This year’s soon-to-be-forgotten Housing Minister, Brandon Lewis, lists his favourite interviewers as Jeremy Paxman on TV and John Humphrys on radio. So that means he is already my polar opposite as I can stand neither of those rather unpleasant, rude, macho egotists.
This week ‘Bungalow Brandon’ burst forth with a frank and honest statement: he wants housing associations to abandon building homes with Government grant.
According to Inside Housing, Lewis said it would be ‘great’ if housing associations withdrew from capital funding programmes because it would save taxpayers’ money. With Chancellor George Osborne committing the Tories to around £25 billion in additional cuts if they win the Election, it would appear that Lewis is softening up the sector for further reductions in grant – on top of the 60% cut imposed in 2010 – or even its elimination.
For those in the sector that seem to relish the thought of a future without grant – because it indulges their wildest commercial fantasies – Lewis’ statement might feel like justification. However, as David Orr of the NHF commented, it is ‘ridiculous’ to imagine that social landlords could build sub-market housing everywhere without grant.
The 60% cut in grant in 2010 ushered in the era of the grotesquely-named ‘affordable rent’ product at up to 80% of market rents. However the available money was not even adequate to sustain this programme – and so landlords were required to ‘convert’ existing social rented homes to ‘affordable rents’ (up to a doubling) when they became vacant, and they were also required to sell more property on the open market, coyly dressed up as ‘asset management’.
So the Tory future has rents being forced up through reductions in subsidy at the same time as Iain Duncan Smith is planning another major round of cuts in housing benefit – hitting those in low paid jobs particularly hard.
For individual tenants the consequences of these policies are severe – rents rising inexorably because AR tracks the market and housing benefit reducing in real terms at a rapid pace. Raising tax thresholds will be no compensation for a tenant in an AR property earning the minimum wage. The outcome can only be increasing impoverishment and a higher risk of homelessness.
The impact on the public finances is also uncertain. Reduced subsidy leads to higher rents leads to higher HB – even if the gap between rent and benefit grows. And the increased risk of homelessness leads to more households being placed in either temporary accommodation or rehoused in private renting, with even greater HB consequences. The more resonant the argument becomes in favour of moving ‘from benefits to bricks’ the faster the Tories move in the other direction.
The simplistic obsession with ‘the deficit’ (is it really the biggest issue facing the country?) and the national debt ignores the distinction between bad borrowing (e.g. to fund day to day running) and ‘good borrowing’, using historically low interest rates to invest in the future, generate an income stream forever and cut the benefit bill. Ed Balls once agreed with this argument, but apparently no more.
Labour’s timidity on good borrowing is sad to see, but they are still a long way from the George Osborne/Brandon Lewis position. ‘Not as bad as the Tories’ is hardly a positive vision for the future, even if it is true. Shortly we will see if Sir Michael Lyons can conjure up a picture of rising investment in social housing. Labour needs him to pull a rabbit out of the hat. It would help if the housing sector could stop waffling about their innovative commercial initiatives and shout out a more basic message about the crucial need for more Government investment.

