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In praise of PricedOut

PricedOut are a campaigning group who represent those unable to buy their own homes because of high house prices. I increasingly think they are a very good thing.
They argue for a more sustainable housing market, with lower prices and less volatility. They fight for better standards in the private rented sector for those no longer able to buy their own home. They also do a good job of highlighting the generational inequalities in the housing market, with most young (and even not so young people) locked out of a stable home long after their parents’ generation would have bought a place of their own.
As they say themselves:
We actively campaign the Government to increase housing affordability by:

  • Increasing taxation on buy-to-let and multiple home ownership;
  • Building more homes;
  • Improving tenants’ rights;
  • Improving the sustainability of the housing market, preventing a further boom in house prices.

In campaigning terms, they punch well above their weight, for a small, volunteer run organisation. They find themselves frequently in the national press making  a compelling case for unpopular reforms and arguing against accepted ‘wisdoms’.
 Now to be fair, they have somewhat of a market advantage over say Shelter or Crisis. Advocating the plight of a vulnerable minority is a tougher sell, than the mainstream ’cause’ of homeownership for young working people.
But to their credit, they do more than just argue for the narrow interests of the people they represent. They argue a broader case for a better housing system – such as better rights for private renters and lower prices. And they stick their head above the parapet to broach unpopular issues, such as taxation.
Join up, visit their website http://www.pricedout.org.uk/ and start following them on twitter @pricedoutuk

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Seabeck slates Tory housing segregation

