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Nick Clegg’s rhetorical flourishes are quite clever until you ponder on them for a second or two. Then the argument falls to pieces. Yesterday’s speech included a long list of things he’d said ‘no’ to within the Coalition. I suppose headlines like ‘Dr No’ and ‘The Abominable No Man’ were the desired outcome, supporting the line that the LibDems have been a brake on ‘the nasty party’.
In housing they have been the Party that likes to say yes. Or, to put it another way, the Party that rolled over to accommodate every nasty Tory policy imaginable.
60% cuts in housing investment? Yes! End social housing? Yes! Put social rents up to 80% of market rents? Yes! Bedroom Tax? Oh yes please! Make large parts of the country unaffordable to people in and out of work who need housing benefit? Yes! A new housing bubble? Yes! End security of tenure? Yes! Increase homelessness? Yes! Slash the homelessness safety net? Yes! Let Boris remove all progressive policies from the London Plan? Yes! Vote against own ‘Mansion Tax’ policy? Yes! And on it goes.
As I’ve argued before, I have no real issue with the LibDems going into Coalition with the Tories. On the economic front, Plan A has been a natural home for them since they reverted to being a classically economic liberal party following the rise of the so-called ‘Orange Liberals’ like David Laws. Vince Cable may huff and puff but the LibDems are close to George Osborne on economic theory and reasonably comfortable with austerity. Nor do I complain that they negotiated a joint platform with the Tories in the Coalition Agreement, winning some things and giving way on others. What is so dishonest is that the policies they have actually pursued in Government were not set out in the Tory or the LibDem Manifestoes, nor were they contained in the Coalition Agreement.
The genesis of the Government’s policies was the work of a little cabal of right wing Tories supported by a small number of leading people in the housing world, working through the Localis think tank. As yes men, Ministers like Andrew Stunnell, Don Foster and Steve Webb have been indistinguishable from their bosses, Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith as they laid waste to the decent tradition of providing affordable housing for the poor that was established post-War by Aneurin Bevan and Harold Macmillan.
The inability of the LibDems to bring any of their Party’s policies into Government is what will condemn them in the General Election housing debate. On paper, their Party policy is very good and no doubt they will try to distance themselves from Government policy. They should be reminded, forcefully, of what they have actually done. The only consolation is that, if the next Election produces a Lab-Lib Coalition (perish the thought), it will be relatively easy to agree a common approach to housing in Government.