At the Tory party conference all the housing talk is about getting people to buy, buy, buy. But are the new offers that have been put on the table any good? If I was a first-time buyer, I’d have nothing to do with either of them.
First up was Rent to Buy, which Eric Pickles ‘announced’ at the weekend before the conference started. This meant the scheme has now been announced three times, the first more than a year ago. It was put forward in the 2013 Spending Round last June, when it was welcomed by the Homes and Communities Agency. Then it was announced again in May, when the DCLG expected ‘huge interest’ in it. And – finally, perhaps – by Eric Pickles in the run up to this week’s conference, with the Telegraph taking the bait last Thursday.
It’s difficult to say anything good about the scheme, except perhaps that it might be better than the one David Cameron was to announce a day later (see below). Tenants will have to pay Affordable Rents at up to 80% of market rates, and will be able to buy after seven years. But how could a tenant who doesn’t have a deposit now save for one in seven years, while paying such high rents? The chances are the plucky tenants will remain just that – tenants – eventually creating a problem for the housing association who built the properties and whose finances may well require them to be sold. This is especially the case in London – to which half the money has been directed.
At least the houses will have been built by social landlords and will presumably be of good quality. Under the second scheme called ‘Starter Homes’, the houses will supposedly be 20% cheaper because they are exempt from Community Infrastructure Levy (used to pay for the roads, sewers, etc) and from section 106 obligations (used to require social housing to be included in the scheme or to require a payment in lieu). Local authorities ‘will still get the taxes which pay for the key infrastructure requirements these homes need – but not more’. But what taxes will these be? They’ll also be exempt from ‘future regulations’ like the zero carbon standard (and presumably other standards included in the recent Housing Standards Review). So the homes will – by definition – be sub-standard and will therefore very likely be of the minimum size and quality that builders can get away with.
Then they will be built on ‘brownfield land’ already zoned for development, that is no longer needed for industrial or commercial uses, including public sector sites. This land ‘costs less’ than other land, but isn’t normally made available to build houses on. Making it available will ‘make a saving’ which will be passed on to the buyer.
There is a whole lot of wishful thinking here. How many sites are there that meet these criteria? Has anyone checked? Will public bodies like the NHS really sell land cheaply? – it seems most unlikely. Are the would-be industrial sites contaminated (and needing expensive treatment)? Are any of them in suitable locations for housing developments? Or will the homes be stuck on the edge of town, remote from bus services and schools, and tagged onto business parks or industrial estates?
It’s amazing that the media soak up these stories without posing questions like these. They accept the 100,000 target figure, which appears to be plucked from the air, and don’t ask what kinds of compromise will be needed to make them profitable to builders, or whether local authorities will actually give planning permission for sub-standard houses on undesirable sites.
One can only conclude that the proposal – which carries no government financial support – is aimed solely at the conference goers and at the press. Whether any real first-time buyers will ever see the houses, or if they do whether they’ll want to buy one, is a question for another day.

The London my young children are growing up in today is very different to the one I grew up in in the 1970s, and the one that greeted my parents when they arrived here from foreign shores in the post-war years. It is not the city of opportunity and aspiration it was when my father came here in 1956. Then, he was able to buy a house for £6,000 and find work and my mother was given the opportunity to learn new skills which enabled her, too, to gain employment. Those kind of opportunities are simply no longer there for many people growing up in the capital. Today, 640,000 Londoners are in low paid jobs, one in four young people are unemployed and the average age of a first time house buyer is set to rise to an astonishing 52 years old.
I don’t need to tell readers of Red Brick that, right now, the biggest obstacle to that opportunity is the housing crisis gripping the capital.
For the last few years I have been inundated with cases in my surgery that relate to housing. It’s the same for my colleagues across the capital. My sense is that for too long politicians have been ducking the tough issues and not engaging with stakeholders from across all sides of the housing industry.
With all this in mind, I recently released a 41-page report with proposals on how to tackle the crisis. It proposed 34 policy solutions that I believe will together get London building, increase the affordability of housing, and tackle soaring rents.
One of the most positive things to come out of the report is that it has stimulated and broadened the debate on housing. Of course, urgent discussion and debate has been taking place on blogs like this and within policy arenas for years, but we need to take strong, solution orientated arguments to the people of London and be honest with them about the difficult decisions we need to make in order to solve the crisis. My report is an attempt to do just that.
Firstly we need to increase the amount of land available for new homes. Initially that requires us to make more land available. Building on brownfield sites should be our first move and is estimated to provide us with over 360,000 new homes. But as high as that figure is, it is nowhere near enough. London needs nearly a million homes by 2021 and more beyond that. We also need to engage, therefore, with the difficult issues that politicians have ducked for decades, and that means challenging the misconceptions around greenbelt.
Ask most people what greenbelt means and they will talk of playing fields and pristine woodland. Much of the greenbelt is exactly that and, of course, that must carefully be protected. But there are some areas of the greenbelt that are not worthy of the name – parts that were designated 70 years ago when they were verdant are now wastelands and car parks.
The city has changed since then, and so have its needs. It is time to rethink a 70-year-old planning policy in order to prevent the current situation in which local councils have to build on playing fields while car parks remain protected.
We also need to correct the mistakes Boris Johnson has made on ‘affordable housing’. He moved the goalposts on affordable housing so that ‘affordable’ rents can now be charged at up to 80% of market value.  As private rents soar, that mean these ‘affordable’ rents are now being set at thousands of pounds per month. The current debate around affordable housing is a farce – politicians have used the phrase ‘affordable’ but have not been honest enough to admit that it means nothing to most Londoners.
We need to redefine what we mean by affordability and make sure affordable means something again. I have proposed linking affordability to average earnings in each borough and capping affordable rents at 60% of market value. This would mean we are not just building more homes but also making them genuinely affordable for Londoners.
The best way to get councils building again is to give them the money to do it. That’s why I have proposed looking at increasing the number of council tax bands. Currently, a family in Bexley or Barnet pay the same as Roman Abramovich in his Belgravia mansion. The current council tax bands are based on 1991 valuations and so, again, they are a part of the system that simply isn’t moving with the times.
All of these ideas will help make buying a home more affordable. But they will take time: building hundreds of thousands of homes cannot happen overnight. In the short term, keeping London affordable means acting quickly to tackle soaring rents. Ed Miliband is completely right to endorse rent stabilisation through control mechanisms, as I outlined back in February of this year [http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/02/we-need-rent-controls-solve-londons-housing-crisis]. My report further outlines what those controls should be, and how they will protect tenants.
To make London a city where we can all can get on and thrive, we need to tackle the capital’s housing crisis, enabling everyone in the capital to make a home here and still have the means to benefit from everything this fantastic city has to offer.
David Lammy’s report ‘Crisis, What Crisis? Tackling the London housing emergency’ is available at www.londonhousingreport.com
 
