I think Labour has got into a bad place on welfare reform. It’s not just since Ed Miliband became Leader, it developed during the Labour years in government. I think it is driven by the overwhelming dominance of the Daily Mail agenda of wild exaggeration about benefit cheats and scroungers and how this feeds into opinion polls. We have not found a way to counter the hugely successful tactics of the right in turning public anger about failing economic performance into hostility against the poor and not the rich. Why is the country not up in arms against the bankers and the mega-rich – the people who run the system, benefit most from the system, who have lined their pockets in the most extraordinary way over the past decade and failed everyone else whilst they were doing it?
On Monday former political advisor to Tony Blair John McTernan was on Daily Politics. Commenting on Ed Miliband’s speech, he said that the Leader was ‘missing symbolic policies that indicate which side he’s on’, adding: ‘If he’s serious about saying if you get a job you should be looked at more seriously for council housing rather than simply council housing being for welfare recipients, I think that’s a big signal, it’s a signal that if you get on, if you better yourself, the state will be behind you, I think that’s a much more powerful signal than anything he’s said on policy before.’
This repeats a myth about council housing, which isn’t and never has been (but will be if Shapps gets his way) allocated according to income or employment status but according to defined housing need, it fails to acknowledge why most people receive benefits (unemployment, illness, disability, retirement) or to explain why they are somehow undeserving of a home. It accepts the ‘welfare recipient’ stigmatisation in its entirety. Like the use of the term ‘lifetime tenancy’ when there is no such thing, the term ‘welfare recipient’ carries a package of prejudices and negative images, and has become a classic stereotype. Even Andrew Neil seemed pleased with this contribution.
Ed Miliband’s speech was more balanced than the spin suggested, as Tony described in his earlier post, but it’s the spin that bothers me. He accepted that there was a ‘terrible shortage’ of social housing and that ‘it will be a key test of the next Labour government that we address this issue’. But the sterotype still crept in a roundabout way. ‘People who give something back to their communities – for example people who volunteer or who work’ should be given higher priority in allocations. But it seems to me to accept the media presumption about who lives in social housing and that there is something deficient about them compared to those that ‘give something back’.
More than half of social tenants are retired or economically inactive for reasons other than unemployment. Of the remainder, the vast majority are actually in work or full time education. People entering social housing are often enabled to work for the first time because rents are affordable and the transition to in-work housing benefit is managed better. The level of volunteering on some social housing estates is extraordinary, something we should celebrate, they put Cameron’s prissy big society full of lady bountifuls to shame. The vast majority of tenants are already ‘responsible’ just like the vast majority of home owners and private tenants are.
Ed makes the point that he wants to reward contribution and not punish people. But there is shortage and the people who get punished are those that won’t get a home as a result of a change in priorities – your grannie who needs sheltered housing, your cousin with a severe medical condition who can’t stay in a private bedsit in a shared house, your son or daughter who has had a breakdown and needs supported housing, your sister with 3 kids evicted from her home because she can’t keep up with the mortgage. None of them working and none of them able to volunteer. These are not tearjerkers, this is the real life business of allocating social housing.
John McTernan rightly said that Labour can’t win unless it is seen to represent a wider coalition of people. I am less sure about his view that we were seen as the party of lone parents and immigrants (lone parents and immigrants won’t agree). I think Labour came to be despised by a lot of natural supporters because of Iraq and because of Labour’s association with the rich – not the poor. We no longer looked like the party of ordinary Britain. The parties on yachts in the Med, the moth-like fascination with the wealthy, our soft line on the bankers and the undeserving rich. Not forgetting the mad in-fighting which diverted the government from the ordinary issues facing people.
We fall into the hands of the forces of darkness every time we play the undeserving poor game, every time we add to the negativity around ‘welfare recipients’ without explaining who they are. Every time we fail to challenge the belief that ‘the housing benefit bill was out of control’ rather than point out that rents have gone up and caseload has increased due to the resurgence of the private rented sector. If, as John McTernan seemed to me to be saying, you can only get the middle class on board by dumping on the poor, then the game is up for the left and every variety within it. But if he meant it when he said that we need to have policies attractive to people in the middle as well as at the bottom, then there is enough common ground to unite us all. Because Labour should be on the side of both.