Demands grow for better standards in the private rented sector. The latest, a joint report from the LGiU and the Electrical Safety Council, calls for clearer powers for councils to introduce licensing and recoup the costs.  It follows on from a CLG Select Committee report, the Labour Party’s own policy review and a bill from Graham Jones MP, all calling for stronger enforcement powers.
The drivers for these reports are pretty obvious.  On the one hand, we have the exponential growth of the sector, doubling in size over a decade. Because of policy changes such as allowing councils to discharge their homelessness duties via private lettings, the sector is not only growing but also accommodates more and more vulnerable households.
On the other hand, we have the continuing problem of poor standards in a significant proportion of private lettings.  More than a third of homes fall below the Decent Homes Standard and at least one in five are unsafe, according to the latest English Housing Survey.  Despite a range of standards and regulations applying to the sector, a proportion of landlords fail to comply and staff resources for enforcement action have been hit by spending cuts.  The government announced extra funds for enforcement in July, but the £3m promised won’t go very far.
Yet in its crazed drive to force down net migration, the government is pushing ahead with massive new regulation in the sector which has nothing to do with improving conditions for tenants and indeed could worsen the plight of some of the most vulnerable ones.  In theory, private landlords will soon have to check that all adults moving into a house have the right to live in Britain, a task which is simple if the prospective tenant has a UK passport but which can be mind-bogglingly difficult if their proof is any of a couple of dozen other kinds of document.  Not only is this difficult, but it will have to be carried out by two million landlords making over one million new lettings per year. A consultation on the issue closed in August, and despite the hostile response the government seems determined to push forward.
It is difficult to know which is going to be more demanding: training so many people (nearly three-quarters of whom only manage one property), or ensuring that they actually make the checks.  That the Home Office is about to take this on given its own staffing cuts and with all the other pressures it faces on immigration is astonishing.  As the response to the consultation from the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association says: ‘We do not consider that the Home Office is in a position to take on a challenge of this scale. We urge caution. This project sets the Home Office up to fail. Again.’
Yet the measure is almost certain to be included in the autumn’s immigration bill.  What will be its effects in the sector?  One possibility of course is that it will be widely ignored and poorly enforced.  The government will be able to tell the Daily Mail it’s taking action, and it might be months or years before its failure is exposed. Another though is that it might drive migrant households (or any who don’t have UK passports) further into the hands of those landlords who are least likely to ask questions of new tenants or comply with the required standards for their properties.
Yet a further possibility is that it will encourage discrimination, which will be easy to get away with given that landlords will at the same time be making financial and other checks.  As the Scottish Association of Landlords says in its response: ‘it will lead to discrimination against legitimate tenants whose residency status is in any way unclear or who are unable to obtain the required paperwork’.
The damage could be even worse if the government complies with its own ‘one in. two out’ requirement about new regulations.  The rule, created by the Business Department, means that the Home Office will have to find ways of cutting out two other forms of regulation to allow this one to start.  It is not yet clear how it will do this, although to some extent those dealing with the private rented sector can take comfort from the fact that it is the Home Office that has to meet the rule, not DCLG. They might have offered up existing regulations that affect landlords, thus making the whole thing even more bizarre.

Would Grant Shapps be capable of going to Brazil for two weeks and producing a convincing report on the state of its housing system? I suspect not. Yet a rather remarkable woman from Brazil managed to assess the housing issues we are facing in the UK not only accurately and succinctly but in decidedly human terms, after just a fortnight’s visit. Raquel Rolnik is not a politician, but perhaps British politicians on all sides could take some lessons not only from what she said but also from the refreshing way in which she said it.
Her preliminary report will be followed by a fuller one by next March. In little more than seven pages the present one is hardly likely to be comprehensive, especially as she devotes much of it to the ‘so-called bedroom tax’ (carefully phrased, pace Mr Shapps), which Steve is covering separately. The standpoint she adopts is aptly summarised in one sentence:
‘…the right to adequate housing compels Governments to look beyond aggregated general figures of supply and demand in order to place housing needs – and not housing markets – at the centre of the decision-making.’
Professor Rolnik is careful to explain how she sought to gain an impression of housing need in the UK, which she did not only by studying background reports but by talking to a fairly large number of people in housing need themselves. Some of these were victims of the bedroom tax, such as disabled people or single parents, but others were Gypsies and Travellers, Catholics from Northern Ireland, migrants from the EU and refugees and asylum seekers. A flavour of her approach is given by her conclusion on those penalised by the bedroom tax, who are often ‘on the margins, facing fragility and housing stress, with little extra income to respond to this situation and already barely coping with their expenses’.
As she says, the right to housing is not ‘about a roof anywhere, at any cost, without any social ties’. Nor is it about ‘reshuffling’ people according to how many bedrooms they have at a particular time. If we treat housing in that way we forget its vital role in keeping kids in school, helping people get jobs and sustaining communities that work.
That a professor from Brazil can speak in terms that resonate with people who work in or are tenants of social housing in the UK is not surprising, especially given her practical background and the fact that she talked to real people while she was here. But it’s a depressing contrast with the language used not just by Mr Shapps and the party he represents, but with the current political discourse in Britain, in which the needs of the most marginal groups now hardly figure at all.
Rolnik also has something to say about homeownership. Here she can speak with authority as Brazil (like much of Latin America) has a higher proportion of homeowners than Britain. Yet she far from venerates its importance. She says not only that the government has prioritised it ‘in detriment’ to other tenures but that it has been ‘taken over’ by the financial sector. Who could argue that either of those statements doesn’t apply to Britain since the 1980s?
A further factor that riles her is the cavalier way (although she is too polite to use that word) in which we squander public assets. Not replacing houses sold through the right to buy is one example. Flogging off public land for private development is another. Here is something else at odds with the Westminster discourse: someone who thinks there is a ‘public good’ which should be looked after, not simply handed over to private interests.
Shapps has convinced himself that Rolnik came with a political agenda. I think it’s more accurate to say that she came with a particular mindset: she knows all too well from her experience in Brazil that valuable public assets are created painfully and often in the teeth of obstacles like aversion to taxes and difficulties in collecting them, and corruption among those with access to the public purse. If the assets so laboriously established are in good shape and serving their purpose, why the hell would you flog them off? To do so merely shows a different political mindset, roughly summarised as ‘private=good and public=bad’.
Raquel Rolnik concludes her preliminary report by hoping that the full one will ‘continue the constructive dialogue’ established by her visit. So even in her last sentence she makes a point from which Grant Shapps could learn something. And the overall tone and emphasis of her report should be a lesson to all: there’s nothing like being obliged to see ourselves as others see us.

