Category: Blog Post

• By guest blogger Monimbo

The Growth and Infrastructure Bill going through parliament at the moment is a threat to affordable housing supply.  Is it also an example of what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’?
Writing in the Guardian about responses to the destruction in New York caused by Hurricane Sandy, Naomi Klein describes how big firms are moving in offering private sector solutions and shows how the hurricane’s aftermath is in danger of becoming ‘just one more opportunity for further deregulation’.
In Britain we haven’t (recently) had a Hurricane Sandy but we do have our own ‘crisis born of corporate greed’ which has led (among many other things) to a collapse in the housing market. Everyone knows that builders aren’t building enough houses because potential buyers can’t get mortgages and in many cases also because builders themselves can’t get finance from the banks. To give some credit where it’s due, the government has recognised this with its FirstBuy and NewBuy schemes, although there is criticism that they are too focused on first-time buyers of new property. Local authorities are also doing their bit with several launching mortgage schemes, such as Sandwell.
But we are also getting a dose of disaster capitalism as developers lobby hard to get rid of regulations that supposedly stand in the way of the investment they would otherwise undertake.  The evidence that the planning system continues to be an obstacle to development, even after detailed guidance was replaced in March by the 50-page National Planning Policy Framework, is mixed at best.  There is even less (no?) evidence that building regulations hold up development, but that hasn’t stopped the government setting up an independent review to look into how many of them can be dispensed with in the supposed interests of ‘economic growth’.
As is happening with homelessness and allocations policies, the government is also tripping over its own initiatives in its hurry to act.  It’s been anxious to weaken (and is said to have considered abolishing) the planning requirements to provide affordable housing, known as section 106 agreements.  At first it was content to let councils renegotiate them, which 40% have apparently already done.  Then in August it decided to consult on renegotiating any agreement that dated from before April 2010. It also announced that expert brokers would be used to get projects moving that were stalled because of section 106 deals.  Its stimulus package of 6^th September promised:
‘…removing restrictions on house builders to help unlock 75 000 homes currently stalled due to sites being commercially unviable. Developers who can prove that council’s costly affordable housing requirements make the project unviable will see them removed.’
Although consultation on the August document didn’t close until 8^th October, within ten days it published the Growth and Infrastructure Bill which will allow any section 106 agreement (irrespective of date) to be challenged immediately.  It is hard to see how the Bill can possibly have taken into account responses to the consultation, several of which were submitted close to the deadline.
This week the Bill has been examined by Commons committee.  David Orr from the NHF has already seen his argument that the Bill could stop the development of 35,000 affordable homes dismissed by Eric Pickles.  Gavin Smart from CIH argued that Pickles’ evidence that 75,000 housing starts were held up includes a range of reasons for delays, such as lack of bank finance or lack of buyers who can get mortgages. It doesn’t give evidence of specific problems about section 106.  In the impact assessment for the Bill, the government says it is targeting sites where housing markets are weak.  But it is far from clear how changing section 106 deals will make a scheme viable if the overall market is still moribund.
Compared to the use of the banking crisis as a smokescreen for massive spending cuts and attacks on welfare and public services, deregulation may seem a minor problem.  But as Gavin Smart also pointed out, section 106 led to 29,000 affordable homes being built as recently as 2010.  This was a huge contribution, even if this scale of output is unlikely to be repeated soon. As direct government subsidy is drastically curtailed, the last thing we need is an irresponsible end to the main source of indirect subsidy: obligations on builders either to provide affordable homes within new developments or, if not, to pay for them to be built elsewhere.
None of this will stop the government, of course.  Disaster capitalism isn’t interested in evidence-based policies, but in deregulation, and much more besides.