A longer than normal post bringing edited extracts from the speech of Alison Seabeck MP, shadow Housing and Planning Minister on the housing parts of the Localism Bill, during the Bill’s second reading in the House of Commons.  You can read the full speech on the Labour Housing Group website or indeed the entire debate here.   
Alison Seabeck said:
The Opposition cannot let these proposals go unchallenged. We will press for votes on our amendments flexible tenancies and security of tenure.
The Government’s proposals on housing and homelessness are deeply damaging, and none more so than the proposal to end security of tenure in social housing. That will create two classes of tenant in social housing. There will be great uncertainty, because there will be different lengths of tenure and different levels of rent, with little rational relationship between the two. There will be a divide between those who have been fortunate enough to get security of tenure in their social housing, and those who have been made to wait for too long and will be granted a tenancy for as little as two years. Tenants whose financial circumstances improve above an arbitrary level will potentially be told to pack up and move on.
As a result of the complexity of the system that is being brought forward, which will be a bureaucratic nightmare, a household in a three-bedroom house could pay less rent and have greater security than a household next door in a two-bedroom flat.
However, the message from the Government to all families in social housing is, “Get a better job and you will lose your home. Invite your partner to move in with you and start a family, and you will put your home at risk.” At a time when we want people to do their best to get on in life, and to build something better for themselves and their families, this is the wrong policy. Labour will stand up for people who strive and who put the hours in to better their lot. What will happen to people who fall foul of the new Tory rules and are told to leave their council or housing association home simply because they have worked hard if they subsequently lose their job or fall ill and are unable to work? What will their entitlement be then? They will go to the back of the queue and start all over again. Where is the incentive to work and where is the fairness?
To solve the housing crisis, the Government need to build more homes. Their policy seems to be aimed at trying to solve the shortage of social housing by allowing everyone a year or two in a social home before moving them on. Ministers seem to have failed to realise that to house people we need not to give them shorter tenancies but to build homes.
What will be the consequences of that policy of limiting social housing so that it is not available to those who work hard to build something for themselves, or to those who invest in their homes and communities? What will happen when we reduce estates to being areas that people pass through at their most vulnerable point and transitional communities of the most deprived? We will go back almost to the state of social housing in the first half of the last century, when access to it was limited by law to the “working classes”. That term was only ever defined once in legislation, in paragraph (12)(e) of the schedule to the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1903, as those “whose income in any case does not exceed an average of thirty shillings a week”.
In today’s money, that would be an annual income of just over £7,000. Mean as the Government are, I do not expect them to set a threshold as low as that, which would make them comparable with Tory Governments of the late 19th and early 20th century. However, the message that their change will send is the same now as it was then: that social housing is for the poor. It is to segregate people from other sections of society that are seen as doing better.
It has been more than 62 years since the House decided to accept that segregating social housing off for just one deprived section of society was entirely wrong. In that debate, Aneuring Bevan said—it is as true now as it was then—that it was
“entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live…that from one sort of township should come one income group and from another sort of township another income group…if we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should be all drawn from the different sections of the community”.
Sixty years on, the idea that this country is stronger when its communities are more diverse, and that its society is more cohesive when it comprises of a broad and mixed swathe of people, is no longer supported by the Conservative party. Nor is it supported by the Liberal party, whose MPs did not oppose the measures in this Bill in Committee despite trying to raise their concerns by tabling amendments. They consistently withdrew those amendments without a vote. Just where is their fabled voice in government and their backbone? We still believe in mixed communities in social housing, underpinned by security of tenure, which the Bill targets so directly.
The framework published by the Department is quite clear that tenancies will be secure only for tenants who have a secure tenancy before 31 March 2012. Therefore, tenants with a secure tenancy will lose their security if their family grows and they need to move to a larger home, or if a person wishes to downsize to a smaller home and the only properties available for re-let are offered on a flexible tenancy.
The Bill is a retrograde step. Homeless applicants found to be in priority need and unintentionally homeless will no longer be able to draw on the security and stability of a social home with security of tenure. Instead, they will be placed directly into the private rented sector and if they refuse an offer, for whatever reason, the local authority will no longer have a duty to house them. They would then have almost nowhere to turn for help. It does not take much to realise the circumstances in which an offer might be unacceptable to an applicant. The accommodation might be too expensive, too far away from their child’s school or too close to an abusive ex-partner. It might also be damp, mouldy or unsafe—the list goes on. Key among all this is the insecurity that a private rented sector offer can sometimes bring. There was a very good article in Inside Housing this week, following a survey that clearly showed that a homeless person placed in the private rented sector was likely to face eviction very early, and to be turned around and around in a circle of homelessness.
The third biggest cause of statutory homelessness last year was the loss of an assured shorthold tenancy. As I said earlier, stability is vital in order to prevent what people have referred to as the revolving door of homelessness. With tenancies in the private rented sector being less stable and of a shorter duration, the risk of recurring homelessness is greater, so the need for stronger statutory protection increases.
If the Government are insistent that they wish to place homeless applicants directly into the private rented sector, it is only right for them to acknowledge the need to strengthen protections for the very predictable outcome of their choices. Evidence shows that homeless people housed in the private rented sector are more likely to be evicted.
Let me finish by saying that it is not just this Bill’s provisions that give cause for alarm, as changes to housing benefit will increase homelessness and rough sleeping. We have already seen homelessness increase by some 15% since this Government came into office. The Government’s consultation on statutory duties on local authorities has seen Tory councils like Hammermsith and Fulham viewing it as an opportunity to scale back their duties to homeless people, while Westminster council has been busy trying to ban soup kitchens.
Our new clauses and amendments are designed to defend mixed communities, to extend protections and advice to homeless people, to stand up for security and stability for low-income families and to prevent the segregation of those sections of our society that this Bill will surely deliver.

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Council rents: dodgy stats and dodgy conclusions