Labour Housing Group and Socialist Health Association held a conference ‘Prescription for a healthy Britain’ on Monday 13 June. Conference papers are available on the LHG website here. In a guest post, LHG Vice chair Marianne Hood picks up the conference theme.
Despite the fact that the links between health and housing have been recognised for well over 100 years, and despite over a century of public health and housing interventions, we still have people with the worst health living in the worst housing.
The original impetus in the 19th century for improving housing conditions (for example slum clearance to tackle squalid living conditions, severe overcrowding and dilapidation) was clearly focussed on improving health outcomes. Sadly, in the 20th century the focus shifted to issues of ownership, access, management and cost – losing the link between improving housing to improve both mental and physical health.
Now in the 21st century many of the policies being driven forward by the Tory-led coalition risk returning us to that early 19th century situation with severe overcrowding and the poorest and most vulnerable people being driven into the poorest homes in an unregulated private sector. Make no mistake, there is a wealth of evidence to show that the private sector, especially the private rented sector, contains the highest proportion of ‘non-decent’ homes with a significant percentage of older people living in the very poorest private sector homes.
If investment in housing is not substantially increased, much of the expenditure on health and care programmes will be totally ineffective. In a report commissioned specially for the LHG/SHA Conference earlier this week, environmental health expert Stephen Battersby* reminded us that poor housing conditions cost the NHS at least £600 million per year, that the one-off costs of works to improve private rented housing gave an annual financial saving to the health sector, and that every £1 spent on providing housing support for vulnerable people can save nearly £2 in reduced costs of health services, tenancy failure, crime and residential care.
The Labour Housing Group believes that housing should be recognised as a community capital asset that needs to be properly maintained, most of our current housing will still be here in a hundred years time, because if it is neglected the cost of demolition and replacement will ultimately fall on the state.
Surely we owe it to current generations, and to our children and our children’s children, to have good housing and health policies fit for the 21st century? Policies that recognise that investment in housing is an essential prerequisite for tackling inequality overall but especially health inequalities.
*University of Surrey and University of Warwick, current President of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.
I liked Ed Miliband’s speech today. Responsibility, reward for contributing to society, reciprocity and ‘doing your bit’ have always been part of the Labour tradition and it’s good to hear the Labour leader putting it to the fore. For too long it’s been territory we surrendered too easily to the Tories. A
nd, it’s right for Ed to draw the dividing line between us and the Tories: Labour believes everyone has responsibilities, at the top and the bottom. The Tories however care a lot about benefit cheats, but have little to say on the spiralling pay of Britain’s wealth-wrecking bankers and chief executives.
His decision to draw on housing as an example was good too. If we are to maintain the legitimacy of public housing, it needs to be a more universal good – available to support working people on a range of incomes. If it becomes housing of the last resort and for the poorest only, the political argument to sustain it becomes ever harder.
It’s the same argument for the Labour Party really: at the last election, as Ed says, we became seen as the party for those on benefits and out of work – the social housing position on the political landscape. It’s hard to sustain a political party on that basis. For legitimacy, you have to make a universal offer that the majority can buy into – the NHS position on the political landscape.
Ed’s argument would see Labour move away from a position which privileged need as the main factor in getting social housing to a system where people’s contributions through work, caring, responsible behaviour were recognised in getting public help with your housing.
As readers of this blog will know – this isn’t a problem free, ‘motherhood and apple pie’ policy – it has tough consequences. There is only so much housing and the more you allocate on a contributory principle, the less there is for those in need, for whom alternative provision will need to be made.
However, I think that passes the public’s fairness test and provides a future Labour government with a strong foundation to invest in social housing and make the case for why.
The choice isn’t between social housing for the working versus social housing for the poorest, but social housing as a more universal offer, or no social housing for anyone.