It doesn’t sound very exciting but the Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2012 came into force yesterday.
Behind the apparently harmless jargon of this statutory instrument is a story of indifference to human need and hypocrisy of the highest order.
In short, the Order sets out the matters that a local authority should take into account when using their new power under the Localism Act to discharge their main homelessness duty by finding accommodation in the private rented sector for a priority homeless household.
The order refers to the standards of physical accommodation and management which should be achieved, for example ensuring electrical and gas safety and that landlords are fit and proper persons.
The Order also sets out what seem to be reasonable conditions about the location of the private rented accommodation to which homeless households should be referred.  Councils ‘must take into account’ distance, potential disruption to employment, health, education or caring arrangements, and the accommodation’s proximity to local services and transport.  But in reality it’s a bit like saying we should all ‘take into account’ our health when tucking into a large pile of jam doughnuts because the Order is a million miles away from what councils – and the Government itself – are planning for homeless households.
Just as Grant Shapps wrote to 20 councils telling them they shouldn’t use bed and breakfast accommodation for more than 6 weeks whilst fully aware that many simply could not avoid doing so under current Government housing policies, Mark Prisk has signed this Order in the full knowledge that homeless households will be transported huge distances with the guaranteed disruption that his Order supposedly seeks to avoid.
Prisk even has the nerve to say the new system would provide ‘certainty for households’ and would offer ‘new protections’.  Compare that with the case studies offered recently by the Guardian and the Child poverty Action Group, which showed that the outcomes for families are often horrendous.
At the same time as the Minister spouts about it not being fair or acceptable to place households many miles away from home, councils and his officials are planning to do just that.
Many newspapers and magazines have now carried stories about councils, especially London boroughs, moving households many miles away from home.  Many more are procuring accommodation right now.  Towns and cities have been mentioned in all parts of the Midlands and the South.  The vast majority will not meet the location criteria set out in the Order, and everyone knows that.
To be stating one policy whilst practicing another is simply hypocritical.  Patrick Butler in the Guardian has reported on what official Government advisers are telling the sector.  He quotes a Government representative, Andy Gale – confirmed to me by another person present who was appalled by his message and tone – briefing that councils would have to undertake a procurement exercise for private rented accommodation and that, for many London authorities, this would involve looking outside the area.  He briefed that the changes have to be ‘sold’ to council members including how to deal with questions like ‘is it about cuts’ and ‘surely the homeless are in the greatest housing need’.  He talks about people playing the system.  And, as Butler quotes, he exposes the underlying rationale behind the new brutal regime: ‘The overall conclusion of introducing this framework is inevitably that new statutory homelessness applications will become minimal.’
Gale, and presumable the department on whose behalf he was speaking, accepts that councils may seek to discharge their duties in distant towns, and that they may face legal action.  Rather than show how councils can meet their obligations, his paper advises councils how best to frame their policies to avoid legal challenge.
On the ground, there is common acceptance that the mixture of welfare caps and changes in the homelessness duty will lead to many households having to move out of London.  For example, 7 West London boroughs have joined forces to adopt a Homelessness Strategic Action Plan which explicitly aims ‘to manage the movement of households out of London in anticipation of the overall benefits cap and other benefit changes’.
The Government’s adoption of the title ‘Affordable Rent’ for its programme of unaffordable housing has rightly been called Orwellian by many.  One meaning of Orwellian is ‘denial of truth’.  A homelessness policy where the Government does exactly the opposite of what it says it is doing is fully deserving of that description.
For more information and discussion about the new regulations, I recommend reading Jules Birch’s blog posts – on Inside Housing and on his own blog .
 
And late addition – Nearly Legal has published Andy Gale’s briefing paper, so you can read more of his progressive thoughts if you want to.

