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Guest blog post by Romin Sutherland

The effect that the Benefit Cap will have on homelessness and the use of temporary accommodation is a complicated and confusing area, but as most of the current legislation remains unchanged, it is possible to envisage the likely outcomes for local authorities’ duties and resources.  With the Benefit Cap reducing larger families’ housing benefit to virtually nothing, it is not as simple as saying “get a job or move to cheaper accommodation”.  As local authorities will remain under an obligation to provide these households with affordable accommodation, they cannot simply move them out of their jurisdiction without keeping them in expensive temporary accommodation under a homelessness duty.  The reasons for this will be given below, but it suffices to say that had the government wanted this policy to work they should have changed the rules around homelessness and/or Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs).

A local authority has an on-going duty to provide homeless families with temporary accommodation (TA) and this must be both suitable and affordable.  Homeless households affected by the Benefit Cap who are already in TA will remain on the authorities’ housing register no matter what happens, as long as they went into TA before the 8^th Nov 2012. After that the household could be discharged into the private rented sector under the new powers included within the Localism Act, but again this must be affordable, so for larger families who would be left with no or virtually no housing benefit, local authorities will have to keep them in TA because they cannot rely on another authority making the property affordable for them through a DHP.  This is because a DHP can only be paid when the housing benefit claim and the DHP are within the same authority, and the only way for a local authority to do this is through the TA regime, which allows housing benefit to be paid to a household placed in another authority.

This is the key point that the government has failed to grasp.  How can a local authority discharge to another authority, when even that authority is not affordable?  The answer is that they cannot.  A local authority can place such a household anywhere (subject to suitability), but they need to use their own DHP money, and that requires an active housing benefit claim in their own authority, which can only be achieved through the provision of TA.

Furthermore, such a household would remain ‘homeless’ as any placement would still be TA, so they would have access to that local authorities’ social housing register.  Until the household is discharged they are still covered by that local authorities’ allocation policy, and unless that authority introduced a new policy to exclude them, they would be able to bid on social housing, even though they have had their housing benefit capped.  As the Localism Act left the ‘reasonable preference’ categories with the Housing Act, which include homelessness, intact, any such change of policy would be liable to legal challenge in the Courts.

An expensive local authority like Westminster might try to place a homeless household outside of London or in a cheaper borough, but obviously suitability still applies.   This means that if a household is engaged with local services or has another reason for needing to remain in the borough, perhaps because they have caring responsibilities, Westminster would not be able to place them outside of their area without acting unlawfully.

If an out of borough placement would not be suitable, Westminster would have to pay to keep them and could not force them out. It is when this group becomes too large that Westminster’s DHP money will not be sufficient and they will have to make use of their general funds.  Also note that most local authorities have leased their TA from private landlords so they have on-going financial liabilities that they cannot escape without following whatever arrangements they have agreed.  This makes out of borough placements even less likely, as an empty TA property would be a costly and inefficient use of a local authorities’ resources.

Similar problems will also arise for social services departments that are forced to house ineligible or intentionally homeless families under section 17 of the Children Act.  Although the numbers will be smaller, the consequences are starker.  Section 17 covers “children in need” and was never intended to cover housing costs.  However, if necessary social services can and do use it for this purpose.  But what happens when these households have been housed?  Does this go on indefinitely?  If it does there will be less money available for social services to meet their legal obligations to vulnerable children and families.  Another unintended and disastrous outcome for local authorities, not to mention the disadvantaged who rely most heavily on them for support.

Ultimately we have no idea what local authorities are going to do. It is likely that households in TA will be kept in their local areas if engaged with services, but when and under what circumstances local authorities will try to move them out, we simply do not know.  I doubt that most local authorities know either.  My understanding is that they are watching the 4 pilot boroughs and have only just started the policy work on this issue, with the first step being the transfer of the responsibility for DHPs from the Benefits Department to Housing, if this has not already taken place.

As much as some local authorities would like to, they cannot get rid of large workless families entirely.  Things will be slightly different outside of London where authorities can prevent homelessness through small DHPs and where PRS placements are viable, but with families with 6 plus children, the same problems will arise.  A lone parent with 6 children will be receiving £482 a week excluding housing costs, leaving only £18 per week to secure a 3 or 4 bedroom property, which as you will know is not going to be possible anywhere in the UK.

