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It’s interesting how many wealthy people have strong views on the Mansion Tax but have no recorded views about the Bedroom Tax. We’re in this together? Well no we are not.
Over the past few days the news from Oxfam that 1% of the world’s population own as much as everyone else put together shocked a lot of people. It’s patently wrong and in terms of economic development, totally counter-productive. In the UK the earnings and wealth of the richest 1% continue to grow at a rapid rate whilst the earnings of ordinary wage earners have grown less that inflation – ie been cut in real terms – for the last four years.
We expect Tories and minor celebrities to bleat when taxes are increased on the rich. Rather more surprising are the interventions by Peter ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ Mandelson and Diane Abbott – who apparently thinks it’s a hoot that she and Mandelson agree about something.
What they had to say and how they said it was unhelpful and gives the Tories ammunition, particularly Abbott’s bleating about some of the money raised being spent in Scotland and Mandelson agreeing with the LibDem alternative of additional council tax bands. National taxes, which the Mansion Tax will be, have different impacts on different regions. Taxes on oil were mainly generated in Scotland but were of benefit to the whole country – it is the SNP’s line, and not the Labour Party’s, that the money should benefit Scotland alone. Lots of other taxes produce more from London, but only because relative to the rest of the country it has a lot of wealthy people and hugely valuable property.
My complaint about Mandelson’s interview was that it is not the first time he has spoken out in a way that undermines Ed Balls and Ed Miliband (especially talk about ‘clobbering people’), having insisted on total loyalty when he was in charge. He is long enough in the tooth to know what impact his interview would have. At least he did appear to accept that it is right in principle to tax very valuable property, wealth that has not been earned but is effectively a windfall due to the property bubble.
It is fair enough to argue that the council tax option is the better one. But there are specific problems with it, which is why the Labour approach is the right one at present. First, Mansion Tax is easier to introduce and will start generating income far more quickly. To produce a fair result, introducing additional council tax bands would involve a revaluation of the national housing stock, which has not been done since 1991. This would be a very expensive and drawn out process, which the Tories would whip up into a national storm, and it might not produce revenue in the next Parliament. Secondly, council tax is collected locally and the additional income would not go into the national coffers to be redistributed to the National Health Service – which is now the purpose of raising the tax. I have no interest in boosting the income of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, which have far too many advantages in the local government finance system already, and a complex arrangement would be necessary to ‘nationalise’ the income. This would be heavily resisted by local politicians. And thirdly, as a graded system, additional council tax bands would be likely to penalise a much wider range of people whose homes lie in between the current top council tax band and the proposed £2m Mansion Tax minimum.
Disinformation about the Mansion Tax is being widely spread. My local Tories are running a scare campaign that Labour plans to tax everyone more for their homes, sending out letters without a Tory logo on top, designed to look like an official communication.
Ed Balls has done his best to deal with the concerns about the Mansion Tax, although a hostile media (made up of quite a lot of people who will have to pay it) doesn’t help. The ‘poor grannies’ (as Myleene Class called them), asset rich but income poor, have been exempted so the tax will roll up until their bubble-boosted capital asset is sold. The administration of a banded system doesn’t involve valuation for most people. He has promised that the £2m threshold will rise with the inflation of these types of property, so there will not be tax creep to catch more people. And the money will go to the NHS.
Polly Toynbee wrote a good column recently about how the national discourse on wealth is controlled by a tiny number of super-rich people who are clueless about the lives of the majority. On Mansion Tax, she argued:

But what inflames inhabitants of the 0.5% of properties affected is the idea of paying at all. No one likes taxes, especially new ones. But every rational review of the UK tax system concludes that failure to tax assets is a disastrous distortion. The sweat of our brow is taxed but not the unearned, undeserved windfalls from damaging property bubbles. Homes often earn more than their occupants do at work. That makes neither economic nor social sense. Even in America most states tax homes at around 1% a year.

Labour would do well to say that it will review property taxation thoroughly when it comes into Government, so that Mansion Tax could be a stop gap to a more thorough reform of property and land taxation. A new system should seek to moderate rapid rises in value which benefit a small number of people to the disbenefit of many more. Taxation of landlords as well as home owners should be reviewed, as should the taxation of foreign investors in land and property.
Ed Balls knows the Mansion Tax is popular in the country but that some of the people who will have to pay it are powerful with easy access to the media, so it will have a rough ride. It will be difficult for some Labour Candidates in areas with high property values, but its impact is no greater than some Tory tax increases – for example VAT, removal of child benefit for high rate tax payers, and increased stamp duty on valuable properties. Mayoral Candidates in particular should be very careful what they say because trying to be populist with this issue is more likely than not to lose them support within the Party.

One of the key themes on Red Brick over the years has been the importance not only of building more social rented housing but of protecting the stock we already have.
Evidence to be published in the upcoming 2015 UK Housing Review published by the Chartered Institute of Housing shows just how much stock is being lost.
Previewed on the CIH website and in the Guardian, the bald facts are these:

• In 2012-13 the stock of social rented homes in England fell by 19,189. In 2013-14 this figure more than doubled to 43,850. The loss over two years of over 63,000 homes compares with additions to the social rented stock (eg through new build) of a mere 28,000 homes.
• Of these, more than 36,000 of the losses have been housing association homes. The biggest factor has been the ‘conversion’ of homes to so-called ‘Affordable Rent’ when they are re-let or their sale on the open market – arrangements which are driven by the need to cross-subsidise the  new development of other ‘Affordable Homes’.
• Right to buy is the biggest factor for local authorities, with 17,000 sales over the two years.