Labour’s housing policy will help lead the country out of the ‘turgid economic trough’ being created by the Tories, Ken Livingstone told a packed London Labour Housing Group conference on Saturday. ‘Investment to create 100,000 new homes would create three-quarters of a million jobs’ the mayoral candidate told the conference, called to debate housing policies for London to be included in next year’s manifesto.
Describing the fight for the mayoralty as a ‘mid-term election’ Ken argued that Labour needed to redefine housing policy as a key part of economic policy as well as being important in itself in meeting the housing needs of low and middle income Londoners. One of the jobs of the new mayor will be to draw up a major programme of housebuilding ready for the return of a Labour government.
The Tories have abandoned the idea of mixed communities in London, he said, but Labour will always build a mix of homes for a mix of people on a wide range of incomes, just as it had done in the past. Ken also reminded the conference that effective campaigns on housing had forced major u-turns from both the Heath and Thatcher governments and could do so again with the coalition.
Karen Buck MP, shadow minister for welfare reform, told the conference that the Tory government’s policies in the Localism and Welfare Reform Bills would have a huge impact on London and could force tens of thousands of people to move – all searching for cheaper areas. The policies would also be counter-productive – leading to higher rents in all tenures and far greater homelessness – making it impossible for them to make their savings.
Karen said that the policies directly contradicted the Tories’ claim that they wanted to incentivise people to get back to work. They had almost completely forgotten that housing benefit is also an in-work benefit – over 40% of people receiving local housing allowance were in work in some boroughs – the losses would make it impossible for many of them to remain in work.
Setting the context for the conference, Nicky Gavron AM, Labour’s housing and planning lead on the London Assembly, said that more and more people were seeing housing as a key battleground for the mayoral election. The difference between the two mayors could not be more stark. Ken’s legacy was strong, Nicky argued. There was a strong planning framework, the best housing record since the 1970s, the highest level of capital investment ever and a massive land bank ready for development. Johnson had squandered this inheritance and virtually all his housing claims could be dated back to Ken’s administration. He was undermining the planning system, scrapping Ken’s targets especially the 50% affordable target and the emphasis on social rented homes. The government’s own inspector had criticised Johnson’s polices, saying his targets were too low, he should keep the 50% London-wide affordable housing target, and should support social rented housing provision. Johnson caved in to his Tory friends in the boroughs, allowing them to cut affordable housing. Only the Labour boroughs are keeping London’s affordable housebuilding going.
The conference, with representatives from all areas of London, inner and outer, debated a series of detailed policy proposals for the manifesto, including policies to increase housing supply, to meet the needs of the poorest and most socially excluded households, to help the ‘squeezed middle’, and to guarantee the future of social housing in the capital. The policies will be developed further before the manifesto is published.
Labour Party members interested in joining the Labour Housing Group should follow this link. London members interested in the work of London LHG should contact [email protected]
Categories
The ‘Warehouse' of Mum and Dad
I still have loads of junk in my Mum’s house. It fills the shed in large boxes and tumbles out of less used cupboards. And it seems I’m not alone. According to the Telegraph:
“Now the younger generation – not wanting to mess up their own, often small, living space – are increasingly relying on the old family home to store their share.”
In my case, I’d have to say that the remaining junk is due to my own lack of organisation and a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
But this amusing life-style story (planted as insurance company PR by the looks of it), reflects a reality about housing for the younger generation:
Far more people find themselves renting and sharing with friends for longer than in the past -because buying’s impossible, there’s little chance of social housing and the cost of private rents means several people sharing is the only option. And, as the article suggests, the homes younger people are renting or buying are getting ever smaller – the newest are the smallest homes in Europe.
It’s no wonder, when parents finally get rid of their kids from the family home (at an increasingly later age), that half their stuff stays behind.
So it may be a pain, when you’re pottering at home in your retirement*, to constantly come across boxes of CDs of angry teenage music, old tennis rackets and bin bags full of WWF magazines 1990-1994 (Sorry Mum – they’ll be worth something on eBay one day), but it’s nothing compared to the pain many have of trying to afford a decent place to live.