It would be good to hear more about the work of Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur on housing. Today she has hit the headlines in the UK for her investigation into the ‘shocking’ bedroom tax and her subsequent condemnation of it as a violation of the human right to adequate housing.
Rolnik also concluded that Britain’s previously good record on housing was being eroded by a failure to provide sufficient quantities of affordable social housing, and more recently by the impact of welfare reform. Her conclusions could carry weight during legal challenges to the bedroom tax because Britain is a signatory to the International Convention that includes adequate housing as a human right.
Lacking in class as always, Tory Chair(man) Grant Shapps failed to deal with the criticism but launched ‘a crude rant against Rolnik’. On the Today programme he said her comments were ‘an absolute disgrace’. He questioned the right of ‘a woman from Brazil’ to lecture British ministers. He said he intends to write to the UN Secretary General (who of course has nothing better to do) to demand an apology.
So who is this person who dares to be both a woman and a Brazilian?
Rolnik is not just some random person spouting her opinions. As an official (and unpaid) representative of the United Nations, an expert appointed by the Human Rights Council, she travels the world to examine, monitor and report to the General Assembly on whether the signatories to the Convention are fulfilling their responsibilities (to ensure that their populations have adequate housing as an important component of the standard of living and their human rights). She looks at cases of violations against the right to adequate housing, performs official missions to specific countries to investigate the status of the right to housing, and submits an annual report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and the UN General Assembly in New York.
She is one of 30 thematic rapporteurs, who do not represent the countries of their nationality because their independence is fundamental to ensure their impartiality
During 2012, countries she commented on included Serbia, Cambodia, Israel, Italy, Panama, Portugal, Nigeria, Colombia, Egypt, France, Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Russia, India and Nepal.
Humbly I submit that Rolnik is both more important and more expert than G Shapps.
As the man who championed the ending of security of tenure in social housing, Shapps will be particularly annoyed to read her recent report on security of tenure as a component of adequate housing. The report discusses the global tenure insecurity crisis that manifests itself in many ways, including forced evictions, displacement resulting from development, natural disasters and conflicts and land grabbing.
Shapps, and the rest of the British Government, should be ashamed that in the midst of such a global housing crisis the special rapporteur thought it necessary to come to the UK to see the horrendous implications of the Government’s policies and the vindictive and punitive bedroom tax. It is David Cameron who should be apologising for Shapps’ intemperate and disrespectful outburst.
From Rolnik’s report: her key conclusions on the UK:

First, and foremost, I would suggest that the so-called bedroom tax be suspended immediately and be fully re-evaluated in light of the evidence of its impacts on the right to adequate housing and general well-being of many vulnerable individuals.
Secondly, I would recommend that the Government puts in place a system of regulation for the private rent sector, including clear criteria about affordability, access to information and security of tenure.
Thirdly, I would encourage a renewal of the Government’s commitment to significantly increasing the social housing stock and a more balanced public funding for the stimulation of supply of social and affordable housing which responds to the needs.