John Perry of the CIH says “On present trends, the record loss of social rented homes in the year to April 2014 will be exceeded in the current year, as right to buy and conversions accelerate and new build for social rent declines still further. By April 2015, we can safely predict that over 120,000 homes will have been lost to social renting over the three years in which the government’s Affordable Rents programme was being fully implemented.”
It is hard to exaggerate what a disaster this is for housing in England. The stock of social rented homes is the most precious housing resource we have – already built, mostly in good condition, available on good terms and at genuinely affordable rents. It is like, as Harold Macmillan once said, selling the family silver.
It is increasingly clear that the Government’s unstated strategy is to gradually remove social rented housing from the system altogether, to be replaced by so-called ‘Affordable Rent’ at up to 80% of local market rents and by an increasing reliance on private renting. We have argued before that the real agenda for the Tories in Government (and therefore for the uncomplaining Liberal Democrats) was set by the infamous Localis report before the 2010 Election which advocated the ‘marketisation’ of all social housing.
Although ‘Affordable Rent’ levels have been mitigated for a proportion of new homes in London (even Boris Johnson appears to realise that 80% of market rent in London is hopelessly unaffordable), the average rent is still in the region of 65% of market, much higher than social rent levels. For tenants who need support from housing benefit to meet the rent – increasingly people in low paid employment – this high rent strategy is to all intents and purposes funded by making poor people poorer or through the back door by the State. In the greatest of all contradictions, it is Government policy to both increase and decrease housing benefit at the same time.
The pressures on the social rented stock, a vicious combination of the lack of new provision and the loss of existing stock, is the direct result of a range of government policies, which together mimic the Localis agenda:

• The removal of social rented housing from the Government’s main funding programme – the ‘Affordable Homes Programme’ – which only supports homes made available at ‘Affordable Rent’ levels and other products like shared ownership.
• Conversions and sales undertaken mainly by housing associations as part of their deals with the Homes and Communities Agency to get a degree of grant for new homes under the AHP.
• Voluntary sales – Labour MP Karen Buck recently revealed that Genesis Housing Association had sold 200 homes in one borough – Westminster, where her constituency is – over the past few years.
• Right to Buy – where discounts have now reached over £100,000 in London and the Government has totally reneged on its clear promise that RTB homes would be replaced ‘one for one’ – currently estimated to be about one-in-seven.
• Going soft on Planning Gain – where so-called ‘viability tests’ are being used by developers to get out of making affordable housing provision in new developments.
• In London the Mayor’s London Plan excludes almost any reference to social rented housing and expectations of provision are entirely in terms of ‘Affordable Rent’ or intermediate housing.
• Misguided ‘regeneration’ schemes in many places where redevelopment leads to a huge loss of social rented homes and their replacement by much more expensive homes, even if they are termed ‘affordable’.

In some places, like for example Islington, there has been a real determination to focus on social rented housing, including a new council housing programme, refusing to support housing associations unless they provide social rented homes, and insisting on full replacement of social rented homes in regeneration schemes involving redevelopment. More could be done in many other places to protect social renting, but nothing should divert attention from the main cause – a Coalition Government that is determined to bring social rented housing to an end.
The importance of this issue, and protecting the family silver, is why I support the SHOUT campaign. SHOUT this week launched its new website, which can be viewed here.