David Lammy MP is the second declared candidate for the Labour nomination to be London Mayor, following Christian Wolmar.
Red Brick will be happy to carry pieces from any of the candidates in the run up to the selection, which will take place after the General Election.
London Labour Housing Group is also planning to hold ‘Housing Hustings’ during the selection.
David Lammy MP website
Christian Wolmar website
 

Ruling out extra borrowing that adds to government debt or has to be paid for from taxes is fair enough, but council housing investment needn’t do either. That is the message that Labour’s Treasury team still seemed unwilling to receive at this week’s Labour conference.
Ed Balls earlier appeared to leave scope for extra borrowing for capital investment but then closed the option down in his Manchester speech. Following this, Chris Leslie said the economic situation would preclude extra borrowing for new homes and that those who expected it to happen would be disappointed.
Obviously, the Treasury team has two concerns, one is getting down the level of government debt, and the other is avoiding new spending that will have to be funded by making cuts elsewhere or by raising taxes. However, the argument in favour of building council houses – as opposed to, say, hospitals or schools – is that the investment needn’t impact either on government debt or on taxes.
Council housing and one or two other areas where Labour might want to invest (an example is rail infrastructure) are different from most areas of public sector investment in these two key respects. They can be funded from charges (in the case of housing, from rents) and the borrowing only counts against national debt because of current Treasury rules. Chris Leslie seemed to gloss over these distinctions. He was quoted as saying:
‘But those of us who believe in having a collective public realm for public services – whether it’s the NHS, education, housing – have to prove to the public that we can live within our means and manage efficiently those particular budgets.’
He added that injecting capital funding into social housing could ‘make a big difference’ to the housing sector, but ‘what I can’t do is raise your expectations and promise you that straight after the election there will be this splurge in borrowing’.
Fair enough. And Labour understandably doesn’t want to frighten the horses now by promising a change in borrowing rules that would embrace international conventions rather than those that traditionally (and uniquely) apply in the UK. However, it could tell the truth, which is that council housing investment is funded through rents not taxes, and there are councils which have the potential to finance new investment from their rental income but are prevented from doing so by the current borrowing caps. It could say that it wants to explore the possibilities for extra borrowing to build homes, given that it needn’t cost the taxpayer more and that it’s a vital part of achieving Labour’s 200,000 homes target. When in power, it could then look at embracing international rules about borrowing that are already used as the yardstick to compare Britain with its competitor economies.
We could add to the case by pointing out that money spent on house building – unlike that spent on schools and hospitals – also feeds quickly back into jobs and extra tax income. This is because houses can go on site more speedily than just about any other form of capital investment, so the boost they give to the economy (and returns to the Exchequer) are faster.
So, lumping housing investment in with health and education is to misrepresent housing’s unique case. Of course, new schools and hospitals are highly desirable, but because they provide services that are free to the public, the investment inescapably boosts government debt and adds to taxes. Housing is different. Treasury team, please note!