You can see various of Rolnik’s speeches on Youtube by just typing in her name, and her work is recorded on a special UN website Housing is a Human Right.

One consistent theme on Red Brick has been the way the right and the media create hostility towards various groups in society, especially people on benefits, social housing tenants, and immigrants.
The British Social Attitudes Survey records and seeks to explain changes in attitudes over the 30 years it has been taking place, and the latest report contains some fascinating material.
Some areas of the welfare state continue to attract huge support, especially the Government’s responsibility to provide a decent standard of living for the elderly (96%) and to provide health care (97%). What has slipped over the last 20 years is public support for the proposition that it is the Government’s responsibility to provide a decent standard of living for the unemployed, down from 81% in 1985 to 59% (but still a healthy majority). Negative views about spending on benefits have grown consistently BUT there has been a reversal of the trend in the recent past, with support for extra spending on benefits rising from 28% in 2011 to 34% in 2012.
Attitudes to tax and spending have stayed remarkably consistent over the 30 years that the Survey has been conducted. The smallest proportion are those who want to reduce taxes and spend less and the majority of people waver between wanting to maintain the status quo and wanting to increase spending. There is some evidence that support for spending rises when the Tories are in power and falls when Labour is in power, presumably a reaction to the policies of the Governments.
There is also a remarkably enduring and consistent attitude towards inequality. In 1985, 69% said it was the Government’s responsibility to reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. This has wavered between 63% and 72% since, but in 2012 was back to 69%. Eight in 10 say the income gap is too large.
When asked what their highest and second highest priorities for public spending are, there is a huge leaning towards health followed by education (71% and 61%) with all other areas of spending trailing well behind. In the 1980s and early 1990s, housing was said to be a priority by more than 20%, but that declined to only 10% by 2003, since when it has climbed again, now up to 15%. It has normally been the third highest priority.
The authors conclude: ‘overall, the British public does not appear to have become less collectivist over time in its support for government activities and spending.’ However, ‘we see markedly reduced support for the government’s role in providing support for certain disadvantaged groups, particularly the unemployed.’
The public view that benefits are too high and discourage work strengthened considerably during the period of the last Labour Government. The report notes that ‘individuals are highly sensitive to cues that portray benefit recipients in an ‘undeserving’ light’ and finds that such ‘cues’ can actively crowd out other values. This, says the report, ‘has major implications for how the mass media and political elites should frame public support for welfare policies’.  
The report concludes: ‘There is some evidence that we may be approaching a turning point, however. The 2012 data indicate that austerity and the experience of cuts to social security may be changing public attitudes towards a more sympathetic view of benefit claimants; in particular we see significantly more support for welfare spending in general, and for spending on unemployment benefits in particular, than we did in 2011.’
Evidence like this has major implications for Labour policy in the run up to the Election. Media hostility to public spending on social security is not generally reflected in the population, who are more liberal than the commentators. There is a specific issue concerning the unemployed, who have tended to lose public support, with fewer people giving priority to unemployment benefits and a majority of people still believing that people can get jobs if they want to. Labour’s compulsory jobs guarantee seems well tuned to tackling these changing views.
Many of the conclusions of the survey run contrary to the modern narrative of a more selfish people who are only concerned about the money in their own pockets. One lesson for Labour might be that it needs to be more bold and speak above the heads of the media and more directly to people, to enable it to connect with the more liberal and collectivist attitudes that, despite all the propaganda, still dominate amongst the public.