The first big housing policy debate to erupt in the New Year is long overdue: rent controls in the private rented sector.
The basic case that ‘something should be done’ is clear. Rents in the high pressure areas of the country have been taking an ever-increasing share of flatlining incomes, and not just in London. That implies that action should be taken both on rents and wages, but it is rents that detain us here. The cost of the sector to the State has been rising rapidly, not only through growing housing benefit (predominantly to assist private renters in work with low incomes) but also through the unrecognised and steadily accumulating cost of tax reliefs. There are signs of a decline in standards, especially at the lower end of the market: ‘beds in sheds’ has hit the headlines but there is also more sharing, more overcrowding, and more conversion of whole houses into small flats. Many more families with children are being accommodated in the sector and the absence of security and stability is unacceptable: as the Social Mobility Commission concluded, ‘the current private rented sector offer – developed in 1988 – is not fit for its new purpose of housing families with children over the long term’.
Harsh changes to the housing benefit regime are only just beginning to work their way through, with unpredictable outcomes: there is plenty of demand for homes and landlords will be less inclined to let to households on housing benefit. Excluded from home ownership and social housing, if poorer people are increasingly excluded from private renting, homelessness is the only likely outcome.
Like many on the left I believe instinctively in the regulation of prices that make a big difference to people’s ability to make ends meet, like rents, energy and fares. But I am still unsure about what to do with rents and concerned that some of the more radical policies being advocated will make things worse not better.
I am certain that the revival of private renting over the past 25 years has been a public policy disaster, giving consumers a much worse deal at greater cost to the State. It has been largely at the expense of home ownership and social housing (being created largely by transfers between tenures rather than new build), which are far preferable tenures that cost the State less. Buy to Rent has become a monster that has stoked up prices, soaked up tax relief, and damaged the home ownership market.
The private rented sector needs comprehensive regulation of standards, contract terms, and management. It is the last unmodernised dinosaur industry with a hopelessly fragmented system of supervision. Sensible landlords recognise the need for professionalisation of the sector within a strict and clear framework.
But what to do about rents given where we are? To create a rational policy you wouldn’t start from here: people should be entitled to have an affordable home even if there is great scarcity. It would help if the discussion was less opaque. The phrase ‘rent control’ is bandied about with little definition. A survey for Generation Rent showed that the majority of people were in favour of rent control, but what did they have in mind when the answered the question? My greatest concern is that not enough thought is given to the long term implications of policy options: the one thing worse than a rapid increase in private renting would be a rapid unmanaged contraction.
There are two main options for rent regulation; mitigation of rent increases and the setting of rents within pre-determined capped levels.
A 38 Degrees petition has received a lot of coverage and support, calling for rents to be capped at a maximum of £195/week for 4 bed houses (significantly less for smaller properties). London Mayoral candidate Diane Abbott MP has backed Generation Rent’s proposal that monthly rents should be set at 50% of the annual council tax bill: landlords would be able to charge more but subject to a 50% tax. In both of these proposals there seems to be little rationale behind the choice of rent levels, producing seemingly arbitrary figures, and there is no assessment of landlords’ costs to enable a prediction to be made of likely landlord response. Generation Rent’s proposal is also linked to a hopelessly out-of-date and chaotic property tax.
If rents fell by, say, one-third, would landlords make a profit? And if they don’t, what would they do? What would happen if capital growth also reversed, as some are predicting for later this year? Alex Hilton of Generation Rent seems to relish this, as more homes would be released on to the market at cheaper prices for potential home owners, potentially triggering a price collapse. My view is that policy has to aim to hold house prices steady for a generation, declining in real terms, avoiding a burst bubble, which creates as many if not more problems as it solves. A flight of landlords and a collapse in prices, a property bear market, would create a lot of homelessness, worsen not improve access to rented housing, and create another negative equity nightmare.
Is there a more rational basis on which to determine the absolute level of rents? Should they, for example, be based on a return on value? Assuming we are not around the corner from a confiscatory command economy, this at least would be a more logical approach. In London, a landlord seeking a gross return (before taxes and costs, including the cost of capital and any service charges) of 4% on a property worth around the average value of around £520,000 would be charging more than £400 per week, more than twice as much as the maximum cap proposed in the 38 Degrees petition. A typical one bedroom flat worth around £250,000 would require a rent of around £200/week. It has its attractions, but I’m not sure that the bureaucracy of such a system would add to the well-being of tenants or landlords.
What this shows is that high rents are a symptom of a much bigger housing market and housing policy failure. House values lie at the root of the problem. Of course some landlords are rapacious, especially those that own houses let by the room. Of course many fail to meet minimum standards of amenity, maintenance and management. Of course landlords will seek as much as they can and they will probably not flee the market if their margins are trimmed. Of course tenants feel exploited, because their incomes have been constrained as their rents have risen. But we must search for solutions that make things better not worse.
Labour’s proposals to mitigate rent increases by index-linking rents during longer tenancies has provoked a wide response. It has been dismissed (disingenuously) by Generation Rent, who say that it ‘no longer matters which flavour of government we have’. Yet it has also been parodied by Grant Shapps as a ‘Venzualan-style’ socialist policy.  I wonder if Grant also thinks that of the interesting New Year report from the right-ish think tank Civitas, which also called for strict restrictions on rent inflation during tenancies of indefinite length, as part of a wider policy to manage the balance between tenures and move away from demand subsidies. I don’t agree with all of it, but it presented a coherent argument and their critique of the demand subsidy approach is an important commentary on the policy agenda of the Coalition.
Labour and Civitas share a lot in common with the German system, which is also based on inflation-linking rent increases during a tenancy but allowing market rents to be determined when a new tenancy is formed. The Germans also have a law against rent usury which I rather like as a backstop control over extremes.
It would be nice and easy to jump on the rent control bandwagon. Generation Rent will accuse people like me of being willing to subject private tenants to exploitation for another generation to come. But I don’t want to go from this bad place to an even worse one. The economics of private renting are not as easy as people like to pretend, and the search for simple slogans does not always lead to good policy.
And I certainly believe that it matters who forms the next Government. The Tories want more deregulation, not less. Labour will introduce a sensible – and correctly cautious – system of rent increase regulation. In addition to the other proposed reforms, it is a policy that private tenants should vote for.

Happy New Year to everyone from Red Brick. Let’s hope 2015 is a much better year for housing than 2014. As Robin Williams (see below) said ‘You can’t keep picking people up; you have to stop them from falling.’

