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]
Category: Blog Post
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.
Categories
That vile word
I was once in a meeting of a housing association which was discussing buying land and developing homes in Stevenage. “I’ve been there” chirruped the Chief Executive, “it really is chavland”. I have been in plenty of other meetings where senior housing folk have talked about their clients in disparaging terms. I can recall one Housing Director in the north responding to a presentation on the Decent Homes programme by saying “There’s nothing wrong with our houses, it’s the people that need fixing”. Fortunately most people who work in the profession are more enlightened and have a more balanced view and a better choice of words.
As a fan (mildly obsessive) of EastEnders I get outraged by every story line that involves any character visiting a council estate. They are always the same. High blocks, lifts not working, rubbish strewn everywhere, hoodies gathered menacingly outside, drug dealers hovering, noisy music blaring, people shouting, and in the middle of it some poor EE character suffering terrible deprivations, and desperate to get back to the square where decent folk live (now there’s the joke). I used to start talks by asking people if they knew where the Jasmin Allen estate was. Invariably they knew it was a bad bad place where police only went in big groups because it was run by gangs and the residents appeared to throw rocks at them on every visit. Everyone thinks they’ve heard of it and the penny eventually drops that it was in The Bill, and was fictional. I believe the filming was done on an estate in south London famous for being visited by Tony Blair on his first day as Prime Minister.
I was got going on this topic by Polly Toynbee’s piece on ‘the vile word’ chav. How right she is that the use of the word chav is just one part of a sustained effort to ‘foster the loathing of a feral underclass’ thereby diverting public resentment about economic and social failure from the rich to the poor.
Polly quotes Baroness Hussein-Ece – a LibDem Equality and Human Rights Commissioner no less – who tweeted: “Help. Trapped in a queue in chav land. Woman behind me explaining latest EastEnders plot to mate while eating largest bun I’ve ever seen.” And then of course this week we have Iain Duncan Smith, hand wringing in public and in private getting his department to place stories in the media – and picked up endlessly by the BBC – about the ‘top ten’ most ridiculous stories told by some benefit scroungers.
For this government (LibDems should look suitably ashamed, I expect it from the Tories) and their supporters this is all part of the softening up exercise for the cuts. Everyone’s on the fiddle, no-one wants to work, they’re breeding like rabbits, they get subsidised housing and don’t even pay the rent, so we should take their benefits away from them. Even decent politicians run in fear from the stereotype and feel it is necessary to back some variant of ‘welfare reform’.
The outcome is that it is so much easier to make cuts that really hurt people. We have blogged about some of these before. The latest news this week, from the heads of Britain’s main charities dealing with mental health, concerns the ‘devastating effects’ welfare reform (ie cuts) is having on the mental health of hundreds of thousands of people.
The long title of Owen Jones’ book ‘Chavs’ being published this week is ‘the demonization of the working class’. That’s what is really going on and council tenants get the worst of the stigma. Some politicians and housing professionals need to read it and begin choosing their policies and words more carefully.
Categories
Generation rent
I was suitably riled listening to Grant Shapps on World at One at lunchtime today, failing to answer sensible points and questions about the housing market from Tony Dolphin and Owen Hatherley. His ability to avoid any question and reply in ludicrous blandishments never ceases to amaze me.
According to Shapps, house price inflation only occurs under Labour. He must have been too young to remember the boom under Thatcher – and even worse the bust when home owners were abandoned with vast amounts of negative equity, a huge number of repossessions – and no government help. At least when the bust came in 2007 – and never forget it was an international banking bust whereas Thatcher’s was home grown – the Labour government took a series of important steps to protect tens of thousands of home owners, and the tenants of home owners, from foreclosure and homelessness.
Shapps simply fails to deal with the issues raised by two important reports today. The first, the one that grabbed the headlines, was from the Halifax who coined the phrase ‘Generation Rent’ to show that people no longer feel that they will be able to buy and that half of 20-45 year olds now think renting is the norm, similar to much of the rest of Europe.