A Guardian poll claims that nearly 80% of respondents agree with the statement that councils should charge high-earning social tenants higher rents.  The Guardian quotes twitter comments including one saying people who can afford to live in the private sector should not be in social housing. ‘Simple. Irrefutable.’
The initial story that provoked such a strong public opinion and huge media coverage came from Westminster City Council.  That in itself should raise suspicions.  The Guardian leads its poll – and misleads its readers – with ‘facts’: that in Westminster 200 social tenants earn more that £100,000 a year and 2,200 earn more than £50,000.  Who then could disagree with the policy they are proposing?  But closer scrutiny leads to the information that the figures are estimates based on a survey carried out in 2006.  There is no information as to whether these are single earners of couples (if both earn average wages, household income would be £50k) and whether lessees were excluded. Personally I just don’t trust this data and have put in a freedom of information request to get the calculations. 
Westminster are using these ‘facts’ as a rapier argument to front their desire to have greater local powers to set council rents.  Very successful bit of propaganda so far.  But beware – they want the local power because they want to put their rents up for everyone not just ‘the rich’.
It is interesting to ruminate on this story.  First, if the figures are correct they show a remarkable amount of social mobility in council housing (2,200 is more than about 1 in 6 of Westminster’s tenants).  Well done council housing for helping people achieve their aspirations.  Secondly, it shows that council housing, despite everything, can still achieve mixed income communities.  Well done council housing.  Thirdly, it makes an interesting change, even if it is dodgy, to see some Tories wanting to get rid of people it regards as rich when most of their policies, especially around local housing allowance, are about getting rid of the poor.
Fourthly, beware polls, even in the Guardian.  People voted yes to a statement that social housing ‘should be available only to those who need it most and increasing rents for high earners would encourage them to move on’ – a totally different statement from the headline that 4 in 5 agreed that ‘councils should be allowed to charge high-earning social tenants higher rents’.  So who was trying to prove what and for what reason?
Fifthly, there would be the small matter of implementation.  To charge higher rents to some because of their income, the council would need to know and be able to verify the income of all their tenants.  It would be dodgy getting housing benefit information for this purpose, and that wouldn’t identify high earners.  I see armies of means-testers knocking on doors, sending out forms and making detailed verification checks.  Even if some simpler means were found (eg higher rents for higher tax payers) the information would have to be transferred from HMRC or self-declared – and in any case would not ‘catch’ the 2 income household earning £25K each.  And it would make the marginal rate of tax for a person passing the higher tax rate threshold totally unsustainable. 
This is a well-worn path trodden by people who like to discredit social housing – there is a fine tradition of stories about council tenants with Jags outside the front door – but in my view it is totally unimplementable even if you like the principle.  So, it has been a bit of a propaganda victory for Westminster, rekindling a few old prejudices.  But even this government isn’t daft enough to do what Westminster wants.  Or is it?

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Heroes fit for homes

Ex-service personnel have always featured highly amongst the homeless.  For many years the armed forces seemed particularly bad at helping people re-settle after their discharge.  There was no single cause for homelessness: sometimes physical disability made people less able to work and more vulnerable, sometimes mental stresses and post-trauma conditions made life back in civilian life more difficult to bear.  Sometimes people had become institutionalised or distanced from their families and an inability to re-settle led to problems with alcohol or drugs.  Some faced discrimination. 
For decades small charities campaigned to get a fair housing deal for homeless ex-service men and women but it was an uphill struggle.  The 1977 homelessness legislation provided one route to a decent home for some: if vulnerability through disability could be demonstrated then a social rented home would be found.  But this was not enough: research by Crisis in the mid 1990s found that around one-quarter of the single homeless population had spent time in the armed forces. 
Since then, increased awareness and better services, both within the armed forces and in local government and the voluntary sector, have had a demonstrable impact on the problem, with Crisis estimating that ex-service people are now around 6% of the single homeless population.  And in a very important step, the Labour Government changed the priority need categories in the homelessness legislation to give clear rights to vulnerable former members of the armed forces.
Striking his most Churchillian pose, Housing Minister Grant Shapps seeks to make the most of today’s announcement by Defence Minister Liam Fox about the improving the ‘military covenant’.   Shapps’ statement is littered with pomposity but little practical action: ‘These brave men and women… heroes … we will not stand idly by… our duty as a nation… we must hear their call’.  There is nothing wrong with the government giving ex-service people priority (in some as yet undefined way) for the FirstBuy scheme, shared equaity schemes, self-build projects and the like.  But it will hardly crack the problem.
In his little list, Shapps included ‘fairer treatment for military personnel applying to live in social housing’.  On the surface, fair enough, given their incomes and housing histories, the route into social housing is likely to be more important than the others in ensuring ex-armed forces personnel obtain an affordable secure decent home.
Call me an old cynic, but isn’t this the same Grant Shapps who has ended the production of social  housing at target rents in the future?  Who has brought about the slashing of ‘supporting people’ budgets – used to support homeless ex-service personnel amongst others – in many areas of the country?  Who has promoted legislation that will remove the right of vulnerable ex-service personnel to be rehoused in a social rented home?  Like everyone else, in future homeless ex-service personnel are likely to be offered a letting in the higher-cost, insecure private rented sector.
It pays to be careful when you see a Tory waving the flag.  In all likelihood they will be up to no good.