It probably has something to do with events in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago, but there is always an outpouring of concern for the homeless around this time of year. The compassion normally dissipates by New Year’s Day. Many tens of thousands of people are homeless all year round, and it will be just as cold in January and February when the emotional and religious strings aren’t being pulled. In the other months of the year, the shocking level of homelessness, like the shocking level of poverty, exposes our society to be lacking in compassion, preferring to blame the victim, and unwilling to tackle problems that are solvable with a bit of gumption.
Reflecting on the life of Chris Holmes, as I have been doing recently, makes me think that it is time for a new drive to build a genuine safety net for the homeless based on a basic right to a decent secure home. The first step would be to accept that homelessness is primarily a systemic issue, caused by housing shortage. It cannot be addressed by an approach based on personal pathology, as Iain Duncan Smith would have us believe.
At least this Christmas there has been some hard information around about who becomes homeless and why. For example, a survey of single homeless people for Crisis warned about ‘the tragic waste of young lives’ after showing that half of homeless people first experience it under the age of 21, and become vulnerable to violence, substance abuse and problems with physical and mental ill health. There has been extensive sympathetic media coverage of homelessness, including from newspapers that are normally hostile – including even the Mail. Others with a better reputation, for example Channel 4 News, put together the statistics in special briefings. The Labour Party collated figures which showed that nearly 61,000 families would spend Christmas in emergency accommodation, including more than 87,000 children. They estimated the cost of temporary accommodation over this Parliament to be £2.8billion – equivalent, in cash terms, to two years’ worth of Government grant for new affordable homes. .
Homeless peoples’ rights have waxed and waned over the last few decades since the high spot of the 1977 Act. Labour’s 2002 Act, which restored core rights taken away by the Tories in 1996, could have been revolutionary because it married stronger rights for individuals with new duties, in particular a requirement on councils to analyse the reasons for homelessness in their areas and prepare a comprehensive homelessness strategy to deal with the problems identified. Excellent in principle, the Act was destroyed by bad execution. Driven by a growing shortage of supply of social housing, and a well-intentioned but ultimately wrong-headed target to halve the numbers in temporary accommodation, many councils responded to their new duties by becoming more vigilant gatekeepers, finding new ways of ‘diverting’ people or turning them away. The revolving door of insecurity meant that many people were pushed back into the private rented sector, often many miles from their family and community. Bizarrely at a time when we’re supposed to be saving money, the system that is now being operated is more expensive than the far better option of providing more homes at social rent. Labour is right to point out that numbers in temporary accommodation have grown by 20% since 2010, but the figure in 2010 was already a disgrace.
Under the Coalition, after many years of slow progress under Labour, all of the homelessness statistics are now rising rapidly. There is of course no reason why more people in the population should suddenly become more feckless or enter the ranks of troubled families – Duncan Smith’s favourite pigeon hole – so it is glaringly obvious that the main problem lies in the lack of supply of genuinely affordable homes. To this can be added a general de-prioritisation of the homeless in the allocation of social housing. As a Government adviser on homelessness said when the latest framework for homelessness was introduced in 2012: ‘The overall conclusion of introducing this framework is inevitably that new statutory homelessness applications will become minimal.’
One person who was concerned about the homeless all year round was the actor Robin Williams, who sadly died earlier in the year. He always had a rider in his contract for any movie he made that the producers must employ a certain number of homeless people. This evidently compared with other actors wanting private jets, on tap champagne, and such like.
Williams was a longtime advocate for Homeless Rights. In 1990, he testified before the Senate in support of the Homeless Prevention and Revitalization Act. In his testimony he said ‘The problem cannot be denied anymore… I do believe this can work in an incredible way, from a grassroots level, that the money can get to and prevent, truly prevent, homelessness. That’s where it lies. You can’t keep picking people up; you have to stop them from falling. That’s what I hope. Thank you.’
One of Robin’s greatest and most testing roles was playing a homeless man in the ‘The Fisher King’ in 1991, with its sensitive portrayal of homelessness and mental illness.

Robin Williams as Parry in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King
 