The second, Tony Dolphin and Matt Griffith’s serious piece of work for IPPR, Forever Blowing Bubbles? takes a long hard look at housing’s role in the UK economy with a proper historical perspective. It makes a series of recommendations for mortgage regulation and the importance of stopping borrowers from thinking that housing market is a one-way bet. They also make a strong case for reform of the private rented sector to provide a real alternative choice for those who need to hedge their move into home ownership. As they say, “tenure rights are weak and the sector is poorly prepared for larger families and their needs. The professionalisation of the sector is much needed to make it the natural choice for those who wish to sidestep the risks of the owner-occupied housing market.”
At one level it seems obvious, but they demonstrate the importance of looking at the housing market as a single entity and not two markets of different tenures, arguing for “reform of the PRS to make it a less destabilising influence in the UK housing market. As we have seen, BTL (buy to let) investment has too often been speculative, volatile and a cause of pro-cyclical price pressures in the housing market. Worse still, it appears to have cannibalised existing housing stock, led to a weak response in total housing supply, distorted existing supply incentives to encourage the overproduction of small city-centre flats, and driven out large institutional investors by pushing prices up beyond sensible yields.”
Owen Hatherley, whose interesting article on home ownership and renting is also published today, put it to Shapps that people who could no longer afford to become home owners were left at the mercy of the unregulated and insecure private rented sector, and therefore faced no real choice at all. And that secure public sector tenancies should be a genuine option. Exit stage right for the Minister, off on another ramble about some excruciatingly complex shared ownership option he’s invented (effectively a cut-back and rebranded Labour scheme).
The Government avoids the big questions in housing policy today, especially how the housing market – and the vast majority of people live and will continue to live in market housing – can be made to work for people on low and moderate incomes. There is a real opportunity for Labour to build on these interesting reports and come to some radical but sensible and appealing policies of its own as the Housing Policy Review takes shape.
Categories
Housing policy crossroads
In the week that the Labour Party issued its call for evidence for the Housing Policy Review, guest blogger Paul Lusk works through some practical issues that policy-makers need to address.
Housing is at a crossroads. There is an opportunity such has not existed for many years to put housing policy in the UK onto a practical footing – one where choices can be made based on value for money, not returns on financial manipulation.
First, take owner occupation. Tax privileges have fuelled a fifty-year bubble in prices whereby owners have bought homes for personal use and then stumbled on a gold plated pension plan which successive generations have bought into. Society will be wary of ever again repeating the conditions that led to the 2007 crash. Owner occupation remains a preferred form of tenure with the benefits of control and security. Its origins lie in Chartism and the co-operative building societies that were early fruit of British socialism. We on the left can be proud of this legacy, and cherish its continuation. But no longer can home-buying be a one-way street to apparently assured riches. An over-sudden readjustment of house values to their real worth would be catastrophic. The only realistic option is a standstill in housing values for a generation. It may be two decades before the adjustment is complete, but it’s the only way forward. The owner occupation boom is over, and a soft landing is now underway.
Now on social housing: by completing finance reforms that the Brown government started (but failed to complete), the coalition is stabilising the council housing sector at a shade under ten percent of the national stock. There will no longer be artificial incentives to shift council stock to housing associations, so any transfers will be about the strategic benefits of transferring control, not about financial manipulation. The seventeen percent of housing in the ‘social’ sector will settle down split roughly half and half between councils and housing associations.
That leaves the sector that provides homes for market rental. The so-called ‘private’ rented sector (housing associations, of course, also like to think of themselves as ‘private’) now provides nearly as many homes as the entire social sector. It is mainly geared around short-term lets by very small landlords, many of whom have bought homes as a speculative investment. Its capacity to provide good homes meeting housing need can be overlooked. It is now time to address the potential for a private sector that attracts more professional managers to deliver longer term homes with a recognised role in meeting housing need.