By Bill Peters
In his courteous and low key speech to the annual CML Conference on 7 November new Housing Minister Mark Prisk, like his predecessor Grant Shapps, fully acknowledged the mountain that the government had to climb in terms of generating new supply across all sectors while at the same time highlighting the measures put in place. He also stressed his desire for partnership working with lenders and builders just as he had in his first speech to housing associations  and no doubt every other group he has spoken to since.
The speech reveals an awareness of the problems but no real sense of urgency about dealing with them and not least as a vital aspect of re-booting the economy. Though the fireworks may be being kept in the cupboard prior to the updated housing statement which will emerge sometime around 5 December the Minister chose to highlight three issues – asking lenders to shout ever louder that mortgages were available, that the new Right to Buy was worthy of close lender attention  and perhaps most bizarrely of all that lenders should support the growing self build market  on which he put not inconsiderable store. This will no doubt prompt readers of  Red Brick to reflect that self help is now becoming a central plank of policy given the inability of the centre to deliver itself!
This of course then takes you to the silences in the speech –no mention of New Homes Bonus and how it might be helping open up supply or not, no mention of how the government was pressuring builders to increase output in return for the huge support it was giving the industry  and no mention of the regulatory blockage around NewBuy which was apparently highlighted in a subsequent panel session by both lenders and builders. The FSA has so far failed to agree the regulatory capital treatment of NewBuy and through which lenders can be clear as to the capital consequences of lending under this scheme, a failing even more astonishing given that Mark Prisk is married to Lesley Titcomb the acting Chief Operating Officer of the FSA!
If government is to have any role in housing supply then surely a central function is to hold the ring and ensure all the different agencies deliver what is needed to make sure we get a huge step change in supply. The days, weeks, months and years are going by –we are already on our second housing minister in this administration and so far we have seen no real improvement in the flow of new homes and no real sense it is on a strong upward path. The Minister now needs to set out how many and when so he can be held to account and he can hold others to account. The cost of the current failure is being borne by households (for example ONS recently highlighted the rise in the number of adult children living at home, we have rising waiting lists and increased homelessness) and the economy.

By guest blogger Monimbo
Red Brick quite rightly castigated both Iain Duncan Smith for peddling more of his myths about housing benefit and Andrew Marr for failing to challenge him in his show on Sunday.  Full Fact has now examined IDS’s claims about people getting over £100,000 per year in housing benefit, showing that probably it amounts to five cases.  And as Polly Toynbee points out in Tuesday’s Guardian (‘Paying the minimum required for survival is only part of the cure for Britain’s dangerous levels of inequality’) it is not as if the money went to those families anyway, it went to the landlords who are raking it in and able to charge virtually any rent they like in the current shortage.