30 years ago the Labour Housing Group, which had been founded in 1981, published its first book on housing policy. It was 200 pages of tightly-argued analysis split into 18 chapters, each with a specialist author, forged into a coherent whole by the editing of Christian Wolmar, now campaigning to become Labour’s candidate for London Mayor. Although circumstances have changed dramatically since 1984 – mostly for the worse, it has to be said – much of it stands the test of time and there are still lessons that can be learned for today.
The launch of LHG and the book – Right to a Home – came at a depressing time for housing. The Tories had stolen the whole debate with the right to buy, putting Labour on the defensive. Housing had slipped down Labour’s agenda despite having been a quiet priority for the Wilson Government of the 70s (although much less so after the IMF fiasco in 1976). The aim of the book was to set out a new stance for Labour which also spoke powerfully about housing rights – but a completely different set of housing rights from the Tories.
The optimism of the 1970s – when it was widely believed that the housing problem was well on the way to being solved – gave way to Thatcher’s single-minded pursuit of home ownership. Then as now huge cuts in housing investment meant that progress was reversed in terms of affordable housebuilding and the renewal of our oldest housing areas. Public sector starts (Britain) fell from an average of 135,000 in the 1970s to 36,000 in 1981 – the watershed leading directly to our modern catastrophe. Homelessness grew and there was an emerging crisis in the heavy use of temporary accommodation – especially bed and breakfast hotels in London but everything including caravans around the country. Conditions in the private rented sector were deteriorating, with several terrible fires in multi-occupied houses. As some housing areas began to gentrify, evictions became more common as landlords looked to sell out.
The core of LHG’s argument was the principle of the right to a home – that everyone, irrespective of income or type of household should have a practical right to housing on a par with the accepted rights to health care and education. Arm in arm with this, housing subsidies should be redistributed away from those that already had good homes to those that did not, leading to greater fairness of housing costs in relation to people’s incomes. Recognising that the withering of the private rented sector was leading to two relatively rigid (in terms of access) sectors (public housing and home ownership), the case was made both for new intermediate forms of housing and for greater parity of esteem between the main housing sectors. ‘Whether people rent or buy their homes raises no issue of principle for socialists’ wrote David Griffiths, ‘A viable strategy has to move beyond a sterile confrontation between the tenures by accepting their long-term coexistence and seeking to ensure there is real choice between them’. We would be in a very different place today if that advice had been taken then.
The book considered housing issues comprehensively, making proposals in relation to the reform of land taxation and housing subsidies, a better system of house buying and selling, the role of housing associations, housing allocations, and new forms of co-operative tenure. It broke relatively new ground by looking in detail at the issues of racial equality and gender equality in relation to housing policy. In one area the crystal ball failed spectacularly: it talked about ‘the irreversible decline’ of private renting and the need to plan for the removal of the absentee landlord from the housing system.
In my own chapter, on Planning Housing Investment, one paragraph I wrote has stayed with me ever since, featuring regularly as an argument on Red Brick: ‘The monetary constraints on public housing investment are more imaginary than real. It is a nonsense to believe that an owner occupier borrowing money to buy a bigger house is somehow ‘good’ because it is a private activity, but that a council borrowing money, ultimately from the same sources, to build a new council house is an inflationary drain on national resources because it counts as part of the PSBR’. Indeed, it made clear that the latter was a much more beneficial use of loan finance because it boosted economic activity, led to a permanent income, and by reducing social security costs and increasing tax revenue it almost became cost neutral to the Treasury. Ed Balls please note.
In the week of his funeral, it is poignant to read again the chapter by Chris Holmes on ‘A Political Strategy’. He made the case for the central political demand to be for a Housing Rights Act ‘which enshrines the legal right to a home within a comprehensive charter of individual and collective rights including the enforcement of minimum standards, security against arbitrary eviction, involvement in decisions and redress against grievance’. He called for a ’vigorous attack on the acute inequalities which disfigure current housing provision’. And, true even more now than then, he concluded: ‘It would be naïve to under-estimate the difficulties of gaining political support for a genuinely socialist housing policy in the face of entrenched interests and deeply-ingrained conditioning…. We need new ideas but active support for a radical socialist housing strategy will only be won through campaigning.’
So true.
 
‘Right to a Home’ published by Spokesman, Labour Housing Group, 1984, written by Stewart Lansley, David Griffiths, Steve Hilditch, John Perry, Mike Gibson, Jane Darke, Bernard Kilroy, Tim Daniel, Richard Moseley, Nick Raynsford, Alan Simpson, Geoffrey Randall, Bert Provan, Tristan Wood, Selwyn Ward, Marion Brian, Christine Davies, Chris Holmes.

Chris Holmes, who died on 2 December after a long struggle with illness, was a towering figure in the housing world for more than 40 years.
 
Chris led many organisations in his extraordinary career: Shelter, where he was Deputy Director from 1974-1976 and Director from 1995-2002, tripling its income and increasing its influence commensurately; Camden, where he was a hugely influential and innovative Director of Housing from 1990-1995, putting into practice what he preached; the single homeless charity CHAR, where he was Director from 1982-87; East London Housing Association (Director, 1980-82); the Society for Co-operative Dwellings (Director, 1976-79), and North Islington Housing Rights Project (Director, 1972-74). He was also variously a Board Member of the National Consumer Council, the Housing Corporation, the Youth Justice Board and the Minister for Housing and Planning’s Sounding Board (1997-2002). He was also active in the Labour Party and was a founder of the Labour Housing Group in the early 1980s.
Many tributes have already been paid to Chris, but there is one particularly noteworthy theme. So many people say he inspired them to work in housing and to campaign for the rights of homeless and badly-housed people. Whatever job he had, day and night he was a campaigner, a communicator, and a motivator.
Campaigns in which Chris played a major part included the extension of security of tenure in the 1974 Rent Act and the transformative Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977, which changed government and public attitudes towards homeless people. In the early 1980s he led the campaign for comprehensive new rights for people living in houses in multiple occupation in a Bill which passed the House of Commons only to fall when the 1983 Election was called – what a difference that would have made. In the early 2000s he again campaigned for stronger homelessness duties, which led to Labour’s 2002 Homelessness Act, then grasped the opportunity it created by launching Shelter into an enormous campaign to influence the practice of every local authority in the country as they wrote their new statutory homelessness strategies.
Chris inspired people though his leadership, his dedication, his encouragement of others, his sheer hard work, and his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of his subject. But he was also a remarkable orator, capturing many audiences with his fluency and passion. He was a restless thinker, always ready with new ideas and new policies to debate, often controversially, although he never wavered from his core belief in the vital importance of social rented housing. He championed people’s housing rights and spoke out against the use of discriminatory language referring to social tenants and homeless people. He wrote hundreds of articles and made thousands of speeches but he was always ready to sit quietly and talk through the detail of a point.
In 2000 he led Ken Livingstone’s Housing Commission: as London had lacked a strategic authority for many years, he started with a blank canvass but steered a complex course through the new Mayor’s untested planning powers to create (looking back from 2014) an extraordinarily progressive and ambitious set of policies.
In addition to his many articles, Chris wrote and contributed to a number of books. His tour de force, A New Vision for Housing, published in 2005, has become a standard text. It traced the avoidable policy mistakes over 50 years which led to the gross under-supply of homes and set out new ideas for creating housing justice and sustainable communities. He became a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research and wrote an accessible but honest history of the Notting Hill Housing Trust, published in 2006, concluding privately that the organisation had lost sight of its founding moral purpose. He remained capable of stirring controversy, speaking out against excessive pay in the housing association sector when his term on the Board of the Housing Corporation ended in 2008 (when it was replaced by the Tenant Services Authority).
Like most people, Chris had his struggles in life. He had a number of serious illnesses and became dependant on alcohol, a problem he controlled but which ultimately, and grossly unfairly, cost him his job at Shelter just weeks after an external review concluded that “virtually all respondents felt Shelter’s campaigning work was very dependent on Chris Holmes and his high-level relationships”. In his last years he suffered from vascular dementia and other conditions which required use of a wheelchair, but he retained his voracious appetite for reading, especially modern politics, and derived enormous pleasure from the birth of his grandchild, Katherine Rose.
Chris was born into a staunchly Methodist family in Yorkshire in 1942, the son of Gordon, who was an insurance broker, and Doris, who worked in a bank until marriage. They lived near Otley. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and the Leys School Cambridge. He took a degree in Economics at Clare College Cambridge. His Yorkshire roots perhaps explain his love both of hill walking and of cricket – he has been described as ‘a good batsman’. He was awarded the CBE in 1998 for services to homelessness and Shelter.