*To avoid the risk of unfairly characterising retirees, my co-Blogger spends his retirement making up for my lack of posting, running the London Labour Housing Group and fighting the good fight. I think he’s busier than ever.
The Tories are moving forward their plans to gerrymander equalise the number of constituencies. The aim is to have the same number of registered voters in each constituency. Of course this will mean vastly different numbers of people in each constituency: those who aren’t registered will be invisible to this process. And those who aren’t registered are disproportionately the young, the mobile, people who rent, lower income groups – basically Labour leaning groups.
Consequently, it is due to remove more Labour seats than Tory seats, though recently it seems the hapless Lib Dems may be on the sharp end.
One thing the Tories haven’t considered and perhaps the Boundary Commission either, is how they equalise constituencies in the south east when housing changes bite. High ‘affordable’ rents, cuts in housing benefit and the introduction of the benefit cap will cause lots of people to leave expensive areas and move to cheaper ones. The Boundary Commission is going to be playing catch-up from the start, trying to equalise constituencies as significant numbers of people are forced to move.
One report already has 82,000 people leaving London for the surrounding towns and that’s ignoring the movement within London which is due to lose 5 seats in the review. When Central London’s larger less well off families end up in outer London and surrounding south eastern towns, how will the Boundary Commission keep tabs on them?
If they don’t, it’s important the Labour Party does, or people already uprooted from their communities will continue to find themselves disenfranchised. Local Labour parties should try to engage with people early, tackle the concerns that new arrivals (from anywhere) can bring and, importantly, get them registered to vote.
With many less well off voters heading out of central London and with real reasons to be angry with the Tories, perhaps MPs in places like Enfield, Barnet, Thurrock, the Medway Towns might regret supporting their party’s housing and benefit reforms.
It’s possible that even the gerrymandering won’t be enough to help them.
Categories
Time to say goodbye
Love it or loathe it, the Audit Commission Housing Inspectorate will be missed after it closes operations this month.
I have a long list of irritations with how it went about its work. Number one is probably the poor quality of some of the inspectors, who sometimes failed to follow their own guidelines about transparency, feedback and having ‘no surprises’ in their conclusions, or imported their own views about how something should be done and turning it into a supposedly objective judgement. Having experienced inspection outcomes that were both significantly higher and significantly lower than the service being inspected justified, I’m left with the nagging feeling that some were preordained and that political fixing could make a difference. Some services seemed to get stars simply because of their previous reputation and sometimes there seemed quite a gap between the evidence and the conclusion.
All of this would be denied by the AC of course and the upside of its achievements comfortably exceeds my annoyances. Most importantly, there is evidence that after decades of flatlining, housing management standards really did pick up and improve during the period that the housing inspectorate was active. The first series of inspections of housing association services burst the balloon that their chief executives had been blowing up about the quality of their own services. Shining a light into a few dark corners brought significant improvement to the sector, in both councils and housing associations. The weight given to the experience of tenants increased as the regime was refined and improved. The set of KLOEs (key lines of enquiry) that the AC produced was a brave attempt to provide a template for a good service, even if they were then rather slavishly followed. Whilst the industry of pre-inspection consultancy prospered, the ideas of regular service review, external challenge and constant improvement became endemic, driving service improvement and a focus on tenant satisfaction.
There were a couple of areas where I am happy to own up to just being wrong in my early views on the inspection regime. One was that the traffic light system was superficial and trivialised important judgements – in fact it was a great success and an effective communication tool. Second that introducing the link between inspection outcomes and funding in the ALMO programme wouldn’t work. In fact it was a great motivator and became an important driver of service improvement and tenant engagement, helping to restore the credibility of council housing.
Maybe I’ll be wrong again but my view even before the Election was that the inspection element of the new TSA regulatory regime risked not being comprehensive and rigorous enough to keep standards improving and that some organisations would slip back into bad old ways. Since the Election, the changes made by this government convince me that it will be far worse than that. Even if the TSA (whilst it exists) and the HCA, as the new regulator, ensure the financial viability and probity of the sector, they will be toothless tigers in relation to service quality. I would welcome the emphasis on local tenant scrutiny if I didn’t know that it will be hopelessly under-resourced and open to manipulation by landlords of all types wanting to talk a good service instead of delivering one.