Andrew Marr not only failed to challenge the IDS myths, he didn’t even show how the IDS welfare reforms will hit people who are on the margins, whether unemployed or working.  These ‘reforms’ are going to do terrible damage, made worse by the fact that they are being staggered over a period of years. While this might (conceivably) make more administrative sense than a big-bang approach, it has two inescapable disadvantages.
One is that people are going to be hit by ‘reform’ after ‘reform’ affecting their benefits and their calculations about their earnings and rents if they are on low pay, so they will (perhaps) reconcile themselves to one only to be hit with the next.  The second problem, which of course for the government is a blessing, is that cumulative effects are harder to identify and publicise.  Both of these factors are made worse by the fact that not only are the reforms staggered over time, but they affect multiple benefits so people may be hit by a housing benefit change followed by a cut in council tax benefit followed by more changes linked to universal credit.  If it is difficult for professionals to keep up, for those at the receiving end it is going to seem like a never-ending maelstrom.
Your Homes Newcastle (the ALMO) has given one small example of the effects, on a single tenant called Joe.  He works when he can on ‘nil hour’ contracts, where he gets sent home if there is no work. Just at the moment he gets £67.50 in jobseeker’s allowance. He lives in a two-bed council flat – after paying his crisis loan of £2, water rates of £6, gas and electricity of £25, and TV license of £5.50 a week he is left with £28.90 to live on. From April 2013 he will lose £7.57 per week from housing benefit (through the bedroom tax) and have to pay £3 towards council tax. He will then have just £18.33 to live on.  If his flat carries any service charges that are ineligible for universal credit when he moves onto it, he will no longer be able to eat.
Let’s suppose Joe finds a regular part-time job on a low wage which restores or improves the amount he is left with each week.  Once universal credit comes along (and it will affect different people at different times, right up until 2017), he may well have to find a job with longer hours just to retain his new earnings.   Any claimant of working benefits will be required to meet an earnings threshold equal to national minimum pay rates for a 35-hour week, to be earned if necessary through working longer hours, getting their employer to increase their hourly wage or getting an extra job on top of their current one. Research by the Resolution Foundation shows that nearly 1.2 million working adults face losses under universal credit if they do not comply with new requirements.
As Polly Toynbee also says, ‘Labour is failing to challenge this government’s constant smears about idle scroungers’.  Most of the poor are already in work, struggling to juggle their benefits, tax credits and wages while paying ever increasing rents.  Labour is right to back the Living Wage, but it won’t begin to tackle the growing struggles that the working poor or would-be working face, unless it also shows how it will put a stop to the erosion of benefits and start to tackle the housing crisis. ‘Benefit cuts are popular for lack of Labour defending the already poor from cuts that send them into food-bank destitution.’  That’s Toynbee’s conclusion, and she is right.