Chris married twice, having two children, John and Kelda, with Ann Holmes, with whom he remained great friends after their separation, and two, Cub and Sara, with Hattie Llewelyn-Davies. His love of housing was exceeded only by his love of family. The photo illustrates both, showing Chris after a 40 mile bike ride for Shelter, undertaken, despite not having ridden for 35 years, with son Cub, then aged 10. Hattie says ‘It shows his complete determination… No one but Chris would have thought it reasonable to attempt such a mad trip… I love the photo because he was so happy and it sets out his twin passions for housing and his family.’
The fulsome words used by so many in tribute to Chris – principled, generous, tireless campaigner, an inspiration, caring, compassionate – do not entirely do justice to his intellect, his capacity to lead and his impact on public policy. There have been very few of his like.
Steve Hilditch
If you have memories of Chris, please add a comment on the site below.
This Obituary has also been published by Inside Housing magazine and can be found here. 
And Malcolm Dean’s Obituary for the Guardian can be read here.

In the flurry of economic statements and announcements that have taken place over the last couple of days, the word ‘housing’ has featured. But only just.
Yesterday the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, LibDem Danny Alexander MP, unveiled the latest ‘National Infrastructure Plan’ – the annual excuse for the Government to re-announce its capital programme. Almost as an aside, he declared that the ‘Affordable Housing Programme’ (in inverted commas because most of it isn’t affordable at all) would be extended for a further two years, spending a miserable £957m over 2018/19 and 2019/20, continuing the steep downward trend of housing funding.
Some might ask, surely that’s a lot of money? Well, not really. £957m over 2 years for housing can be compared with £15billion over 5 years for roads. And today the Chancellor cut Stamp Duty on the purchase of homes by £800m each year. For this Government, housing is miserably low on its order of priorities, and affordable housing is right down at the bottom.
The National Infrastructure Plan makes it clear that the Government does not regard housing as ‘infrastructure’. Given the Wiki definition that ‘Infrastructure is the basic physical and organizational structure needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function’, that would include housing in my book.
Yet in this large document, with long lists of schemes, there are very few mentions of housing: it features largely as something that might be facilitated by transport investment. Indeed there are so few big plans for housing that they can be listed individually. There is a loan for an extension to the London Overground to open up Barking Riverside, land remediation and other works to enable the Ebbsflett ‘garden city’ (since when did 15,000 homes constitute a ‘city’?), early plans for a second garden city at Bicester (this time 13,000 homes), and the nationalisation of new homes delivery for the development at Northstowe. Of broader interest, there are to be reforms of compulsory purchase procedures to hasten development on brownfield land and further reforms to speed up planning decisions and s.106 negotiations. That’s it.
George Osborne’s reform of Stamp Duty seems to be a sensible way of restructuring the tax, avoiding the steep ‘cliff edges’ between bands that have distorted the market. But is it the priority use of £800m when the problem is building more homes? At a political level, it is a success for the Mansion Tax campaign: Osborne has felt it necessary to respond to the demand for the owners of very valuable houses to pay more tax. His reform shifts the burden up, reducing the tax for cheaper homes and increasing it for more expensive homes. But, as Ed Balls pointed out, this is a tax that is only levied when a home is bought and sold, it is not an annual levy on housing wealth – wealth that has increased rapidly due to the property bubble but not been earned.
It will be interesting to go into an Election with the parties competing with their alternative forms of taxing mansions and very valuable homes. But it would be even nicer if the debate could, for once, revolve around competing offers to invest in genuinely affordable homes.

