By guest blogger Bill Peters
The latest planning application figures published by CLG give little comfort to the view that we are seeing a resurgent housebuilding sector emerging on the back of the New Homes Bonus and generous government support to the housebuilding industry. (For background on the NHB see this House of Commons Library paper and previous Red Brick posts).
It is of course hard to disentangle the NHB impact given the data is not readily available and it sits at odds with the more traditional housing starts and completions data sets. The Hansard record of the debates between Shapps and the eagle eyed Nick Raynsford (including for example this one) point up the fact that the NHB output includes empty homes coming back into use and a large number of new one bedroom flats which seem either to be conversions of existing larger and possibly multi-occupied homes plus new student residences.
Either way the evidence regarding the incentive effects of NHB are very poor to date raising the question about whether it is fit for purpose as a central plank of housing supply policy.
Alongside this is the funding and support given to the housebuilding industry in a variety of schemes – FirstBuy, NewBuy, Build now Pay Later, Get Britain Building and more. There appears to have been no stated agreement with the housebuilding industry about increasing output on the back of this support, rather it has been used to underpin existing balance sheets and to secure viability much in the same way as help to mortgage lenders did, though there at least targets re small business lending were imposed.
As matters stand we have the flimsiest of housing policies backed onto a weak housing market. If and when the economy and that market recover any vitality the government is going to look very exposed.
No doubt Grant Shapps is hoping by then he will have got another job. However if the current unravelling continues – the Newham relocations being the latest – he may never get one!
Category: Blog Post
It has been an extraordinary week of goings-on since the news broke that Newham Council had written to organisations as far away as Stoke to try to get homelesss households rehoused.
Grant Shapps was straight on to the airwaves trying to make political capital – pointing out that Newham was Labour and denouncing them for doing this during an election (bizarrely also denouncing the BBC for raising the story during an election period, as if news isn’t news). Labour MP Karen Buck pointed out that Tory Westminster was sending people to Luton, and Westminster Labour Leader Paul Dimoldenberg showed that the Council was working with its Tory neighbours Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham on proposals to send people to Nottingham and Derby.
Categories
Mr Shapps plays politics
If Grant Shapps accuses you of playing politics, you can be sure that he is guilty as sin of doing that himself.
I had the pleasure (?) of attending last night’s Sky debate between the London mayoral candidates. It may not have been great but it was 1000% better than the Newsnight effort with the awful Paxman. And well done Sky for focusing mainly on policy and starting the questioning with housing (even though they didn’t pick my effort) and being the first media outlet to give housing and homelessness issues some air time.
With such a strong focus on the London mayoral election, it is hard for others standing for election in the rest of the UK to get a look in at present. But there are many other vitally important contests where housing issues will be an important factor. On May 3 elections will take place for 131 English, all 32 Scottish and 21 Welsh councils – full list here.
Birmingham will be a crucial bellwether election, where the contest is close and Labour is challenging the Tory/LibDem Coalition, but even here the media seems more interested in the referendum on whether to have a mayor than it does in the issues that directly affect people’s lives, like housing and education.
If policies alone decided Elections, Ken Livingstone would be romping home as the next London Mayor.
Instead he faces a photo finish with Tory Boris Johnson. ‘Look at Boris, isn’t he a laugh’ is no way to run one of the world’s five greatest cities. But his celebrity status only tells half the story: Johnson is a cunning and ambitious right wing Tory who is running an unremittingly negative campaign with such hugely powerful media support that even people on own Ken’s side start to believe some of the things that are said.
Ken has always had an extraordinary ability to define the policy needs of the moment. On fares, he saw that the need in the 1980s was to use spare capacity and get people back on the tube again; by 2000 the need was for massive investment in new services; and now in 2012 the need is to put money back into the pockets of struggling Londoners.
By guest blogger Monimbo
As well as being the catchy phrase that was evidently used on a 1945 Labour election poster, Let’s Build the Houses – Quick! is a new publication by Cathy Davis and Alan Wigfield from Spokesman Books. It looks at the failures of recent housing policy and calls for a massive new building programme from the next Labour government.
Red Brick readers will sympathise with the main line of argument, which is that Labour didn’t build enough social housing, the Tories are doing much worse still and the main component of a sensible housing policy should be to put that right.
Ealing Council should retain its commitment to social rented homes and security of tenure in its own stock. That’s the foremost recommendation from the report of the Council’s Housing Commission, published this week after a year of research and debate.
The internet is getting increasingly littered with dead websites from now defunct social housing regulators. The Tenant Services Authority closed on 31 March and its functions transferred to a new Committee of the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). Its website remains as a record of activity, just as the Housing Corporation’s web content remains online following its demise back in November 2008.
Another king is dead, long live the new king, this time the snappily titled HCA Regulation Committee, whose new regulatory framework for social housing came into effect along with other Localism Act changes on April 1st.
It’s amazing how many people think that only those who are economically inactive can claim housing benefit. But then again all the rhetoric about cuts to HB and to Local Housing Allowance (HB for private tenants) has been about tenants living in something called ‘benefit dependency’, being feather bedded and given so much money that they can afford to live in places that ‘hard working families’ couldn’t afford to live.