This week is the National Housing Federation’s ‘Yes to Homes Week’. Their imaginative campaign is designed to raise local awareness of the need for more homes and to get local support, especially from councillors, for new developments. Through the campaign website you can register your support, get campaign ideas and download a guide for councillors.

The campaign is aimed at councillors from all the political parties and it is intriguing that the website carries articles from spokespeople from the main three. Planning Minister Nick Boles’ piece was replicated elsewhere in the media in a flurry of media coverage earlier in the week: some interpreted his article as ‘a challenge to Cameron’. Well Cameron clearly has a lot of challenges on his plate at the moment as his rush to war has reduced Britain to the role of ‘a little island that no-one listens to’ (if you believe the Russians).

Boles begins his piece with a passionate declaration on the importance of a secure home – ‘one of the most fundamental human urges’. ‘If you know that you are likely to stay in your home for some time, you are more likely to meet your neighbours, support local community groups and get involved in local schools’. But here’s the rub: ‘That’s why Conservative Prime Ministers… have believed in home ownership’. He then talks about reform to the planning system, ‘Help to Buy’, and land supply.

Boles wastes not one word in his article on rented homes, which is surprising given that home ownership is in decline, there is huge interest in ‘Buy to Let’ and there is huge demand for social housing. He says nothing about affordability except in the context of ‘Help to Buy’, which most economists think will only put prices up at a time when wages are static. He apparently sees no contradiction between the ‘human urge’ for a secure home and the Government’s removal of security of tenure from new affordable rented homes. And he appears to have forgotten that Macmillan as Housing Minister and later Prime Minister built a huge number of council houses as well as homes for owner occupation: he believed in a balanced tenure policy. It must be that modern renters lack this ‘fundamental human urge’.

Labour’s Jack Dromey takes a more balanced view of tenure and the range of housing needs than Boles: ‘Millions locked out of home ownership, spiralling waiting lists for social tenants, rising homelessness and soaring rents’. The challenge to build more covers homes for rent as well as homes for first time buyers, to bring escalating prices and rents under control, and his proposals include major reform of the private rented sector. He emphasises the economic benefits of building homes and the wider social benefits as well in terms of health and quality of life. He uses examples of Labour Councils pledging to build more and to regulate private landlords. And he identifies the increasingly vital challenge in housing – that 95p in every £ spent on housing goes in housing benefit and only 5p goes on building homes.

Tim Farron, President of the LibDems, has a tricky path to tread as he leads a party with an excellent housing policy which has forgotten to take any of its policies into Government. It’s interesting that he focuses on rural housing, and I agree with his comments about the importance of providing more affordable homes in villages and his comments that the huge number of second homes in some areas – over 40% in some parts of North Cornwall – is destroying communities. Unlike Boles, he at least appears to have heard of rented housing and supports an increase in council house building. But his view the ‘we have the power to fix this’ and ‘there are things that national government can do’ are rather at odds with the supine way that the LibDems have let the Tories run away with housing policy within the Coalition.

Councillors of all Parties can register support for the ‘Yes to Homes’ campaign and get the guide here.