One of many challenges facing landlords will be to put sufficient effort and resources into making tenant scrutiny work and to maintain the tradition of external rigorous challenge based on the methods developed by the Housing Inspectorate. I hope they will but I fear they won’t – and the industry will take a step backwards.
The idea of evicting social housing tenants on higher incomes emerged in Westminster, based on some very dodgy statistics about how many tenants earned over £50,000 and £100,000. It appears that after years of saying soial housing had too many poor people, now the Tories say it has too many rich people as well. I suspect they just don’t like social housing. Now that Grant Shapps has taken up the attack, it has become a national story. The original story was broken by the Leader of the Labour Group on Westminster, Paul Dimoldenberg. In a guest blog, he accuses Shapps of tabloid-style reasoning. No surprise there then.
So Grant Shapps MP thinks it is a ‘no brainer’ to evict Council and Housing Association tenant families who between them earn £100,000 a year. He reckons that there are 6,000 such families across the UK who he says are rich enough to be able to buy their own home and should be evicted so that they can make way for a family who is in more serious need of a home.
Well, I certainly have a number of serious concerns about this proposal which has emerged out of the blue without any consultation or thought to the consequences.
In typical tabloid-style reasoning Mr Shapps raises the spectre of RMT trade union leader Bob Crow who earns £130,000 a year but still lives in a council house in north London. Interestingly, Mr Shapps can name no other high-earning individual or family to make his case and his argument rests entirely on the personal circumstances and choices made by Government ‘hate-figure-in-chief’ Mr Crow.
But the facts of these so-called ‘high-earning’ Council tents are a million miles from the isolated Bob Crow example.
A more typical ‘high-earning’ family is the one living in Grant Shapps’ constituency in a 2-bed Council or Housing Association flat where the parents both have middle income jobs earning £25,000 each and their daughter and her fiancee, again both earning £25,000, are saving for a deposit on their first home. Does Mr Shapps really think that this family is ‘rich’?
Does Mr Shapps really expect Council and Housing Association tenant families like this to reveal their incomes if it means that, by doing so, they will be evicted if they are thought by the Government to be earning too much? And how many people will decide not to work overtime or go for promotion if it means that they will creep over the £100,000 threshold and face eviction?
If Council and Housing Association tenants have to reveal the income of all family members living in their home, will it include the state pension of an elderly grandparent living with them? And will the meagre earnings of the teenage daughter with a Saturday job also be required to be included, too? Real life is very different from Mr Shapps’ easy headline grabbing and ill-thought out policies. So far he has failed to answer any of these points.
Or will local Councils and Housing Associations be told to make assumptions about their tenants’ income and then to evict those families who they estimate to be ‘wealthy’?
Mr Shapps says a family with a combined income of £100,000 should be able to buy a home of their own, but this will be different across the UK. In London, the South East and South West, a young couple with a combined income of £50,000 and living in a Council flat with mum and dad will not be able to get on the home-ownership ladder if that family is told to move out and buy their own flat. They will end up in private rented accommodation paying a lot more in rent.
And how did this £100,000 figure come about? Was it the result of research or is it a convenient figure that will guarantee tabloid headlines?
Posted on 6 June 2011. Later Paul added:
Housing Minister Grant Shapps’ plans to evict Council and Housing Association households with a combined income of £100,000 unravelled today on the BBC Radio 2 ‘Jeremy Vine Show’ when he contradicted statements he made over the weekend and now claimed that his new policy would mean that families with four or more people on average incomes would not be evicted if their combined household income is more than £100,000.
In a bizarre example of ‘policy making on the hoof’, Mr Shapps told BBC Radio 2 listeners that
- The £100,000 income threshold only applies to individuals and couples with a combined income of £100k
- Other family members’ income (e.g. children, granparents) will not be counted
However, Mr Shapps’ claim that this new policy would mean that people with high incomes would move out and allow people in housing need to take their place, was immediately in tatters when he revealed that if the high earners paid the market rent then they could continue to live in their Council or Housing Association property as now.
