefits, draconian sentences, we need to remember that a large number of the same people will want to be ‘defended’ by the implementation of such measures.
Doesn’t mean they’re necessarily right, but we can’t just discount the views of those in the bottom half of society. The liberal argument needs to be one that appeals to the whole social spectrum. Its advocates need to recognise they begin on the wrong side of the argument for millions of people whose interests they would otherwise champion.
The more I hear from MPs who fiddled their expenses but were allowed just to write a cheque to pay them back, now denouncing people who stole chewing gum or bottled water or were given a pair of shorts during the riots, the more I think they have lost control of their ethics.
An excellent piece in the Guardian today by Vera Baird (Riots sentencing: a sinister attempt to upend the judicial process) describes how firmly the government’s hand is on the tiller of the rash of extreme punishments, aiming to deliver Cameron’s edict that everyone involved in the riots should expect to go to jail, no matter how trivial their offence. Using historical precedents – for example, during the miners’ strike it was very difficult to get fair acquittals for strikers at the magistrates’ court – she shows how easy it is to lose all judgement: anger is not a good servant of justice.
The government-inspired hysteria around sentencing is reverberating around many councils as well. There was a rush of council leaders trying to look tougher than the rest, although they were all beaten to it by Wandsworth, a council which has never held tenants in high regard (or indeed wanted them in the borough at all), who claimed that a tenant whose son had been caught up in the riot “will today (Friday) be served with an eviction notice”. Nearly Legal website notes that Wandsworth’s new leader Ravi Govindia’s rush to make a name for himself was not all that it seemed. First, the tenant’s son has not been convicted of anything, and secondly, the alleged incident was not in the location of the tenant’s flat, so that any attempted repossession on the grounds of nuisance would struggle.
And then the Notice seems to have not been a Notice of Seeking Possession, let alone an ‘eviction notice’ but a warning letter. The tenant concerned even got quite a good hearing from the normally prejudicial Daily Mail. NL wryly commented: “If even the Daily Mail is having second thoughts, Ravi Govindia clearly runs the risk of looking, well, pretty damn stupid in such a desperate act of witless publicity seeking.”
Mary Riddell, writing in the equally unlikely Telegraph, commented: “Threatening to evict a charity worker and her eight-year-old daughter is an act of political spite. Had this mother, whose “crime” is that her 18 year-old son is charged with violent disorder, given birth to a mass murderer, she would not be treated in such a fashion.”
Wandsworth are now looking like fools and so are the Labour councils now caught in the slipstream. They should reconsider their precipitate action and come to their senses.
There are 2 big events for LHG in September.
London Labour Housing Group
LLHG will hold its first AGM on Monday 12 September at the House of Commons. The guest speaker will be Jon Cruddas MP who will lead a discussion on London housing policy for the mayoral election and the Labour Party’s national housing policy review.
The meeting is open to members of LHG living in London. Labour Party members can sign up to join LHG at any time, including on the night. For membership information, go to: http://www.labourhousing.co.uk/join-lhg
We need to know numbers in advance so if you are interested in coming, please email Steve Hilditch at [email protected]
LHG at Labour Party Conference.
For those attending Labour Conference in Liverpool, below is the information for LHG’s fringe meeting.
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Labour Party Conference 2011 Fringe Meeting Labour Housing Group with SERA and the Co-op Party Homes For The Future – reviewing possibilities Sunday 25th September 2011 –– 6.00pm – 8.00pm Riverside Balcony, ACC BT Convention Centre Chair Jacky Peacock OBE, Vice Chair LHG Speakers: Leonie Cooper, SERA Huw Lewis, Welsh Admission is FREE and REFRESHMENTS are provided
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We’ve heard a lot about families in the aftermath of the riots – issues about parenting, family breakdown, single parents and children who don’t know right from wrong. Breakdown of traditional families, moral decay and social disorder all go together for the right and some on the left too (such as Frank Field).
Life is undoubtedly a lot tougher for children who do not grow up in a stable and loving family. A strong family life is the way that many people manage to deal with and overcome social disadvantage and poverty.