It’s a truism that all current settlements were once new settlements. Were there NIMBYs when Gloucester was founded by the Romans, when Oxford was established in Saxon times or when Henry 1 established a monastery and a new settlement at a crossing of the Thames in what became Reading? How is it that people living in existing settlements feel so strongly that they have the right to veto anyone new coming along, when their own property was once a new one that might have infringed on someone else?
A new report from the Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF) examines what conditions are necessary to make it possible to create new settlements in England. The report is a good summary of the current, but decades old, problem of housing under-supply. It argues that there is a multiplicity of reasons for the chronic failure of housebuilding – not just planning, not just restrictive green belt policies, not just the profit-motivated policies of the volume housebuilders, not just local opposition, not just lack of effective demand, not just the petty restrictions on borrowing by councils to build new homes – but all of these things and more contribute to the problem. It reinforces my view that there is no silver bullet, and that undersupply can only be solved by a truly comprehensive and strategic approach. It often seems that those who obsess about any one issue seem to be doing so to divert blame from themselves (it’s not us, say the builders, it’s the planners; it’s not us, say the planners, it’s the lenders; and it’s everyone but us, says the Government, because we’ve deregulated the system and cut red tape).
The report traces the story of new settlements over the last century and a half, from the imaginative interventions of philanthropists like Cadbury and Rowntree, to the inspiration of Ebeneezer Howard and the Garden City movement, to the post-WW2 overspill programme, to the new and expanded towns movement, to the unfulfilled ambition of the Eco-town programme. Whether or not previous residents opposed the development of Letchworth or Welwyn Garden Cities I don’t know, but it is hard to imagine them being built under current conditions.
To try to answer the question ‘how can we create the conditions for new substantial settlements to be built?’, BSHF’s recommends better understanding of the impact of recent new settlements, especially in the overspill and new town periods, trying to develop political consensus, the creation of a single national strategic spatial plan for England, strengthening the ‘duty to co-operate’ in planning, establishing a powerful body with powers to manage disagreements between authorities, making sufficient public finance available for upfront infrastructure, setting up new settlement partnerships involving communities, clear Government messages to set the debate, and better communication of housing supply problems to the public.
Most of these things will help, but I was left with the feeling that the recommendations were rather anodyne and inoffensive, perhaps because such a wide range of actors, including Government, were involved in the BSHF’s consultation. The report tiptoes around key issues like land prices, risk-averse profit-maximising builders and the Government’s dilution of policies requiring affordable housing to be built. It acknowledges that more needs to be done at the ‘larger than local’ level but fails to identify the Government’s abandonment of regional spatial strategies as an error. RSSs were not a roaring success, and there were major tensions around their proposals, but they held promise as a creative mix of top-down and bottom-up and needed another decade to be fully effective. They were far more likely to achieve something than the current confused approach that ranges from central Government hectoring, petty interference and expensive bribes to localism gone mad.
In city or in country, I would be inclined to be a NIMBY too if a modern developer package of expensive but profitable houses and a trivial amount of affordable housing for local people came my way. Under current policies, I would be concerned that any new settlements would be little more than a few acres of executive homes within reach of a fast train to London, unlike the genuinely mixed communities that were created in the Garden Villages or the New Towns.
Although the report is about new settlements, it would be wrong for anyone to see this area of policy as ‘the solution’, any more than the other current hobby horse, building on green belt land. The search for a silver bullet invariably ends in failure. We need policies that will tackle the shortage in all types of areas: intensifying existing cities and towns as well as expanding existing settlements, especially those with good communications, and building new ones. None of these is enough on its own.
Even in the most hard-pressed place, London, successive land capacity studies have shown more land to be available or potentially available than many thought possible. However it is often expensive or difficult to develop, suffers endless delays, or needs intensive work on site assembly. More imagination would also help: for example, London and other cities are replete with single storey buildings with nothing on top and tens of thousands of acres of car parks (I have never understood why cars need to be stored at ground level when people can be stacked on top of each other, it should be the other way round). Large retailers like Tesco and Sainsbury’s are beginning to see the potential above their stores and this breakthrough could lead to thousands of new homes being provided.
As regional planning has been abandoned (except in London, where it has become a negative force under Boris Johnson), the BSHF’s proposal for an English national spatial strategy is an intriguing idea. There is a strong case for a long term national infrastructure plan, including housing, that looks 20 or even 50 years ahead. I might be more convinced by the case for HS2 if I believed the Government’s claim that it will help reduce the gap between the north and south (rather than just making it easier to get to London). The answer to the questions ‘how many new settlements do we need, and where?’ may emerge from the bigger question ‘what do we want the country to look like geographically in 50 years’ time?’