In our last two blogposts we have pointed out the vital importance of securing a large amount of investment if Labour is to achieve its target of 200,000 homes a year by 2020 and expressed our concern at the implications of Ed Balls strict line on ‘no more borrowing’ under the next Labour Government. We were looking to Ed Miliband’s speech today  (click link for full text) to raise our hopes.

In a generally excellent speech, with its huge commitment to restoring the National Health Service, housing was given high priority as one of Miliband’s ‘six goals’ within Labour’s ten year plan. Here’s what he said in the key passage about housing:

Goal 5
And a plan for your family doesn’t just depend on wages, jobs and education. What is it that provides us with security in life and faith in the future? The love of the people we care most about. Decent work properly rewarded. And the confidence and security that comes from having our own home.
So many people in Britain today don’t have that. That most British of dreams, the dream of home ownership, has faded for so many. Under this government, Britain has the lowest level of house-building since the 1920s.
So our fifth national goal is that for the first time in fifty years we will make sure this country is building as many houses as we need. By 2025, doubling the number of first time buyers who get on the housing ladder each year. Again, we will need a national effort to achieve. We will stop the large developers sitting on land and we will back the thousands of small developers and construction companies with access to new loans. There will be new towns, garden cities and suburbs with a half a million new homes. And housing will be a top priority in our capital investment programme. Because we need to start Britain building again.

The phrase ‘building as many houses as we need’ is striking. The current commitment to build 200,000 a year by 2020 is seen by many to be stretching given the well-rehearsed problems with housing delivery. As all national estimates of need are miles beyond 200,000, ‘as many as we need’ is an extraordinary ambition if it is to be taken literally. It implies that beyond 2020 we must have policies in place to increase the number up towards 300,000 and perhaps even beyond that.
The exclusive emphasis on home ownership is disappointing – not because increasing the number of homes for first time buyers is to be sniffed at, but because it fails to acknowledge the importance of providing homes at genuinely affordable rents for those who will never be able to afford to buy. Home ownership has now been declining for a decade and it is almost as if no-one has noticed that a major structural change has taken place. Simply on political grounds the votes of people who want and need to rent count the same as those who are likely to be able to buy. And genuinely affordable rented homes will be just as important in creating balanced communities in garden cities and new towns as new homes for owner occupation.
The only phrase that covers the social housing programme – ‘And housing will be a top priority in our capital investment programme’ – re-states the tougher fiscal stance set out by Ed Balls yesterday. No promise involving extra borrowing, so no promise on the borrowing cap that limits how many new homes councils can provide. It is hard to translate the phrase ‘a top priority’ into hard cash and real bricks and mortar.
It will be hard for Emma Reynolds to put a positive spin on the Eds’ speeches but she has the job of making this appear coherent to housing world.

From my point of view, I can only say it is disappointing. I was looking for a commitment on the social housing programme and especially on the council housing cap. I was looking for an ambition that a decent proportion of the 200,000 target would be genuinely affordable homes and not just a few more acres of Barrett and Wimpy homes (welcome though they are as part of a balanced housing programme). I was looking for a strong statement to move ‘from benefits to bricks’ through increased investment.
I keep hearing noises that Sir Michael Lyons and his team have written a strong report that will make a real difference to housing delivery. But if he is meeting his terms of reference he is most likely to be recommending raising the cap and using public borrowing to invest as well as making proposals for the private sector. And the level of grant remains critical to getting rents right and beginning the long task of rebalancing away from a dependence on benefit. I think Lyons’ task has been made harder by the new fiscal stance and (I speculate) this might be a reason for delay.
So the housing baton passes to Lyons and I just hope he can impersonate Usain Bolt in the last leg of the relay.