It would be hard for anyone to read the new report on welfare reform from the Child Poverty Action Group and the Guardian’s survey of how councils in London are responding to the welfare caps, then go to BBC i-player and watch Andrew Marr’s interview yesterday with Iain Duncan Smith, without feeling a deep sense of outrage.
Duncan Smith peddled every myth and fairy tale going.  There were all these people getting £100,000 for rent, families with generations of people not working, people having children just to get more benefits, it goes on and on.  All have been debunked by respected fact-finders and by benefit experts who actually deal in statistical analysis.  But not a single challenge from the so-called journalist Marr: as easy rides go, this was the easiest.
Marr’s fawning coincided with an excellent Guardian piece by Patrick Butler and Ben Ferguson that illustrates the increasingly desperate search being made by London boroughs to find homes for households made homeless and likely to be made homeless by Duncan Smith’s benefit caps.  17 of the 29 boroughs that responded to their survey said they were already placing homeless families outside the capital, or have secured or are considering temporary accommodation outside London for future use.  The fact that so many boroughs are doing the same thing gives the lie to the claim that this is just about families who want to live on housing benefit in rich areas like Mayfair or Kensington.  Market rents outstrip benefit cap levels in many of so-called ‘cheaper’ outer London boroughs like Haringey, Waltham Forest, and Barking and Dagenham.  Butler and Ferguson say: ‘Councils said the move was inevitable because there is virtually no suitable private rented temporary accommodation for larger families in London that is affordable within government-imposed housing benefit allowances’. 
Another excellent Guardian piece by Amelia Gentleman looks in detail at how being moved away from home and established networks has affected one family, and case studies are also a focus of the CPAG report.  It’s only by looking at the impact on individual families that the real nature of the reforms becomes clear.  The people being affected are the polar opposite of Duncan Smith’s crude demonisation: they are typical families who are seeing their aspirations smashed by the reforms.
The Government’s story that all this would lead to landlords reducing rents has also been exposed.  Rents continue to rise and more landlords are refusing to take people on housing benefit, another turn of the screw both for the families and for councils.
Councils and organisations like the co-authors of the CPAG report, London Advice Services Alliance, are trying to advise people but the options are becoming slimmer.  Discretionary transitional funds are proving wholly inadequate.
The Government continues to maintain the fiction that this is nothing to do with them and that boroughs should not act outside the law: councils ‘must secure accommodation within their own borough so far as reasonably practicable’.  But this is plainly fatuous when most councils in London are in breach and they all cite the shortage of supply and the welfare reforms as the reasons.  Most of the boroughs concerned are doing their best in impossible circumstances although it is impossible to feel sorry for the Hammersmith and Fulhams and the Westminsters who deliberately exclude affordable housing from their future programmes.
As a response to the emergency, CPAG recommends that homeless families in temporary accommodation should be exempted from the caps (at a cost of £30m).  This is a sensible and pragmatic proposal.  They also want the mayor and London councils to co-ordinate their responses and the work of advice agencies much more effectively.
And, like everyone else, they say that the only medium and long term solutions are to build more houses.