Over 13 years, Labour supported families through maternity and paternity leave, expanded childcare, Sure Start children’s centres and parenting classes – along with some harder measures to make parents more responsible for their children’s actions.
The Tories prefer promoting marriage and the maintenance of ‘traditional’ nuclear families. They had their plan of tax incentives for marriage, until the coalition agreement forced them to drop it.
Government’s can also do things that undermine family life. This government’s benefit policies are providing a compelling ‘incentive’ for families to split up.
The impact of the Universal Credit and household benefit cap may make it very hard for families to stick together. The limit on the total level of benefits a family can claim in a year is £26,000 per year, regardless of the size of the family. It applies to two parents, two children, as much as a single parent and single child or a multi-generational family.
This cap, once combined with housing costs, will force many families into considerable hardship, especially larger families. Many people will move to other areas. Many others will look for ways to get by the area where they live.
If larger families live separately they are far more able to do this.
A family of two parents and two children can claim a maximum of £26,000 in benefit. Should they separate into two household, both parents perhaps finding smaller, cheaper places in the area, the same people are eligible for up to £52,000 of benefits.
It’s difficult to know how people react to poverty and hardship. People are ingenious and look for the gaps in any system to get along. That’s human nature, not cheating – the rich do the same in employing expensive accountants to help them minimise what they pay through the tax system. And, in my view the bonds of family or the pressures of broken relationships, are far more important than any ‘incentives’ right-wing government’s might offer for marriage and keeping families together.
But, I wonder if that great champion of the family, Iain Duncan Smith, has considered how his system provides a considerable pressure and incentive for poor families in expensive areas to split up.
Maybe it’s understandable that people want to lash out after the appalling behaviour of those involved in looting and violence during the riots last week. But there is also a risk of a dangerous authoritarian response. This not only includes proposed changes to the nature of policing that have always been resisted before – bringing in the army, rubber bullets, water cannon and public whipping of members of the underclass just in case they were rioters (sorry I made the last one up) – but also wider and wider forms of punishment such as removing benefits from perpetrators.
Suddenly on Thursday the debate focused on council tenants, as Tony discussed in his post on Red Brick, and the issue is leading the news today. Councils of all political persuasions knee-jerked in favour of evicting perpetrators who are or live with council tenants, and Wandsworth appears to have been the first to issue a notice of seeking possession. Mr Bandwagon himself, Grant Shapps, was quickly on to it, saying if necessary we could have new laws by the Autumn if the existing power isn’t strong enough. In his article in Inside Housing Shapps says: ‘As things currently stand, whilst thuggish behaviour against neighbours or in the immediate vicinity of their home provides a ground for evicting a tenant, looting or other criminal activity by tenants further from their homes can’t usually be taken into account. People who commit anti-social behaviour should feel the consequences regardless of whether their actions are taken within the immediate vicinity of their home or further afield.”
And Mr Bullingdon (did he or didn’t he take drugs and smash places up, I can’t remember?) David Cameron joined in, saying council tenants were subsidised (they aren’t) so they have additional responsibilities to behave. Branding a whole class of people, not for the first time, he said: “I think for too long we have taken too soft an attitude to people who loot and pillage their own community. If you do that you should lose your right to housing at a subsidised rate“.
Simplistic solutions? Bullingdon boys don’t even which end of the broom is up.
The existing law indeed may not give Shapps and Cameron what they want, as the always excellent Nearly Legal website briefed. To get a possession order the landlord will
have to demonstrate that nuisance was caused or an indictable offence committed
‘in the locality’. It is a discretionary ground for possession so the courts would decide on the merits of the case.
In my view the criminal justice system exists to assess evidence and context and impose sentences on those found guilty. The question we have to ask is why the crime of looting a High Street should be punished by removal of housing, but only if the perpetrator is a council tenant? The riots have nothing specifically to do with housing or council estates. Why aren’t we debating removing NHS benefits or free school meals? Or parking permits or driving licences? Or tax relief for pension contributions? Or access to higher education? Or child benefit?