To those that don’t already do so, ignoring the Secretary of State over the next six months while he’s making even more trouble than usual for councils might make good sense. His latest mischievous missive to local authorities tells them that by next April they have to publish the value of their council housing stock. Those that comply by then will provide convenient ammunition for Pickles when he’s in full election mode.
How does he justify it? Of course he’s not going to admit to being a troublemaker, so he claims he wants to ‘allow local communities to hold their councils to account’. To help them do this he’s forcing councils to publicise a completely meaningless figure – the open market value of their houses with no sitting tenants in them. It’s not hard to imagine headlines such as ‘Subsidised council tenants in Birmingham live in homes worth up to £500,000’. In fact, the clue to how the data will be used is already given by one of the headlines in the government’s own press release: ‘Multi-million pound properties’. Pickles thinks there is plenty of equity in ‘expensive empty properties’, the sole evidence for which seems to be the £3 million house sold off by Southwark more than a year ago.
He adds another little twist. Selling these expensive empty properties could reduce England’s staggering total of 635,000 empty homes, he claims. Except of course that even if councils sold off every empty house (and presumably stopped any tenants ever moving), it turns out there’d still be 608,000 empties, as practically all of them are in the private sector. No matter, it helps to spin a myth that empty property is local government’s fault.
With the apparent exception of the Secretary of State, most people know that if you own a house there are two ways to tap into its asset value. One is to sell it, which of course means you’ve lost the house. The other is to borrow against the asset value, which means you keep the house as well as get whatever else it is you want. Eric won’t approve of this idea though, as it would mean giving councils more borrowing freedom and he’d lose an opportunity to force them to sell even more council houses than he’s making them do already through right to buy.
We’re used to him ignoring what councils tell him about his proposals so it’s no surprise that he’s done it again. In this case, councils complained they could lead to misinformed debates about the real cost of their social housing stock rather than increase transparency. He’s going to address the complaint by putting a footnote to the figures explaining the differences between ‘existing use value as social housing’, and ‘open market value’. That should do the trick.
What the figures will show, of course, is that estates in central London are worth a fortune, and it will give further encouragement to councils to realise their value, regardless of tenants’ views. Red Brick has already tracked the story of the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates in Hammersmith & Fulham, where an intention to sell by the previous Tory council is proving difficult to unravel now the borough has changed hands. It can only be a matter of time until Britain sees examples like one provided by a Red Brick reader in Australia. The New South Wales government has a highly contentious policy of flogging off its most valuable housing: it’s planning to sell 300 tenanted properties close to the central Sydney harbour front worth about $500 million. In theory, three new flats could be built in outer Sydney for every one sold at Millers Point, but the government has pointedly made no commitment to do so. Perhaps I should have hesitated though before using such an outrageous example, it will probably reappear soon in one of Mr Pickles’ press releases.

BY David Rodgers*
To change the nature of the political debate it is often necessary first to change the language used in it. The Labour Party and our supporters are doing this in the debate about the abhorrent Bedroom Tax. However much the government insists on calling it “the Spare Room Subsidy”, it is now ‘the Bedroom Tax’ in the eyes of the public and the media. Changing the language has won the argument that ‘the Bedroom Tax’ is a pernicious attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. We just need a Labour government to abolish it.
We need to change the language we use in order to change the housing policy debate from one that focuses on building homes for individual ownership in a dysfunctional housing market to one that focuses on increasing the supply of new homes in a range of tenures. The UK housing market is dominated and skewed by house builders who have a vested interest in maintaining scarcity of housing supply to boost speculative profits for them and land owners. It is has been further skewed by ‘Right to Buy’, ‘Help to Buy’, ‘Buy to Let’ and, in London at least, ‘Buy to Leave’, all of which have done nothing to increase the supply of homes that are genuinely affordable for working households without the taxpayer paying ever increasing housing benefit subsidies to landlords.
The Tories are good at this language game. There is nothing “Affordable” about ‘Affordable Rents’. Nigel Farage is also abysmally good at it, parking his by-election “UKIP Tanks on Tory Lawns”. On our own lawn, ‘The Mansion Tax’ might not be the right language to use. Despite its good intentions, a broader more equitable review of council tax bands might be a better policy.
In discussing our dysfunctional housing market we need to engage in the debate on our own terms. As Labour’s shadow housing minister, Emma Reynolds MP, rightly said at our recent London Labour Housing Group AGM, there is nothing wrong in recognising the aspirations of the upcoming generation to own their own home. But what is wrong is that this aspiration is only open to a shrinking number fortunate enough to be able to buy, mostly with the help from ‘the Bank of Mum and Dad’. But to describe this as ‘getting on the Housing Ladder’ is to use the language of the dysfunctional market. It makes out that ‘Getting on The Ladder’ as soon as you can is desirable because house prices will inevitably continue to rise relative to earnings and, if you don’t get on ‘The Ladder’ now you never will. ‘The Housing Ladder’, driven out of the reach of many by inflationary house prices, has been generous to ‘Generation Property’ but has condemned ‘Generation Rent’ to housing poverty and creates systemic economic risks.
Ladders are dangerous things. Perhaps rather than talking about ‘the Housing Ladder’ we should talk about ‘the Housing Escalator’. Escalators only go one way but those nimble enough to get on them only gain if house prices continue to rise because housing remains a scarce commodity.
Pardon the pun, but I accept that the language of ‘Housing Escalators’ might be a step too far.
Seriously though, let’s stop using the language of our dysfunctional housing market. Emma spoke eloquently about Labour’s policies for three year private sector tenancies, putting a ceiling on rent increases and banning letting agents from charging fees to tenants. But we need to use eloquent positive language too about ‘Visionary and Ambitious’ housing policies: ‘Stable House Prices’ achieved by increasing the supply of new ‘Zero Carbon Homes’, ‘Living Rents’, council’s being ‘Free to Borrow Prudentially’ to ‘Invest in New Council Homes’, legislating for ‘New Tenures’ like “Mutual Home Ownership’ that empower communities to ‘Capture the Uplift in Land Value’ through community land trusts, co-operatives and ‘Mutual Retirement Housing’, giving ‘Assured Yields’ to pension fund investors, and ‘Investing Public Land’ to build homes that have ‘Permanent Affordability Built-in’ for for future generations.
Change the language and we change the housing debate. Change the housing debate and we win the election.
 