The abject failure of the Tories to build enough new homes, and especially enough new genuinely affordable homes, should present Labour with a golden opportunity. The housing statistics are stark and concern about where a growing population will live has been rising. It is now not only the number of homeless, overcrowded and sharing households, it is the number of 30 year olds living back with parents, the ‘generation rent’ forced to shell out on exploitative rents instead of saving for a deposit. There is growing concern that in the high pressure areas of the country, housing shortage and very high housing costs are a major brake on the economy.
Labour’s policy appeared to be moving in the right direction. By adopting the target of building 200,000 homes a year by the end of the next parliament – not enough to do the job, but a start – Labour demonstrated some commitment. By establishing the Lyons Commission – expected to report this week but now supposedly a few weeks away (a worrying development) – Labour showed it was willing to get into real detail about making the land and development markets work better. And there was a huge head of steam behind calls to end the artificial ‘cap’ on councils borrowing to build new council houses.
Ed Balls is a very clever man, the architect of the stunning announcement on Bank of England independence to set interest rates after the 1997 Election. So I’m hoping that yesterday’s speech only told half of the story and Ed Miliband has grabbed all the good stuff for his speech today.
Everyone in the Party will have views on austerity and the fact that it makes ordinary people and the poor pay for the Bankers’ crisis. But the point that concerns us on a housing blog is Balls’ strong statement that there will be no new policies that increase public borrowing in the next Parliament. Searching for a silver lining, he did say that housing would get increased priority within the existing capital expenditure limits, and that line was also being spun by housing spokesperson Emma Reynolds during the day. That could well mean that the ‘cap’ will be loosened or even lifted and that councils will be able to expand their building programmes – something that is absolutely essential if the 200,000 target is to be met. But the question is begged – giving housing greater priority at the expense of what other capital programmes? I can’t imagine HS2 being reversed to make room for the housing programme and other capital programmes have their own strong justifications.
There is a general belief that the private sector can build a bit more and housing associations can build a bit more, but that the 200,000 target will not be met unless councils are unleashed – see for example the evidence from SHOUT to the Lyons Commission for the full argument (and summary below). I can see nothing but economic benefit from extra council borrowing. It is good borrowing: it creates a capital asset that will bring in income for decades to come; it creates jobs that are still much needed; and it has a long supply chain generating far more economic activity than the original investment. And borrowing is and will remain cheap. Yet Balls’ whole speech was couched as if capital spending was a bad thing because it adds to total government borrowing and therefore the ‘deficit’. (See an interesting article in the FT (paywall) on what the various borrowing figures mean).
There is a further challenge. More borrowing to build does not necessarily produce homes that are genuinely affordable, even if they are built by councils. To get down to traditional social rent levels, subsidy is needed. Good councils, like Islington, are finding new ways of cross-subsiding new council homes to keep rents down. But the national programme would need significantly more grant to enable rents to be kept to sensible levels. The grant programme has been cut by more than 60% since the Coalition came in, which is why rents for new social homes are so ridiculously high.
For many of us, determining how much grant is available is the key decision that Labour has to make in the housing field. Building more homes at genuinely affordable rents is the essential first step towards removing the growing dependence in the housing system on housing benefit. Every home built with grant for social rent saves money forever in the benefits system.
Two previous promises have been made about increasing grant but these appear to have disappeared from current consideration. First, an increase in grant to grow the housing programme was promised out of the proposed Bankers’ Bonus Tax. And secondly, an increase was promised out of the proceeds of the sale of 4G bandwidth. If these are now consigned to history, there are currently no promises about grant levels.
There was also no sign in Balls’ speech that labour will take more radical steps like taking council borrowing for housing out of the prime measure of public borrowing, bringing the UK into line with standard international debt measures and treating councils as ‘public corporate bodies’ who should determine their borrowing on prudential grounds within their own business plans rather than as a conglomeration with central Government. Maybe that will be Balls’ next ‘Bank of England’ moment in May next year.
Imposing a borrowing straightjacket on housing will be a disaster for Labour’s housing ambitions. If housing is to have higher priority within existing spending plans we need to know how much priority and the cost in terms of other programmes. And to give confidence to the people who will actually deliver the 200,000 promise, something signidficant must be said about grant.
Ever the optimist that one day the housing penny will drop, attention turns to Ed Miliband today. There is some speculation that housing will feature big in his speech. Personally, I think it must.
 