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Prescription for a healthy Britain – conference reminder

Labour Housing Group, Socialist Health Association and Unite the Union are organising a Conference on tackling the housing and health divide, to take place in London on June 13 2011. 

PRESCRIPTION FOR A HEALTHY BRITAIN
Speakers are
Alison Seabeck MP – shadow housing minister;
Karen Buck MP – shadow welfare reform minister;
Dr Stephen Battersby – President, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health;
Angela Mawle – Chief Executive, UKPHA

Costs (includes lunch) £50 for statutory or commercial organisations, £25 for voluntary organisations and individuals, £12 for members of LHG or the Socialist Health Association. Unfunded organisations or individuals please contact SHA.

Bookings through SHA at http://www.sochealth.co.uk/confs/Booking.php

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Security for Private Renters

What’s the down-side to giving people who rent from private landlords longer and more secure tenancies? I think we should.
We know that life isn’t going to get any easier for first-time buyers: mortgages are still hard to get and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Life is getting worse for those that want and need social housing: fewer homes being built, more rents at near-market levels and more people being diverted into the private rented homes anyway.
Homes let by private landlords will become more important for those locked out of social housing and homeownership. The key point about these tenures (well traditionally) is that they provide long-term security and stability.
So how do we provide private renters with more security and stability as well? One simple measure would be to provide those who rent privately with more security in their home. If it has to be a home for the long-term, people need more rights in that home, especially if that is the home in which people raise their family. Why not have a minimum tenancy length of 3, 4 or 5 years?
Increasingly, I struggle to see the down-side. People talk about the impact on landlords. The burden of ‘red tape’ and the inability to get the property back immediately may cause them to pull their homes out of the rented market. But those homes are likely to then be sold, leading to more homes becoming available to buy, especially for first-time buyers.
In the past, buy-to-let landlords helped increase the number of homes being built. Developers knew they could sell their new homes to landlords ready to buy them. But that’s not a sustainable way of keeping housing supply up: it helped fuel the boom and it resulted in the empty city-centre flats in many places – when the landlords went away, no one wanted to buy them to live in.
If tenants were given more rights, those landlords who remained in the market would be those most committed to providing long-term and good quality homes for tenants. And it would give people more real choice by putting the different tenures on a more equal footing.

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Crossroads or Dead End?