The National Audit Office does not normally indulge in hyperbole, so when they conclude that the housing benefit reforms ‘will put pressure on the supply of affordable local housing’ they mean what they say.
In their report on the implementation of the housing benefit reforms by the Department of Work and Pensions they show how the changes will lead to shortages of private rented accommodation at or below Local Housing Allowance Rates: ‘on current trends 48 per cent of local authority areas in England could face shortfalls by 2017 ‘. 
The report summarises the scale of the cuts the Government is attempting to make in HB.  Spending of £23.4 billion in 2011-12 on 5 million households is planned to be reduced to £21.6 bn in real terms by 2014-15, a cut of £2.3bn.  1.4 m private rented sector households and 600,000 social tenants are likely to be affected.
In its understated way the NAO makes it clear that there are major problems with implementation.  For example, they say that the administrative burden on local authorities ‘has not been fully assessed’, which means no-one knows, and that DWP ‘clearly has further ground to cover in helping to raise awareness of the effect of the reforms on claimants’, which means tenants are ill-prepared for what is about to hit them.  The Government seems to be putting its publicity effort into telling tenants about the right to buy instead.
The Government has tried to deflect criticism of the changes by putting money into a discretionary fund available to local authorities to help deal with transitional issues – £390 m between 2011-12 and 2014-15.  NAO show that this fund amounts to 6% of the savings being made and that ‘It is not clear how the overall level of funding has been determined or whether it is likely to be sufficient to tackle the effects of reforms’.  In other words, it will be wholly inadequate.
But perhaps their strongest warning lies in the following conclusion: ‘We see the main ‘unplanned’, and perhaps ‘un-plannable’, challenges facing the Department as being those areas where the interaction of local authority funding capacity constraints, social housing stock, rental market conditions and the local economy may produce extreme impacts.’ 
Note the words.  Extreme impacts.
The chair of the public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge MP, said she was ‘astonished that the department of work and pensions still does not understand the wider impact of these changes. There is a real risk of increased homelessness.’
It’s like waiting for Hurrican Sandy: it will be best to prepare for the worst.

In the heady days before and after the passage of the 2002 Homelessness Act I worked with Shelter on its plans to make the most of the new legislation.  Although there were several important changes to general entitlements, the point that most excited Shelter and its then Director Chris Holmes was the introduction of duties on local authorities to review homelessness in their areas and to formulate statutory homelessness strategies.
Holmes wanted Shelter to transform itself from being an external critic of local government to becoming an active partner in a joint enterprise to end the scourge of homelessness.  Although only partially successful, a lot of groundbreaking work was done across the whole country.
In the decade since, the optimism about being able to tackle homelessness at its roots has dissipated, to be replaced by a much harsher blaming culture and, now, under the Coalition, the dismantling of the homelessness safety net.
In the years immediately after the Act, councils, encouraged by a highly active team at CLG, introduced a range of new strategies and policies so that the management of the homelessness function improved significantly.  Councils were, however, under huge and increasing pressure due to the shortage of social housing.  Over time it became hard to distinguish between well intentioned policies, such as homelessness prevention and providing housing options services, and increasingly tough gatekeeping exercises where the main purpose was to reduce and divert demand.  In particular, the Government’s top target of reducing the number of homeless households in temporary accommodation by 50%, on the surface an aggressive and progressive policy, drove many authorities down the gatekeeping path to the point where rules were stretched to the limit and sometimes broken.  Because the key indicators – numbers in TA, homelessness acceptances – were moving in the right direction little attention was paid to what was going on.  And, despite the growing barriers, those people accepted as unintentionally homeless and in priority need knew that at the end of a very long hard road a social rented home with a genuinely affordable rent and security of tenure would provide a platform for them to rebuild their lives.
As the years progressed, homeless people became parcelled up in the campaign by elements of the media and politicians like Ian Duncan Smith to stigmatise and demonise all ‘welfare’ recipients.  Some Labour politicians signed up to the new blame culture and some gave in too easily to the pressure it brought, but the Coalition has turned it into an art form.  Homelessness is primarily an outcome of our generation-long failure to build affordable homes, but people on housing waiting lists are encouraged to blame the homeless for taking all the homes.  Why should ‘they’ get all the homes when ‘we’ hard working families cannot?  The image of the teenage single mother getting pregnant to get a council flat has become an icon alongside the shirker lying in bed all day living the life of Riley on the state and the lower orders breeding like rabbits just to get more benefits.  The name of the game is blame the victim and divide and rule.  The truth is that homeless households are little different from the general population represented on local housing waiting lists.
I think it is fair to comment that the homelessness safety net is being dismantled.  The next step is that, from November, defined homeless households who would normally have had the right to be offered a council or housing association home will have to accept private rented accommodation if it is offered by the council (under certain terms), as is explained by Ben Reeve-Lewis in his excellent piece last week on Guardian Housing Network.  As we become a backward country in social policy terms, the analysis that it is reasonable for homeless households – by definition families with children or people who are vulnerable in some way – to be ‘discharged’ into the high cost and low security private rented sector has attracted surprisingly little comment from the social housing movement.  Even within the sector homeless people are blamed for everything from causing their own homelessness to exploiting the system to being responsible for concentrations of deprivation and anti-social behaviour on estates.
The myths and stereotypes are winning the argument and to turn it round we need to show rather more old-fashioned solidarity.