David Rodgers is a councillor and deputy cabinet member for housing, employment and skills in the London Borough of Ealing. He is membership secretary of Labour Housing Group and an executive committee member of London Labour Housing Group. From 1979 to 2012 he was chief executive of CDS Co-operatives, a London based co-operative housing association and served as the elected President of Co-operative Housing International. The views in this blog are entirely his own.

Policy Exchange won’t be expecting a good reception from Red Brick for their latest housing proposals. Our opposition hasn’t stopped the coalition from adopting some of their past ideas, but their latest one is bad even by PEx’s standards.
It’s not surprising that Freeing Housing Associations has had a drumming, not least from Tony Stacey (presumably one of the housing association leaders they hoped to convince). It’s already been expertly dissected by Colin Wiles and Jules Birch, so Red Brick can step back from the detail and take a broader view.
The report’s starting point is the current development regime, in which new homes must be let at near-market rents and chunks of existing stock must also be let at higher rents. The report ignores the resultant decline in the social rented stock, exacerbated by rising right to buy sales, which has been highlighted in Red Brick and elsewhere. Some of the big housing associations – not, to their credit, all of them – have also been oblivious to these effects and are still willing to build houses on the government’s terms. And, surprise, surprise, they are the ones who also (perhaps behind the scenes) support Policy Exchange and its ideas. Key for them is a future in which they’ll have freedom to set their own rents and allocate their own properties. Given their powerful financial positions, they’ll happily pay the price of getting less new grant and having to buy out their old grant. As they see it, they’ll finally get the chance to break away from an irksome regulatory regime and cater for more profitable parts of the housing market.
Almost coinciding with the PEx report came one from JRF on what the housing market will look like in 2040. It asks who will house the poor, especially as absolute poverty has, since 2010, been rising for the first time. It points out that, if social rents were to rise to 65% of market levels, the housing benefit bill would increase by 125% and 1.5 million more people would be poor. JRF and NHF are producing a report in the New Year aimed at developing a genuinely affordable rent linked to earnings for those on low pay. They are calling this a Living Rent, and it will include costed proposals for how such rents would work. It will represent the polar opposite of the Policy Exchange proposals.
Freeing Housing Associations doesn’t address this crucial issue. Neither did the NHF’s response to the report, which insisted that associations ‘must’ be able to set their own rents and decide who to let their homes to. While David Orr welcomed ‘this critical debate’, his own stance was very clear. Tony Stacey and Placeshapers are quite right to point out that, in this respect at least, he doesn’t speak for all housing associations: but it’s pretty obvious he thinks he’s speaking for some of the big ones.
These associations think of themselves as dynamic businesses which can only prosper if they have more ‘freedom’. Yet for several years they’ve enjoyed a benign environment of guaranteed above-inflation rent rises, underpinned by HB paid directly to them, combined with low interest rates. How many businesses have that kind of certainty? Yet their surpluses don’t represent the sort of returns that major equity holders in a company would expect. Since the scrapping of the TSA they’ve also enjoyed light-touch regulation yet PEx claims they suffer from a ‘byzantine system of regulatory rules and financial constraints’.
To be fair to Policy Exchange’s supporters, we must admit that this debate was sidelined by the recent Lyons report, when it should have been central to it. Building 200,000 new homes per year is vital but equally important is ensuring that a high proportion of them are let at rents that can be paid by families on low to middle incomes. While Lyons called for 50,000 new homes from social landlords, he was much less clear on the implications for rents. Indeed, chapter 9 of his report hosts a mini-debate which anticipates some of the key PEx proposals. Arguments for flexibility over both rents and allocations are put forward and are contested, but Lyons ends up recommending ‘discussions’ with the sector over a new rent regime. It’s true the report then points to the disadvantages of high rents and the arguments for shifting spending ‘from benefits to bricks’. But it was the former, not the latter, that was turned into one of its recommendations.
My only disagreement with Tony Stacey and Placeshapers’ views of the report is therefore that they are too polite, ‘welcoming’ the debate that the report has provoked. The housing lobby might have its debate, but the conclusions will matter little to ministers. It’s more relevant to see the PEx ideas as part of a softening up process for fundamental changes to the housing association sector of which the NHF ought to be very wary. While we know the Lyons Review wasn’t part of this process, its equivocation inadvertently left openings that would have been better firmly closed, rather than giving further encouragement to the ‘debate’.
Why is this all so dangerous? As we’ve seen, the housing minister has already turned the unpopularity of the 2015 Affordable Homes Programme into a presumed acceptance by associations that they don’t need grant. And now the sector itself helps a right-wing lobby group make the case, in what might appear to be convincing detail. Let no one be mistaken, if we have a conservative government in six months time a ‘no grant/high rent’ regime for housing associations is firmly on the cards. Protests about the increasing housing benefit bill will fall on deaf ears, because most of the expenditure falls under the new welfare spending cap. In other words, rents will go up, but state helps towards paying them won’t.