SHOUT submission to Lyons Commission

Labour’s conference this week needs to be about more than how to respond to the referendum result or whether to bail out the NHS. Important though they are, how to put flesh on the bones of Ed Miliband’s pledge to reach a target of 200,000 new homes per year in the next parliament is vital too, and as with the NHS he shouldn’t back away from committing resources to it.
The Lyons Review, due out shortly, should provide a detailed blueprint for how to deliver 200,000 homes and more. But the plan has to be backed by resources if it’s to have a chance of working, and this is where the two Eds come in. It simply can’t be assumed that the target can be met by relying on the private sector alone. A marker has been put down by Tom Copley, Nicky Gavron and a mixture of Labour councillors and parliamentary candidates in London, demanding that Lyons calls for changed borrowing rules for local authorities and that this is in the Labour manifesto. They make a point with which Lyons will surely agree, that historically councils made a massive contribution to total output and they need to do so again. While it’s true that housing associations now make the bigger input to new building, if we are really to achieve the near doubling in output that Ed Miliband wants, both parts of the social sector will have to make a step-change in delivery along with the private sector. Achieving the target through expansion of private output alone is simply unrealistic.
There are several key elements to this. First, the reform of council housing finance, begun by John Healey in the last parliament, needs to be completed by giving councils wider borrowing powers. Ideally, as Red Brick has long argued, borrowing rules would be changed. But if that is not an immediate prospect, then at least a mechanism is needed to allow councils whose borrowing headroom is too low to get more, especially those who have ambitious but thwarted new build plans.
Second, the issue of grant cannot be ignored. While many councils will build without grant, it’s obvious that associations and some councils need grant and that the current regime is not working. Simply continuing with the second Affordable Homes Programme due to start next April will not deliver the number of homes needed at properly affordable rents. The programme must be reappraised. At present it threatens to produce the worst of all worlds: too few homes, designed to be let at rents that are too high. The warning signs are there from the poor response to the Mayor’s section of the programme in London. Even if new resources can’t be found, at the very least the programme must be reconfigured, with the available funding for housing protected and very clearly targeted.
The third key issue is the balance between rents and benefits. The coalition’s policies have been grossly irresponsible, pushing up welfare costs in both the short and longer term and having no regard to the realities of many tenants being in low-paid, insecure and part-time work. Policy needs to be reframed to push back against higher rents and enforced benefit dependency. The worst outcome would be simply to continue the present policy drift.
Finally, local authorities need to be firmly on board as partners in driving towards the 200,000 target, using their strategic housing and planning powers. But again, the reality of how local government capacity has been shredded by the coalition needs to be faced. Housing and planning services have been hit by some of the biggest local government cuts. Together the services account for only around three per cent of local spending, so the problem is not unresolvable. But neither can it be ignored if councils are going to set the local strategies and deal with the planning applications that will be needed if housing supply is to be doubled.
None of the above are comfortable messages for the two Eds, but who said that building 200,000 homes per year would be easy? It won’t be enough to set a paper target, make some reforms to the planning system, and hope for the best. The Lyons report will surely both make that obvious and show what needs to be done if the ambitious target is to be delivered. And although Lyons can’t say it, the Labour Party also needs to ensure it’s the very highest priority and that the test of any shifts in budgets or further welfare changes will be whether they or not they help deliver it.
While Ed Miliband was in Scotland perhaps he had the opportunity to draw useful lessons that could be applied if Labour forms the next government in Westminster. For example, did anyone tell him that Scotland’s 32 councils build ten times as many council houses per head as their equivalents in England? If Scottish local authorities already enjoy the freedom to borrow sustainably from their rental income, perhaps ‘devo max’ can be used to apply the same rules south of the border.

Since September dawned, two interesting reports have been published recording views about social housing and social housing landlords.
The first, from the Housing Partners consultancy, reported on a huge (but self-selecting) survey of tenants. It said that only 22% of the 61,000 tenants surveyed felt that their landlord ‘cared about them or their family’ and less than one-third felt that their landlord listened to their concerns.
The report focused on failures in communication and recommended that landlords should put much more effort into getting to know their tenants and treating them as customers. Although the results are much poorer than the picture painted by landlords’ own satisfaction surveys, there is plenty in the results to raise concern amongst landlords (the report draws no distinction between housing associations and councils).
The Fabian Society’s report Silent Majority, based on a national survey and focus groups, looks at one of the often-cited reasons given for poor performance in housebuilding – that there is not widespread support amongst the public for social housing.
Even though most people see social housing as a service for other people, ‘not for me’, a clear majority (57%) support more social housing being built, and only 15% oppose the idea. The proportion opposed rises when the question refers to the local area, but only to 27% – much lower than many would suppose given all the talk about NIMBY opposition.
The report notes that stigma remains a problem for social housing – calling for more effort to be put in to addressing it – but this concern does not translate into opposition to more being provided.
Political differences emerge from the survey. Net support for new social housing was at +66% for Labour voters and +62% for LibDems but fell to +27% for UKIP and a very low 16% for Tory supporters. The authors comment:

The survey provides a clear steer on the characteristics of people more likely to oppose new social housing in their area. They are people in rural areas; people in the south of England; home owners; and those intending to vote for the Conservative party or the UK Independence Party (UKIP) at the next general election.