Over the past few months I have been pursuing Freedom of Information requests concerning the Government’s ‘Affordable Rent’ programme.  We have expressed concern about this programme ever since it was scribbled on the back of a fag packet in a hurried response to George Osborne cutting the housing investment budget by more than 60%.
The basic idea was to slash the amount of subsidy per rented home by requiring providers to borrow a larger share of the cost privately, recouping this through a huge increase in rent.  There were many in-principle objections to the policy: it would use up housing associations’ capacity to borrow and significantly increase their risks; it would be unaffordable for most people coming in to social housing (despite the Government claiming disingenuously that it would meet the same needs); it would make more people – in and out of work – dependent on housing benefit and increase the benefit bill, which would have to ‘take the strain’; and it was allied to the Government’s policy of reducing security of tenure for new social tenants.
The policy did however expose a fault-line in the social housing world.  The cynical branding of the scheme as ‘Affordable Rent’ caused endless confusion and still does.  Some providers and some councils were hostile to the new scheme, mainly due to high rents, but others embraced it enthusiastically, notably those that were already dropping social rented housing and moving towards market-based rents.  Even those that were hostile were seduced by the argument that this was ‘the only game in town’ – it was better to build ‘Affordable Rent’ because the alternative would be to build nothing.  Some exceptional councils like Islington found ways of keeping a social rented programme going.  The policy also had widely different impact in the regions – rents at up to 80% of market levels is a disaster in the south but were lower than some existing social rents in parts of the north.  So a nationally consistent response was hard to achieve.
Two factors characterised the policy from the start: incompetence and delay.  Virtually a whole year of output was lost as providers struggled to understand the new rules and prepare complex financial plans and risk assessments.  As a result, ‘affordable’ housing starts tumbled towards zero and the programme became hugely back-loaded into the final year, substantially increasing the risk.  Even now most of the schemes are ’indicative’ not real planned homes on real sites.  The programme had unclear objectives: Who was it for? What size mix was required? (for example Boris Johnson in London has consistently said he wants more family homes).  To what extent should providers cross-subsidise from small homes to family homes to keep those rents down?  Who was making the decisions – the provider, the government and HCA, or the local council?  Was social rent excluded entirely?  What would happen in existing schemes subject to s 106 deals?
Endless negotiations and threatened stand-offs followed, to the extent that only this week the HCA announced that the final contract has at last been signed.  Information about the programme has been scarce and questions were met with the reply that the information was commercially confidential.  The CORE statistics on new lettings revealed some information about the small sample of properties that had come through the system, but we need to know what it is planned for the whole programme.  When Ministers started bragging about how many ‘affordable homes’ would be produced, and Boris Johnson boasted that rents would be ‘only’ 65% of market rates in London, the door opened for FoI requests seeking information about the basis on which these claims were made.
Communities and Local Government responded properly with the information that they had, which wasn’t much.  But it did reveal that across England 82,000 existing social rented homes would be ’converted’ from social rents to ‘affordable rents’ to help pay for the programme.  That is a significant share of re-lets – homes that were provided under previous schemes to be let at genuinely affordable social rents that have been hijacked for this purpose.  CLG also revealed the national average rent and the regional distribution.  However, their information was based on the initial bids of providers and not the signed contracts which followed negotiations, and it became clear that CLG had little idea of how the programme was developing. The FoI response did however reveal more information about ‘Affordable Rent’ than CLG revealed to the Public Accounts Committee when it prepared its recent report into the programme.
The Mayor of London was altogether more slippery about responding to the FoI requests.  Sometimes the more someone talks about transparency the less they practice it.  The GLA argued that it was too expensive to collect the information until I pointed out that the Mayor had already made statements on issues like output and rents, so he had clearly been briefed.  They argued that the information was commercially sensitive but I made clear I was after monitoring data not details of contracts.  Finally they released anonymous information about provider contracts, the average rents they would charge and the relationship between these rents and market rates.
But then it became clear that the information was wrong.  When Inside Housing magazine tracked down the provider with the highest average rents they claimed the information was wildly incorrect.  Of course, both Red Brick and Inside Housing are entitled to rely on information provided by statutory agencies and the error belonged totally to the Mayor, who has now been forced to re-issue the information with an apology.
I am relieved to discover the highest average rent for a provider is not over £440 per week as the original information said.  But this experience reiterates the point that the amount of public information available about the programme, and especially the biggest segment of it in London, is inadequate, as the Public Accounts Committee found.  The HCA has published more information, on providers, funding and numbers of homes, but not rents and not expected completion dates.  The GLA has published much less about London.  Even though it is much smaller than previous programmes, ‘Affordable Rent’ is the main Government effort; it is still a large amount of public money and we are entitled to scrutinise what is being provided with it and whether it meets proper housing objectives.
Omnishambles, did I hear you say?