We need to think clearly about the whole issue of ‘housing need’ and subsidised rents. Generally we on the left know that social housing does not equal welfare housing but we have been reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion – that creating more lettings in the social sector does not equal meeting housing need. The private and the social sectors both have a role to play in meeting housing need, if this means enabling people to access essential accommodation which they could not otherwise afford. We need to think about both short term and long term housing needs, and the risks of defaulting into restricting the future choices of people whose short term housing need has been settled by the allocation of a social home. We need to think about whether the buying power of the state is properly rewarded by the current system of housing benefit with its array of poverty traps.
We also need to revive a central idea in the Cave review of social housing – making it easier to decouple housing services from stock ownership. Actually this applies also to the private sector if is to be made stronger and more efficient. The tax system heavily penalises landlords who devolve housing management to external providers, including tenant co-ops. The Tenant Services Authority abandoned its plans to empower tenants to ‘trigger’ a change in managing agent for reasons that it always refused to discuss, but the logic of removing the barriers to this separation of powers is irrefutable. All groups of long-term tenants should have the right to choose their own manager.
Categories
Is Social Housing Welfare? (2)
Picking up Tony’s theme in our last post, our guest blogger seeks to answer the same question.
Monimbo
In housing circles there have been debates for years about the ‘role’ of council housing or more widely social housing, and of course these were given a further boost byJohnHills’ report in 2007. Before the election, as readers of red Brick are probably well aware, think tanks were falling over themselves to redefine – and usually narrow – social housing’s role.
But recently there have been even more worrying developments – typified by the media castigation of Bob Crowe for living in council housing which Steve covered in an earlier blog. Nothing could be more typical of the recent trend than the disgraceful article by Mary Dejevsky about fraudulent tenancies, which called for all council tenancies to be ended on 1st April 2013 at which point there would be a sort of moratorium and people (presumably by now waiting outside the front gates of their houses) would have to justify their entitlement to a continued tenancy.
As CIH’s Abi Davies has pointed out, while of course social housing is part of the welfare state, it is not ‘welfare’ in the sense that it’s only available when needed like a hospital emergency service. There has always been ambiguity about these issues in the media, most of whose commentators probably know and care little about social housing, but the recent trend is marked by a succession of coded comments about the sector by ministers, which are then regurgitated in the usual exaggerated ways by the media to produce a general picture of tenants who want to live in social housing long-term somehow being abusers of the system.
Steve has previously written about the misleading term ‘tenancies for life’, which is part of this slur campaign, when security of tenure is simply about proper consumer protection. CIH is about to publish a book, Housing and Inequality, which reminds readers that housing policy is about people’s homes and the home is a key ingredient of people’s happiness. This is something deliberately overlooked in current debate about security of tenure, the need for more ‘mobility’ and the issue of ‘underoccupation’. It is almost as if there are two housing systems, one in which owner-occupiers with adequate and secure incomes have an almost unthreatened dominion over their homes, while the more than one third of households who are not owners or who have only a tenuous grip on ownership have to live with much less security and less right to regard their house as their home at all.
The other slur is to describe council housing (in particular) as ‘subsidised housing’. There are several issues here. One is that all tenures are subsidised – the last government spent about £1bn in its last year subsidising owner-occupiers, for example. Of course social tenants pay sub-market rents, partly because of historic grants and subsidies and partly because social landlords are non-profit. However, if someone shops at the Co-op, we don’t describe his shopping as ‘subsidised’, do we?
Let me make a positive proposal to address this particular issue, at least as far as council housing is concerned. In a year’s time (April 2012) council housing becomes self-financing, and this presents a golden opportunity to kick the ‘subsidised’ tag. The Treasury is forcing councils to take on £6.5bn of extra debt, not currently in the system, to compensate the Exchequer for the profits (yes, profits) it would have made if council housing had still be on its books.