Housing associations seem to have reacted much more sensibly than some councils on this one. Peabody’s Stephen Howlett, said he thought courts were likely to find eviction of tenants caught up in the riots disproportionate: “We want the strongest action to be taken against those involved, but our preference is for the criminal justice system to be the
focus.” The measures risked simply moving the problem to another area, or pushing tenants further into poverty: “These people have to live somewhere, so if they are evicted you risk just exporting the problem.” He had talked to a mother on the Pembury estate in Hackney who was was “terrified that she and her younger child would be made homeless as a result of her 17-year-old who she could not keep under control“. He added: “This is not simple. We have to be very careful.”
The only reason tenure-based punishment has gained traction amongst politicians and some parts of the media is that it reflects pre-existing prejudice that council tenant = underclass = rioter. It is part and parcel of the scapegoating and stereotyping of social tenants in general and council tenants in particular. It often seems to be the case that council tenants are singled out for extra punishment or additional requirements to behave in a particular way. Eviction for anti-social behaviour – not applied to other tenures, not
even to RTB lessees or their private tenants -.was only an acceptable policy because it involved ASB in the dwelling or the locality, that is the place where the tenancy existed, but it is now proving to be the thin end of the wedge.
There is no information that council tenants were disproportionally involved in the riots, so far this is a knee-jerk reaction not based on evidence. From what I’ve seen so far, some were tenants and some weren’t. Tottenham for example is a genuine mixed tenure community with both middle class and working class home ownership and private renting and housing association renting as well as council housing, from which rioters could have been drawn. It would be ludicrous to suggest owner occupied households containing a perpetrator should be foreclosed or lose their exemption to capital gains tax on their properties.
Fortunately Ed Miliband has been taking a more considered approach. I agree with him when he says: “These issues cannot be laid at the door of a single cause or a single Government. The causes are complex. Simplistic solutions will not provide the answer. We can tackle the solutions only by hearing from our communities…… They want us to go out and listen to them in thinking about the solutions that are necessary. Before any of us say we know all the answers or have simple solutions, we should all do so.”
Categories
Evict the Rioters?
A significant number of councils, all of which Labour, have announced they may evict tenants who are found guilty of the rioting and looting over recent days. I’ve picked up Greenwich, Barking and Dagenham, Manchester and Salford coming out with this announcement.
This is undoubtedly a very tough line.
I think tough actions should be taken against those who caused incredible damage to communities, mostly their own communities, across London in recent days. People, even if they face poverty and disadvantage, have choices and responsibilities. The first of those responsibilities is to obey the law.
As Red Brick has constantly argued those who are worse off in society, many of whom live in social housing, are not ‘passive’, ‘impotent’, ‘dependent’, ‘trapped’ but people who shape the world around them, try to better their lot and contribute to their community, most often in positive ways that belie their circumstances.
Occasionally, a tiny minority choose to act in destructive ways and in the past few days, we’ve seen that on an incredible and entirely unpredicted scale.
Poverty, alienation and pessimism about the future are undoubtedly a major part of what has gone on in recent days – and as Steve says condemnation can only be one part of our response. But, for the sake of the many people who share those challenges, but choose not to riot and loot, we must ensure those who have sought to wreck their neighbourhoods face the law’s toughest penalties.
As for eviction, I can see both sides:
Why should those who have committed such grievous crimes against the public realm get the benefit of such a valuable public good, which is in such short supply? There are plenty of others in need and law-abiding who might make better use of those tenancies. And why should people in social housing be subject to neighbours who’ve acted in such destructive ways in the estates and street where they live?
But shouldn’t those who are guilty of crimes face criminal penalties – prison, fines, and community orders? We wouldn’t withdraw public services like health or education and it reinforces the idea that a good stable home is not something that people should have by right, and is of a second order importance compared to healthcare or education. Is it fair that rioting social tenants may face eviction, but those who own their home or rent privately are unaffected?
On balance, evictions are probably counter-productive – the process being long and drawn out and the fact that the rioters will have to move elsewhere in circumstances that may make such behaviour worse and more likely.
Perhaps in this case community orders might have a particular role – so sentences can be carried out in the communities where crimes took place and local residents can see that justice is being done.