Before Blue Labour there was Red Tory.  And the think tank ResPublica, directed by the original Red Tory Philip Blonde, has just published an important report which they claim sets out ‘a progressive future’ for housing associations (HAs).   
ResPublica says that “At the Crossroads” is a radical new vision for HAs in which they would take on a much wider service role, bringing the big society themes of mutualism, localism and community ownership into the housing debate.
To be fair, the report is well written and well-researched and has a lot of interesting things to say about the work housing associations already do in communities, with some excellent examples of innovative work providing local services, supporting and funding community organisations.  I like the idea that HAs should declare a ‘social dividend’, but the rest of it is scarcely new.  There is no trend analysis of how community investment by HAs has developed over the years (slowly and often backwards) or of the retrenchment that is going on now.  It doesn’t properly consider the example of care services, a key role that HAs have taken on where there are huge cuts in many areas currently.  It argues a good case for the rationalisation of stock, devolution of management, and improvements in tenant engagement and control, but this is also a well worn path.
The report gets more challenging in its discussion of governance and the options for community control, arguing that associations that adopt new forms of community accountability, especially through active shareholder participation, should qualify for further deregulation, claiming that they would be ‘set free’.
Despite trying to be unremittingly positive about the coalition’s policies (and failing), the report is deficient on several counts.  It acknowledges that coalition policies will cut development, but it has virtually no analysis of the role of HAs in providing homes for people in housing need, which is of course their primary purpose for being.  It is hopelessly optimistic that HAs would be transformed by extending shareholding, not recognising that shareholders have few rights and little power, especially as Boards invariably control large numbers of proxy votes at AGMs. 
I can see the model working, indeed would welcome it, for smaller or geographically based associations.  I would welcome mass membership of such organisations, the much wider development of mutuals, and a huge extension of tenant influence.  But it ducks the challenge posed by the least accountable and most problematic HAs – the very large associations who own a major proportion of the stock, work in dozens and sometimes hundreds of council areas, and are hugely complex finance-driven organisations.  It is not just a matter of devolving management, the financial centre would always retain control.  They would have to be broken up and I can’t see that happening, especially as some are hell-bent on becoming plcs not community organisations.   
The form of deregulation that the report says should be on offer to HAs that adopt the community model is also extremely dangerous.  Organisations that are community influenced or indeed community controlled can fail just like others can, they embody large amounts of public resources and should be subject to external regulation to ensure they are meeting their purposes and maintaining efficiency and probity.  Good organisations should welcome good regulation and not see it as red tape or some unfortunate additional cost.  Localised tenant scrutiny is a good thing but it is open to manipulation and has no chance of working unless a lot of resources are thrown at it.  It is not a substitute for external regulation.  The history of HAs is full of chief executives who talked a good service until the inspectors called and revealed the reality.
It is also important to look at what ResPublica mean by HAs being ‘set free’.  Localisation of rent setting.  No thanks.  Use of flexible tenancies.  No thanks.  More flexible use of historic ‘recycled’ grant.  No thanks.  Converting existing homes to flexible tenancies.  No thanks.  These are not freedoms, they would amount to tenants giving away their rights.  
It is hard to predict what will happen to HA finances under the new regime.  Those that will build anything anywhere because they are little different from private developers may see rising rents and more cash to spend, but they are the least likely to give themselves over to community control.  Others foresee less development and therefore a reduced ability to spread their overheads, leaving less money to spend on anything but the basics.  If the money isn’t there, the community extras will gradually be stripped away and no amount of big society coalition-speak will make any difference.

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Reform or privatise?

Our guest blogger Monimbo assesses the Government’s chances of achieving ‘cuddly privatisation’.
One side effect of the coalition’s troubles in persuading people about their NHS reforms is that they also seem to be having second thoughts about wider ‘reform’ of public services.  Cameron signalled in February that he wanted all public services to be open in principle to outside competition.  But Francis Maude, in a leaked memo, has now said this would be ‘politically unpalatable’.  Instead, the government now apparently contemplates a sort of semi-privatisation, where services will be run by cuddlier voluntary bodies, mutuals and social enterprises, rather than the less-cuddly Serco or Capita.
This, to put it mildly, seems to show confused objectives.  The one virtue of the NHS proposals was that they were crystal clear in their goal of providing bigger opportunities to private health suppliers – perhaps too clear from the viewpoint of trying to convince the public to accept the reforms.  Cameron’s Telegraph article in February seemed to show a similar desire, surrounded of course by much talk about the big society and freeing services from the ‘grip’ of state control (if someone needs to have a grip on public services, shouldn’t it be the state?).
Now two things have happened. One is that the public service reform white paper has been postponed. The other is that, according to the leaked memo, in the white paper the government won’t take ‘the political risk of fully transferring services to the private sector with the result that they could be accused of being naive or allowing excess profit making by private sector firms’.
So now what seems to be on offer is half-privatisation, which is presumably judged to be more acceptable to the public. While this is possibly true, is it achievable?  Both in the NHS reforms and what is allegedly proposed for public services generally, the government seems to be unaware of or to be ignoring the EU procurement rules.  These come into play if a service is put out to tender, rather than being run in-house as a normal part of central or local government.  There is nothing discretionary about them: they have to be applied, unless (as in housing, for example, with ALMOs) the service is to be run by a company still owned by the public authority.  There are exemptions for small contracts, but it’s not permitted to split what otherwise would be a big contract into multiple small ones to get round the rules.  The rules are set out inUK law which itself is based on European law.
The effects on housing are, as yet, even less clear as we wait to see whether new rules will be imposed on local authorities and, within them, on council housing services. Given that the government has imposed a tight timetable for council housing finance reform, any further imposition on councils would be unwelcome, to say the least.  Ironically, housing associations (presumably unaffected by the latest proposals) have themselves complained about the bureaucracy associated with EU procurement rules.
Either the government is being disingenuous about its real plans for public services, or it thinks it can achieve something that in practice looks impossible: cuddly privatisation. It seems to think that this will both drive down costs and make services more user-friendly, and as usual it has a handful of examples (the one in the memo is apparently a mutual called the Sandwell Community Caring Trust) that seem to be prove its point. But of course they don’t: all they prove is that a particular solution works in one place, not that the same approach can be used for services as diverse as supplying driving licences or collecting taxes (two of the examples given in the leaked memo).
Once again we seem to be on the brink of public service ‘reform’ whose end result is likely to be full privatisation.