Let’s make a virtue of this necessity. Every Labour councillor, every council, the LGA, trade bodies like ARCH and the NFA, the CIH, trade unions, the four national tenants’ organisations – all should plan to publicly celebrate on 1st April 2012 the fact that council housing will have paid off its historic debts to government. From April next year it will no longer be subsidised, and in fact it will be making a modest return to reinvest in the homes it provides. Non-profit, yes, but subsidised – no!
The recently launched Labour Party review of housing policy is issuing a ‘call for evidence’ from organisations and individuals with an interest in housing policy.
Earlier this year Labour Leader Ed Miliband MP established several Policy Reviews, including one led by Shadow Communities Secretary Caroline Flint MP which will focus on the key question: How do we meet families’ aspirations for good housing and a good home?
Written evidence is invited by Monday 27 June covering any or all of the above and any other relevant issues. A website is being launched and submissions will need to be in a specified format and may be published: we will publish details here when they are available, and the document will also be available on the LHG website at www.labourhousing.co.uk . This will be an important exercise and Red Brick encourages readers to consider the questions and make submissions. We would also be pleased to receive any comments for publication on this site.
The call for evidence starts by recognising that Britain’s housing system is failing and that there is a genuine housing crisis, the effects of which go well beyond the needs of those on housing waiting lists: “Our commitment is to a decent home for all at a price within their means, supporting successful, safe and sustainable communities where people are able to lead happy, healthy lives and contribute to their local community, and ensuring that the next generation of families has access to the sort of home that best suits their needs and meets their aspirations.”
The Housing Policy Review will consider:
1 – The Changing Landscape:
- What effect will significant demographic trends have on household formation and household type in the future?
- What will the impact of Government’s policies on housing be and how will it vary around the country?
- What will the housing market look like in 2015, and how significant will regional variations be?
- How are changes in the housing market affecting people’s expectations and aspirations for housing and decisions about their lives?
2 – Places where people want to live:
- Where do people want to live and what do people want from a home and from the community they live in? Does everyone want the same?
- How do we create and finance the infrastructure and amenities that communities need to thrive?
- How can housing support safe, healthy communities where people are able to work and their children can get a good education?
3 – Housing finance:
- How do we encourage more private and institutional investment in housing?
- Where should public expenditure on housing be spent?
- How do we create a housing market that contributes to economic stability and
- How do we balance a prudent approach to mortgage lending with a mortgage market that enables people to buy their own home?
4 – Housing supply:
- What are the causes of undersupply in the housing market and why have levels of house-building fallen to such low levels?
- What lessons can we learn from our approach in government and from what worked in the past or overseas?
- How do we support the construction industry to build more homes? And in an environmentally sustainable way?
- What role can converting empty residential or commercial units play in creating more homes and how can we increase supply amongst existing housing stock?
5 – Home ownership:
- Why do people want to own their own home?
- Are there aspects of home ownership that could be replicated in other types of tenure?
- What is preventing people from buying their own home?
- How do we make home ownership more affordable and accessible for first-time buyers?
6 – Social Housing:
- What is the role of social housing providers? Who should live in social housing and how should it be allocated?
- Why do people want to live in social housing and are there aspects of social housing that could be replicated in other types of tenure?
- What should the relationship be between social housing and the private rented sector and home ownership?
- How do we ensure that all social homes are decent?
7 – Private rented sector:
- Why do people live in the private rented sector?
- What do people want from a home in the private rented sector?
- How do we tackle bad landlords? Does the private rented sector need better regulation?
8 – Planning:
- How do we increase land supply for housing?
- How do we make better use of previously developed land and vacant dwellings?
- How do we overcome local opposition to proposed developments and get communities to champion new homes?
- How do we ensure that those outside the housing market aren’t excluded from decisions about development?
9 – Housing design and quality:
- How do we encourage the best design in new builds?
- Are homes in Britain fit for purpose and how do we improve the quality of housing?
- How do we set the standard for energy efficiency in new builds and improve energy efficiency in existing stock, especially private stock?
- What would a ‘green homes standard’ look like?
Categories
Know any Lords?