Shelter’s latest report, written by Robbie de Santos, makes a strong case for putting shared ownership at the centre of housing policy.
It argues that schemes like Help to Buy will fail to make homes affordable for the majority of people on low to middle incomes, but that a more flexible and integrated approach to shared ownership could bring an element of home ownership within the reach of a majority of people who are excluded from the market now. This ‘squeezed middle’ is defined for the purposes of the report as people falling within deciles 2-5 in the income distribution.
Shelter identifies a number of reasons why shared ownership has never really caught on – despite the hullabaloo there are still only 174,000 shared owners in England. New schemes with different eligibility criteria have been invented, been marketed, and been replaced with great regularity, the only common factor being complexity and failure to connect with people. The mortgage market has never fully responded to the existence of shared ownership, and neither has the second hand estate agency market: buying and selling remains risky and difficult. Shelter say that the tenure has never had sufficient scale to move from being ‘niche’ housing to becoming ‘a functional middle market’ and that a single scheme with common eligibility rules is essential. They also argue for making smaller ownership shares available – down to as little as 12% of the equity.
In housing market terms, the report makes a lot of sense. Conventional home ownership has been declining for a decade now – a trend started long before the financial collapse, although intensified by it – and social housing is increasingly unavailable. That means many more people – most young people – are being pushed into private renting despite the fact that this does not accord with their preferences. Home ownership rates have been held up by ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, estimated to involve gifts from parents of £1.2 billion and loans of £800 billion a year since 2005.
The report contains a lot of interesting and detailed analysis of affordability, looking at the Government’s Help to Buy scheme as well as different variants of shared ownership, on the basis of which it concludes:

Looking across the full span of low to middle income households (deciles two to five), almost three quarters (73 per cent) would be able to afford a three bedroom home with a 50 percent share – but 95 per cent would be able to afford a three bedroom home with a 12 per cent share.

So far, so good. But the report moves onto dodgier ground when it argues for a long-term commitment to making the sector a mainstream option: it calls for £12 billion to be committed to shared ownership over 4 years by the next Government, enough to provide 600,000 new homes. Normally I support calls for more money to be spent on building more homes, but this is more money than the current housing programme in its entirety. An average grant of around £20,000 per home would be needed to allow providers the flexibility to offer the option of very low equity shares: this puts it in the same subsidy territory as the appalling ‘affordable rent’ product.
Shelter say that their call for a £12 billion programme would stand alongside their other demands to build rented homes and to reform the market. But they don’t comment on the relative merits of the programmes and where the priority should lie. How much is it justified to spend on policies which by definition will not help the poorest 10-20% of households rather than programmes that will directly benefit them? Does it matter who gets the homes if more shared ownership homes could be built than social rented homes for the same budget? Isn’t it just building that matters? (Interestingly, the same argument that is applied to justify ‘affordable rent’)?
Herein lies the dilemma around all forms of intermediate housing that require subsidy. It is right that public housing policy should support a range of housing options targeted at different people who are suffering the consequences of market failure. But it is also right that the highest priority for public support should be the provision of social housing to assist those with the most extreme housing needs. This was a knotty problem for Ken Livingstone when he became Mayor of London in 2000, and he eventually compromised with a formula that, within the 50% of London’s new housing that he required to be affordable, there should be a split of 70:30 between social rent and intermediate housing (mostly shared ownership).
Public policy should start by aiming to meet the needs of the poorest or most deprived. The only programme that does that is the direct provision of social rented homes to people in the greatest need. In the final analysis, the case for more shared ownership is not made if it comes at the expense of those waiting for social rented homes.