Mr Shapps failed to spell out how Councils and Housing Associations would gather the information on ‘high earning’ tenant incomes or how much the Town Hall bureaucracy would cost to set up, run and police. Mr Shapps also failed to answer how he would stop high earning individuals declaring that their income was £95,000 or stop the two person household declaring that they earned £45,000 each in order to dodge having to pay market rents.
By introducing a new policy of letting high earners stay if they pay market rents, he will provide very few new homes for people in housing need. And much of the extra cash generated by increased market rents will go topay for an army of Town Hall snoopers whose job it will be to set up a new bureaucracy to find out tenants’ income and enforce the new red-tape regime introduced by Mr Shapps.
Last month, Westminster’s Housing Cabinet member Philippa Roe claimed that the Council wanted to increase rents for high earners by “a little bit more”, but now Grant Shapps has revealed the truth and tenants will face a 400% increase in rents as they go from their current level of around £110 a week to market rents of £450 a week or more.
The answer to local housing shortages is to build more homes for social rent, not to divide the community and set middle earners, the low paid and high earners against each other. Giving Councils like Westminster Council the power to set their own rent levels will mean that Council rents will go up for everyone, not just those on over £100,000.
This is an addition to my previous post really about how we get ‘generation rent’ into homeownership, if indeed we should. There’s a paradox that the measures you take to ensure ‘responsible’ lending from banks are the measures which prevent more first-time buyers form getting a property. Opening easy credit again could be seen as one answer to the problem of younger people being unable to buy.
That would be the wrong lesson to draw from the financial crisis and its aftermath.
There are some people at the moment who can sustain a mortgage but to whom banks won’t lend. But that’s not really the issue. Looser lending may help in the short term, allowing some more people to buy a home. But in the long term, it’s cheap credit which fuelled the housing boom, drove up prices and locked most first-time buyers out. It’s not something we want to repeat.
As a colleague put it to me once: ‘house prices in Britain rise to the level of available credit in the economy’. More lending means higher prices.
That’s why the IPPR are right to say that there should be limits which ensure lenders act responsibly. I don’t know whether that’s a certain loan to value ratio as they suggest or something else. But, I do think the timing’s important. If limits like this are going to prevent another bubble, they need to be imposed before their effects bite, during a slack period. Once the housing market begins racing away, it’ll be difficult and unpopular to draw it back again with borrowing limits. Better that when it grows again, it does so under more sustainable rules.
After a long lie-in on Tuesday (I had a day off), I found myself surprised by the rarest of things – a front page housing story. Nope, not asylum seekers jumping the queue into council housing, or a big family in West London claiming 50k in housing benefit. But, a story about homeownership in the Independent and a serious one at that. It was followed-up with coverage by Sky and the BBC.
It seems people are waking up to something aspiring first time buyers have known for a while: if you haven’t got parental help, owning a home for most people is a distant prospect.
House prices and deposits for mortgages are so high that it feels (and indeed is) an unrealistic goal for people to achieve.
We either accept that many people will become renters in the long term and put renting on a more equal footing with owning your own home. That means greater security for tenants and ensuring higher standards, with better ways to enforce tenants’ rights. It also means providing renters with tax-efficient ways to build assets and save in the same way owner occupiers build value in their homes and benefit from prices rises.
Or, we need to do something to keep house prices lower compared to earnings, so younger people can afford them in the future. That means limiting the real-term rises in house value the older generation may be relying on – to fund later care perhaps or provide their pension. It means making homeownership once again the goal of public policy, but a reformed homeownership, which is about a secure place to live and not a financial investment.
In both cases, it’s about transferring wealth from an older generation to a younger one, to those who own assets to those who do not – whether they are housing assets or take a different form.
The problem is what will convince the baby boomer generation to back reforms that do this? Only, I suggest, the realisation that their children will never realise an aspiration which the post-war generation came to take for granted. And that’s why this debate is a good thing, because at least it’s happening beyond the ranks of the housing professionals and creating wider awareness of stark housing choices.