Red Brick

Eric Pickles made a very big fuss announcing more protections for the rights of property owners – limiting councils’ ability to bring privately owned empty homes back into use:

“The Coalition Government is standing up for the civil liberties of law-abiding citizens. Fundamental human rights include the right to property.”

Quite.
It’s just as well that his Localism Bill doesn’t provide any Tom, Dick or Harry the right to interfere with your private property rights. 
Erm, but doesn’t that very piece of ground breaking legislation provide for a ‘Community Right to Buy’?
This would give local people the legal right to nominate any community asset onto a council’s ‘most wanted’ list. An asset on this list, in the case of its closure, could not be sold until after a ‘community countdown’, in which the community gets time to prepare its own bid to buy it.
So if you want to flog your shop, pub, small business etc, you might find your neighbours ganging up to stop you doing so – for a little while anyway.  
Now, I don’t think a community right to buy is a bad idea. I’m not sure it’ll ever work, but never mind. However, it is entirely at odds with the ‘fundamental rights’ you have to do as you wish with your property.
Both, on their own, are good populist measures in their own terms, so why pause for the sake of consistency?

I thought I’d flag up this article in the Telegraph from last week.
It’s about the construction industry hitting the buffers because of the poor weather in November and December this year.
It also notes that construction, despite being a very small part of the economy (6%) accounted for a significant proportion of what little growth there has been. Construction growth made up one third of all growth in the economy in Q2 of 2010, and one quarter of all growth in Q3. Not a bad contribution from a small sector.
This shows that the extra money invested in housing as part of the fiscal stimulus worked exactly as it was supposed to. The construction growth of the last year has kept people in jobs (and off benefits) and supported firms that otherwise would have gone under or contracted.
Think how much more anemic the growth in Quarters 2 and 3 would be without the extra housebuilding.
More worryingly for the future, construction is now contracting, jobs are being shed at a rapid rate and in particular “residential construction [is] falling at the fastest rate since April 2009, indicating the knock-on impact of a stagnant housing market.”
And I would add, deep cuts in capital for housing investment and the fiscal stimulus coming to an end.
And remember not only did this irresponsible, deficit creating spending splurge keep people off benefits, in jobs and supported competitiveness and capacity in the economy – it leaves a legacy of tens of thousands new affordable homes across the country that would not otherwise have been built.

The tough choices of joined up government…
As we reported, Grant Shapps made the case earlier this week that a stagnant housing market with prices remaining flat or decreasing in real terms would be a good thing for first-time buyers and achieve a more stable housing market in the future.
 At the end of this week, David Cameron argued that the housing market “has become very stuck and we’ve got to get it moving again”.
He rightly points out that mortgages are now hard to get even for those who are able to pay them and are likely to be able to in the future:

“If you are a single person, you are earning a decent salary. You go to the bank or building society, you are actually quite a good risk – they won’t give you 80 per cent of the value, they won’t give you four times your salary.”

Here’s the problem however – as soon as you start opening up mortgage lending again, to exactly the people David Cameron describes above, then house prices will start rising again, exactly what Grant Shapps doesn’t want.
As I said, in my last post the brake on house price increases is mortgage availability. The price of homes in Britain rises to the amount of available credit in the economy. Increase the credit, increase the prices.
It’s one of the tough problems you face in government. They can try to help Britain to develop a more stable and secure housing market. The result of that is locking first-time buyers out of the market in the meantime. Take your pick.
Without some really radical reforms (that some of our previous commenters have flagged) the government has pretty limited powers over shaping the housing market. They’re going to find it really hard to force the banks to free up their lending, not least because they also want to banks to build their reserves back up so they can pay back the public’s money.
In contrast, if/when banks in the future begin to lend more freely and the housing market gets motoring again, they’re going to have to take some pretty tough steps to stop prices spiralling again. Grant Shapps hasn’t said what steps he would take or what levers government really has in these circumstances, but it would take quite a lot of political steel to intervene.

I was thinking about more party reforms that Ed Miliband could pursue, and especially what kind of people we want to be Labour MPs.
There are well known barriers to becoming an MP for some groups and Labour has taken the most steps to address under-representation – most obviously through all women shortlists, which have resulted in Labour having more women MPs than all the other parties put together.

The Tories have tried, but with less success with their derided A-list of bright young things, who ‘get’ the Cameron project.
To become an MP requires in most instances years of steady hard work, dedicated campaigning, attempts at an unwinnable seat or two, a lot of time, supportive friends and family and much more. It’s unsurprising really that given these demands politics is becoming more professionalised.

People who already work in politics-related jobs are most likely to understand the processes and are likely to have employers sympathetic to their ambitions and give them the time they need.

So do we need more people in Parliament who have done different things in life and perhaps have had a career in business, local government, the health service, housing associations and charities, before entering parliament?

The truth is if you have a serious job in any of these fields, you’re going to find it hard to put in the time to devote yourself professionally to winning a seat. Some do, and great credit to them.

So could we have a Labour A-list that supports experienced people onto the Labour benches? People who know how to run things and led serious organisations and have not made professional party politics their lives.
Potentially this would add gravitas to the PLP, probably make for more independent-minded MPs, provide a greater pool of people who would make good ministers (they’ve run things) and widen the pool of talent and expertise from which we draw.

Not directly housing related I know – but I got started on this thinking about the people I know in the housing world. Many in local government, housing associations and housing charities were politically engaged on the left at some point, but chose to pursue their politics through a public service route, to the exclusion of elected politics. It would be good if it were easier for them to bring their skills and experience back into politics later in their careers, rather than being forced to make one choice at an early stage.