OK so it is the silly season in politics. Ed Miliband went on holiday – big story. David Cameron went on holiday – even bigger story because he was photographed with his top off. The Daily Express reported on a cure for cancer and a conspiracy to murder Princess Diana. House prices went up again. Homelessness went up again. Eric pickles talked about bins. Various TV companies filled the schedules with documentaries about carefully selected poor people and people desperate for a home.
But it was New Statesman that provided the highlight of the month by reporting on a game produced by UsvsTh3m which asks you to guess the price of various houses.  The game randomly provides pictures of 10 houses that have recently been sold, and you have to insert the price. After 10 goes, you get a score.
After a lifetime working in housing all over the country, my score was depressingly low. House prices are either much higher or much lower than I think. Generally they were higher than I thought all over the country. I seemed to be more accurate in London just by assuming every property was worth more than a million.
So I eventually managed a score of about 70% after previous goes getting around 60%.
Have a go and see how you do. It is genuinely illuminating and shows how bonkers the Government is to try to engineer another house price bubble before the Election.

By Sheila Spencer
Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard lots of big ideas from Eric Pickles: why local councils should not discourage people from allowing others to park in their drives and the very strange idea of allowing some parking on double yellow lines (no suggestion about which places this could apply to or what to do if this causes hazards for others),
But he has saved the best – and the most superfluous, it seems to me – for the housing world. He seems to think that the worst problem we’ve got in housing is bins getting in the way (Govt needs to tackle “the ghastly gauntlet of bin-blighted streets and driveways”). He even goes so far as to lay the blame at the foot of the Labour Government, who says, had policies about bins which “made families’ lives hell”.
There’s plenty of really big stories that I would like Eric Pickles to start making statements about, ones that affect significant numbers of people in rather more profound ways. For a start, picking up the bins theme, Homeless Link and Broadway tell us that a number of homeless people have recently died as a result of sleeping in bins
The risk of death in this way is not a rare occurrence: in every town and city where I have looked into homelessness and rough sleeping, someone has mentioned to me that people are known to sleep in large bins, usually behind shopping centres. They are often at risk of being crushed as the bins are tipped up to be emptied.
Then there’s the number of rough sleepers who get assaulted. Homeless charity Crisis says that compared to the general public, homeless people are 13 times more likely to have experienced violence and 47 times more likely to be victims of theft. The press is full of stories about assaults on rough sleepers; in Cambridge, there were 5 times as many homeless people reported as victims of attack in 2012-13 than in 201-11.
I also wanted to mention the state of some of Britain’s private rented sector accommodation. In my area, it’s not bins left on the pavement that makes me depressed about where I live, it’s the terrible state of repair, cleanliness, and safety that affects not only the tenants but those living around them. With few private tenants staying for longer than the initial shorthold tenancy period, there is little commitment to, or indeed incentive for, tidying up the outside of the place. So collections of old bottles, cans, papers, and letters are all too common on the path just outside the property, and gardens are very rarely looked after. And as well as the common hazards caused by broken steps and gates and letter boxes which trap your fingers, (familiar to all Labour Party canvassers and leafletters), there’s the occasional house with the wood canopy or stone render above the front door, ready to drop onto you as you stand innocently waiting for an answer to your knock.

But for tenants, particularly those in terraced houses divided into flats, some features are much more dangerous. Walking around London, I’ve seen the most frightening-looking electrics outside flats above shops, garden walls leaning over at a terrific angle, almost ready to go, and alleyways between houses full of rubbish.
I’ve just done some research into the private hostels and Bed & Breakfast places that homeless people have to resort to. If you want to hear some of the worst stories, try this Big Issue in the North report , which highlights the huge gap in regulation that results in, as we saw, holes in the ceiling, landings full of old furniture, undecorated rooms, big hostels with no cooking facilities, and places where sexual abuse and drug pushing can be not just allowed but even actively promoted by the managers.
So Eric, how about statements promising to tackle the state of some of disrepair and terrible conditions in the worst of our private rented sector, or doing more to end the tragedy of homelessness? Leave aside the great problem of bins in the middle of footpaths, or the worry of what to do about people being allowed to park in people’s driveways, and put some thought into tackling the real housing crises in our country, why don’t you? There are real blots on the landscape that need your attention.