Both reports contain intriguing and thought-provoking survey results. But for me two points stand out. First, NIMBYs should not be feared as much as they are because there is good support – the silent majority – for new housing and much more support than is commonly recognised for social housing. Developers thinking clearly about how to get local communities on their side and how to ameliorate the local impact of development are working along the right lines. Secondly, it might just be social landlords that are failing as organisations, and not social housing that is failing as a tenure. Landlords could certainly do more to improve their tenant services and to boost their own popularity with their tenants – and more widely.
Hopefully these reports will encourage those landlords who describe social housing as ‘a failed brand’ to think again. It would help all of us who want to see more affordable homes built if they could be more positive about the sector’s key product.

Nick Boles, the former planning minister, was a fan of bungalows. When he called for more to be built last year, especially for older people, he drew praise from the Telegraph and the Guardian (the latter characteristically reminded us that ‘Under Milk Wood’ was written in a bungalow). The government’s streamlined planning guidance, issued on Boles’ watch, specifically told councils to build more bungalows. He warned that councils would need to open up more land for development if they did so, but that there would be less opposition to them ‘because of their popularity’.
When Boles was given a different job in the July reshuffle, bungalow enthusiasts feared the worst. Fortunately, his replacement, Brandon Lewis, proved equally keen: within a month he’d repeated Boles’ call for more ‘quintessentially British’ bungalows, calling on us to love them ‘a little bit more’. At the same time, he made clear that they needn’t necessarily be built on greenfield sites: ‘there are lots of areas that are not built on that are not beautiful green fields or are not necessarily classified as brownfield’. He even pointed out how wonderful the bungalows are in his own constituency, Great Yarmouth.
So when Saffron Housing Trust made a planning application to build ten bungalows on old railway land in Great Yarmouth, they must have thought they were onto a good thing. With various provisos, there were no official objections to the scheme and the planning department recommended it should go ahead. The two Labour ward councillors backed the scheme, in part because it would resolve fly-tipping and other problems on the vacant site.
The officers’ assessment showed that over 500 people were waiting for housing in the area, most wanting one- or two-bed properties and nearly two-thirds needing single floor accommodation. Clearly the bungalows would be oversubscribed. The households on the waiting list might well have agreed with their MP when he said you need ‘somewhere you can move to which is ideal for you without having to go into what you might see as a retirement home’.
However, the NIMBYs struck. Adjoining residents had got used to having the land as a free car park: 53 objected and a petition against the project raised 47 signatures. Councillors set aside their own assessment of housing needs and voted to reject the scheme at their meeting in May.
At this point a judicious intervention by the local MP and planning minister might have sorted things out, even though he’d stressed that it was ‘not up to him where new homes were built – that was a choice for local councils’. However, it turns out that in his own patch he is opposed to the council ‘forcing yet more housing on the community’. In his recent newsletter, he says the 10 bungalows would have caused ‘traffic chaos’ and that ‘out-of-touch’ Labour councillors were ‘defying the will of local people’ (setting aside, presumably, the hundreds of households who would gladly have applied for the homes if they’d been built).
Colin Wiles, discussing Lewis’s original enthusiasm for bungalows, noted in Inside Housing that George Orwell spoke about ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’. Colin was referring to the minister being at the same time in favour of low-density, single-storey developments, and worrying about the need to use more agricultural land for housing. As it happens, this small development in Great Yarmouth would have met both tests. It turns out, however, that Brandon Lewis’s ‘contradictory beliefs’ are far less complicated than Colin thought. Bungalows are to be universally welcomed, except in Great Yarmouth.
Acknowledgement: research for this piece was prompted by a news item in 24.dash.com