The National Housing Federation’s report Home Truths has caught the imagination of the media this morning.  Even the Daily Mail is shocked by the growing numbers of people in work who need housing benefit to pay for their homes, a key fact that undermines the Government’s normal line about housing benefit being spent on the workshy and people living in luxury homes.  Good examples of coverage include the Telegraph and the BBC.
The report’s simple format – rehearsing key facts about housing – gets important points across very well.  Although the story that has grabbed the interest is the huge increase in housing benefit claims amongst working people, other facts will bear endless repetition.  For example:

• 1,837,042 households on housing register April 2011 England
• 50,290 households accepted as homeless 2011/12 England
• 50,430 households in temporary accommodation Q1 2012
• 72,876 private housing starts England 2011/12
• 43,164 housing association housing starts England 2011/12
• 1,830 councils housing starts England 2011/12
• 37% increase in private rents in last 5 years
• 11.1 – the ratio of average house prices to average earnings in England, ranging from 7.1 in the north east to 15.6 in London.
• £50,682 – the income needed for a 75% mortgage on an average home.
• 94% – the increase in house prices over the last decade (2001-2011) in England.
• 29% – the increase in earnings over the last decade in England.
• 86% – the increase in the number of people in work claiming housing benefit since 2009, an increase of 417,830.

NHF Chief Executive David Orr commented:

“The housing market is at the point of no return; with rising house prices, rising rents and millions of families really struggling to afford their home. It’s no surprise that one in 12 families in England is on the waiting list for social housing. Sadly the future is looking even bleaker.”

In addition to the report, the NHF website has more background information and references as well as resources such as an interactive map of private rents around the country.

Towards the end of the last century I spent some months working in Southwark preparing and drafting the Council’s then housing strategy.  So it was interesting to read the report of the Southwark Housing Commission some 14 years later.  Surprisingly, most of the issues were much the same, showing that not enough progress has been made in the intervening period.  Strategies are an important but not sufficient element in achieving change.
The Commission makes many recommendations about the future of council housing in the borough that are sound.  Many, like the need to improve repairs and maintenance and the responsiveness of housing management are not new and are not controversial.  There are many examples around the country of councils that have made significant progress in these areas.  Nor will there be much argument about the Commission’s conclusion that the council will need to run its housing with ‘a more business-orientated mindset’.  The controversy lies in the Commission’s discussion of the future role of council housing in the borough and in particular whether the council should aim to retain its stock at its current size or reduce it by as much as 50%.
The Commission comes to stark conclusions about the state of the council’s 39,000 homes – with 18,000 homes still below the decent homes standard and a growing proportion of the stock reaching the end of its useful life without major investment.  This is a consequence of the type of construction undertaken after 1950 and the inadequacy of investment in long term maintenance since.  Southwark did not benefit enough from the ‘decent homes’ funding made available by the Labour Government after 2000 – although different people will have different views as to whether this was the Government’s fault for insisting on ownership and management options that tenants did not want or just the inevitable outcome of the council and tenants’ own decisions on issues such as stock transfer and setting up ALMOs.  Most tenants still continue to prefer to keep the council as their landlord, and that should be the starting point.
If it is easy to be dazzled by the scale of the challenge in Southwark, and to descend into doom and gloom, the Commission’s analysis provides some new grounds for optimism.  In particular, HRA (housing revenue account) reform – proposed by Labour and implemented by the Coalition – could be the game-changer.  Back in 1999 the council did not want to go down the road of large scale stock transfer, so the success of the housing strategy depended almost entirely on national government funding decisions – the annual HRA settlement and annual investment allocations.  The council now has choices and much more power over the destiny of its housing stock.  It has control of its own rental income and a sizeable borrowing capacity.  It has a real opportunity to prepare a genuine (rather than a hopeful) 30-year strategy for its stock and full responsibility for its implementation.  The report shows that a judicious mix of redevelopment in the worst cases, physical improvement in many others, and using borrowing capacity to build new homes to replace those lost through right to buy and demolition, together with a major drive to improve the quality and responsiveness of housing management services, could mean that council housing in Southwark has a positive future.
The Commission considers three options for the future size of the council stock – maintaining the current number (39,000), reducing to 30,000 and reducing to 20,000.  I am not convinced that they have got to grips with the option of reducing by almost half – there is no real discussion about who the stock would be transferred to, what might happen to it and whether it would be guaranteed to continue to meet housing need rather than be marketised in some way.
The Commission itself concluded that even a stock of 39,000 – the largest of any London borough – would be insufficient to meet the predicted need for homes that are affordable to people on low and moderate incomes.  Even if it could meet the borough’s own needs, those with long memories will recall that most of Southwark’s homes were built by the LCC/GLC, with resources provided by all Londoners, partially to help relieve housing pressures in other boroughs with less land.  As the ‘social cleansing’ of poorer people from high value central boroughs takes place, Southwark may need to fulfil this role again.
Crucially, the Commission’s assessment is that all three stock sizes would be viable options: “The Commission holds the view that all three options are possible and potentially financially sustainable, and that each has its advantages and disadvantages.”
Social rented homes have become such a precious resource that it is surely right that the Council Leader, Cllr Peter John, in response to the Commission’s report, has ruled out drastic reductions in the stock and has also reiterated the borough’s commitment to building 1,000 new council homes by 2020.