The Opposition was defeated and the hand-wringers in the Liberal Democratic Party have done nothing yet. So the Localism Bill (see here and here and here) went through the House of Commons and now heads off to the House of Lords. There it will meet a few people who know a lot about housing, and it is time for them to take a firm stand.
There is encouragement from what a few LibDem MPs said during the second reading debate that a concerted attempt to remove or at least dilute some of the housing aspects of Bill could have some success.
For example,
- LibDem MP Annette Brooke said that she wanted “to put on record my concern about the two-year tenancies…… The Liberal Democrats want this issue to be revisited in the House of Lords. It is incredibly important to get it right….. as we pass this Bill to the other place, we do so with a lot of questions.”
- President of the LibDems Simon Hughes MP said he was “very supportive of the comments of my hon. Friend Annette Brooke, who expressed her concern not that the Government are not listening, but that they may need to go further in the House of Lords to accommodate the points made by those of us who for years have had a passionate concern for social housing and council housing.”
- And another LibDem Dan Rogerson set out a principle that shows what the debate is all about: “The key to social housing is longer-term tenure, which gives families, and particularly those with young children, confidence that they have a home for their family for the future. That is why we need to focus on the fact that social housing is meant to be not for short-term crisis accommodation but for family homes…… I should like a great deal of reassurance in that regard from those on the Treasury Bench before I join the Government in the Division Lobby” (for Third Reading).
So now is the time, if you know any members of the House of Lords, to get writing and lobbying to make sure that this nasty Bill doesn’t come back to the Commons without some substantial amendment.
Combining those that take the Labour Whip, concerned LibDem Peers and the many cross-benchers who take an interested in housing, there are enough votes to force the government into change.
Despite my many reservations about the House of Lords, forcing changes to the Bill would not be an undemocratic step. None of the Bill’s housing policies appeared in the Lib Dem Manifesto. Apart from housing mobility, none appeared in the Conservative Manifesto, which promised to “respect the tenures and rents of social housing tenants”. Apart from HRA reform and empty homes, none made it into the coalition agreement. This Bill is borne of thoroughly undemocratic practice: the British people were not told any of it at the Election and should not have to put up with it now.
Categories
Human rights at home
Human rights and equalities, like Health and Safety, get a bad press. The media associate them with overweening European institutions and bureaucratic interference with the ability of people to do whatever they like. In reality it is about providing checks and balances to the power of the state or public bodies, seeking to ensure that individuals get equal treatment irrespective of their personal characteristics and are not subject to unfair or arbitary decisions.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has just published an excellent guide to the human rights legislation and its impact on social housing. As the introduction to ‘Human rights at home: Guidance for social housing providers’ says: “Poor housing can affect a person’s health, work, education, relationships and life chances, which is why the right to respect for a person’s home is in the Human Rights Act.”
The guide deals with many of the current controversies surrounding the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights in housing, including the applicability of the Act to housing associations (broadly yes, but it does not make them public sector bodies) and the restrictions recently placed by the Courts on ‘mandatory’ rights to possession (including the ending of starter and demoted tenancies), where it is now clearly necessary to demonstrate reasonableness and proportionality in the decision.
The Guide includes a useful step by step set of questions designed to help providers to make decisions that are not in breach of the Human Rights Act. Given the timing of publication, it does not address the issues that may soon arise from the government’s legislative programme. I can think of two that might interest lawyers and the Courts in future – the application of rules to award and end flexible tenancies and the circumstances in which eviction would be justified in the case of a tenant who has fallen into arrears because their housing benefit entitlement has been severely curtailed due to underoccupation but for whom there is no reasonable means of obtaining a smaller home.
In my view the landlord/tenant relationship is shifting far too far in favour of the landlord and it is a good thing that the Human Rights Act provides a constraint on landlords’ activities. The Guide should encourage reflection amongst those who want to maximise the freedom of action of landlords: even if the Localism Bill appears to give them more absolute powers to end tenancies, the Human Rights Act is lurking in the background to provide some possibility of challenge, redress and amelioration.