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Making work pointless

This Tory government seems to have missed the fact that their new ‘affordable’ rent regime creates massive disincentives for work and pushes people into the benefits system. For a government that considers people being helped and supported by the government as suffering from ‘dependency’, they’ve missed the fact that they’ve made the problem a lot worse for working tenants.
They are forcing people into claiming benefits by charging rents they can’t afford. That means they severely penalise people for working more, getting higher paid work, or someone else in the household finding a job. They’ve created a new benefits’ trap with very steep sides.
Since we had Cllr James Murray blogging for us a few days ago, let’s take what would happen to a modest earning Islington tenant as an example.
80% of the average Islington rent for a 2-bed place is £396 a week. If you earn say £20,000, that’s already more in rent per week than the £306 you earn. So, you get housing benefit and as a working household, there is no benefits cap, so you can claim what you need to cover the cost.  
All well and good isn’t it?
But what if you begin to earn more? For every extra pound you or your household earns, 65p of your housing benefit (as part of the new Universal Credit) gets withdrawn. Every new pound earned is actually worth 35p. 
So, get a promotion and take home £2k more? You’ll actually get £700. Do a week’s worth of overtime for £380, you’ll see £135. And if you have a partner out of work and they move into a job, bringing home say £8,000, you’ll effectively have only £2,800 extra, until you escape entirely from the benefits trap.
For comparison, average Islington social rents are about £85 – affordable within a weekly budget of £306. And every extra pound you earn you keep. Doing overtime, winning promotion or having someone else in the house get a job are all 100% worthwhile financially.
The point is that social housing doesn’t need to be a form of ‘dependency’. Low rents in secure homes can be the platform which allow people to earn modest salaries and stand on their own two feet without state benefits.

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New Blog on the Block – 'ProgLoc'

Former Labour advisor and Deputy Director of the think tank NLGN, Anna Turley launched a new blog last week – ProgLoc. Impressive early contributions and it’ll become a must-read for anyone interested in local government and localism on the left.
Check it out
“ProgLoc is a new independent blog dedicated to providing a voice for the centre-left in local government. It seeks to provide a platform for open debate and to become a hub for the best new thinking amongst progressives at local level.
The aims of ProgLoc are:

  • To develop a forum for sharing new thinking and ideas on local public services and local government and to reclaim the localism agenda for the centre-left.
  • To tackle reactionary approaches and negative briefing against local government and local public services; standing up for the sector when required but also developing challenging new ideas about how to deliver better local services.
  • To support a new generation of local government leaders. So many great progressive politicians in the past have heralded from local government – we want to highlight good political leadership at local level.
  • To unite progressive forces at the local level. We will examine what the barriers have been in creating progressive partnerships and look to ways of building new alliances between progressive forces.
  • To enable a new approach to the relationship between the elected politician and the community. To help those on the left reinvigorate local democracy, and to ensure local government is focused on empowering people to bring about change in their community.
  • To be a bridge and broker between local government progressives, the voluntary and community sector and trade unions to align rather than fragment or contradict campaigns.
  • To support the creation of a new relationship between local government and the business sector. In the current climate it is vital that progressive councils form a new partnership with business to combine economic growth and social progress.”