Early indications from Enfield show that they are looking to move people voluntarily, but what tactics they will employ to convince people to move will need to be monitored.  Oddly there is every reason, and perhaps no other choice, but for families to make homelessness applications and go into TA.  Yes, they might be moved out of their local area, but at least they would retain an important link to their sending authority, and would have been forced to move in any case.

For those families, including pregnant and nursing mothers, who are simply unable to find appropriate employment, this policy simply doesn’t make sense, and there are structural problems with it that cannot be resolved without changes to existing legislation.  If the Local Housing Allowance caps of 2012 made preventing homelessness difficult, the Benefit Cap will make it impossible.

Romin Sutherland is NextDoor Project Manager for the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust (Z2K)

It is forty years since I first met Richard Crossley and we have been good friends and sometimes house mates since. We learned the community development ropes together in North Paddington in the 1970s and have debated the issues around housing and community empowerment at great length ever since. We were reunited in a work sense in 2008 when Richard was the lead officer based in Communities and Local Government setting up the National Tenant Voice (subsequently becoming its first and only chief executive) and I chaired the Government’s project group.

Recently Richard was diagnosed as having a rare form of incurable cancer and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. In a typical Richard way, he has decided to write about his illness, his diagnosis and subsequent thoughts and experiences, in a frank, and, to his friends, heart-rending blog called World turned upside down.

In his latest post, Richard reflects on his career in housing and community empowerment, and it is a privilege to re-post it here on Red Brick.   

By Richard Crossley

I’ve often thought it a shame that people don’t get to hear their own obituaries. Last Friday I was privileged to hear mine, when my work with social housing tenants was recognised at the TPAS Northern Awards ceremony held in Manchester.  The chairs of the four National Tenant Organisations (NTOs) each spoke about the work I’ve done and the influences I’ve had. It was a proud if somewhat embarrassing moment for me. I got chance to say a few words, and decided to focus on my career rather than my illness and treatment, so that it was more of a retirement recognition rather than a premature wake! So I thought in this blog I’d set out (probably slightly more coherently than I did in Manchester!) some reflections on my working life.

The first thing that shocked me was that my career spans over 40 years. 40 years!! Where did that time go? I can still remember clearly working for the Cyrenians with homeless people in Cambridge in 1971/72 – and after that for 4 years as a community worker in North Paddington. I can remember things I did around that time more clearly than what I did last week! Mine has not been a typical career – but reflecting on it I have no regrets at all about the career choices I’ve made (there’ve been occasions when I’ve thought I would have been better off with a more traditional career that would have enabled me like so many of my generation to retire early with a good pension, but given recent events for me that wouldn’t have been a good choice – following heart rather than head and bank account has definitely been the right move).

I think there’ve been two drivers to the choices I’ve made. The first has been about trying to achieve some sense of social justice. The second has been about supporting and enabling people without a voice to have some influence over their lives and their neighbourhoods. I’ve been employed by tenants’ organisations, voluntary organisations, local authorities, and spent many years with the ground-breaking Priority Estates Project (PEP), before going on a 5-year secondment to central government and then working with the NTOs to set up the National Tenant Voice.  Over that time I’ve worked with some amazing people: colleagues, housing professionals, councillors, civil servants……but most of all inspiring tenants and residents, many living in neglected housing and neighbourhoods seemingly abandoned by public services who despite all that have been willing to stick their heads above the parapet and strive to make a difference. They are the people who make me look back with pride and affection at my career.

Of course there have been disappointments along the way. Leaving aside specific events (such as the Coalition Government’s chopping of the National Tenant Voice, or the last government winding up the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit half way through its programme without any analysis of its lessons and achievements ) there are three I’d like to mention.

Firstly, we have a seemingly pathological capacity to re-invent wheels. Every new government – indeed every new minister when I was at DCLG – has to make his/her mark with something “new”.  (I do recognise of course that the current government isn’t so much re-inventing wheels as taking them off). Usually only the name and packaging is new, but it’s the refusal to recognise what’s gone before and learn from it and build on it that has been so frustrating. It’s not just governments that are guilty of this – there are many wheelwrights in the housing and regeneration professions.  

Secondly, there’s a growing reluctance amongst housing providers and others to invest in community development. Maybe it’s that community development isn’t properly understood, or maybe it doesn’t produce quick enough results. But I know it’s a process that’s likely to produce more sustainable results if done properly. I took such an approach in developing Charteris Neighbourhood Management Co-operative in Islington in the late 1970s, and with others on Belle Isle North estate in Leeds in the 1980s. Charteris Co-op is still going some 30+ years later, and Belle Isle has been successfully managed by tenants for around 20 years. Both these successes are the result of a community development approach.

Thirdly, in the new world of co-regulation, tenant panels and tenant management, I have a worry that we are becoming too caught up in partnership and management, and as a result are losing a radical edge. I know from all the work I’ve done supporting tenant management that it will only be effective where landlord and tenant work together, and I’ve been promoting partnership working as much as anyone. But I also know that at the end of the day power rests almost entirely with the landlord. I know of many examples where landlords resist tenants having any real say, or where independent tenant organisations no longer get funding. Sometimes a bit of agitation, a bit of direct action, a rattling of the cage, is needed to bring about change. It will be a shame if that radical tradition of the tenant movement is lost. I said at the TPAS Awards that they should consider an award for “agitator of the year”. Assuming I’m still around a year from now, I’d happily present such an award!

It seems like every day I read something about ‘subsidised council tenants’. A number of times on Red Brick we have tried to debunk the fallacies of who subsidises whom in housing and to show that council housing has been running a surplus for a number of years. Now there is also growing evidence that income from rents is being used to prop up the wider finances of a significant number of councils.
In a well-researched piece for LGC News last week, Keith Cooper quoted case after case of councils switching costs and charges from their general funds (GF) to their housing revenue accounts (HRA). He found examples of community centres, libraries and street lighting costs being switched, presumably so that they would appear as savings in besieged general funds.
Despite the fact that there is a statutory ring-fence around the HRA, designed to ensure that tenants’ rents are spent on the management and maintenance of their homes and paying off debt, wily council Finance Directors have for decades managed the interface between the GF and the HRA to meet their overall objectives. There is no suggestion that the practices described by Keith Cooper are illegal, most Finance Directors are well aware of the limits they must stay within, but they are certainly canny practice and there is insufficient transparency. In his article, Keith Cooper quotes one Director saying they are ‘creative’.
In councils where I have worked it would be possible to find up to 60 separate sets of financial transfers between the GF and the HRA, ranging from an apportionment of ‘overheads’ like the cost of democratic functions and senior management, through service level agreements for services like payroll or accountancy or personnel, to proxy contracts for services like grounds maintenance and additional refuse clearance. With such complex arrangements there is plenty of scope for ‘creativity’.
Tenants have in the past complained about some practices which in effect required them to pay twice – as rent payers and as council tax payers – for their services. For example, it was frequent practice for general street lighting and road maintenance to be paid for from the council tax, but for ‘estate roads’ and estate lighting to be charged to the HRA. Another example was for the HRA to be charged for ‘extra refuse collection’ when the service was little different from that provided elsewhere.
Although well-known in the tight world of Finance Directors, these arrangements were often unknown to tenants and leaseholders and normally remained unchallenged. The setting up of arms length management organisations (that then sought to control their own costs) cast light into this gloomy corner of housing finance, often for the first time. Some apportionments turned out to be little more than back-of-the envelope calculations, others more sophisticated attempts to identify real costs. In most cases a review of a council charge led to a saving for the ALMO.
The HRA ring-fence was originally introduced to prevent cross-subsidies going in the opposite direction – from the ratepayer to the rent payer. As rents rose faster than inflation and councils came under increasing pressure to keep rate increases down, so the balance gradually shifted in the other direction.
The pressure on councils is extremely intense at present so it is no surprise they are looking at a service that is currently slightly better resourced to help out. Tenants, if asked, may indeed support a portion of their rents going to aid services that they also benefit from, especially if the option is to lose them. One of Keith Cooper’s examples – a council which is charging its HRA to fund extra welfare rights officers – may indeed be providing exactly what tenants need most.
But there are longer term questions of fairness involved. Far from being subsidised,  tenants in some or even many places are cross-subsiding taxpayers. Council housing is a trading activity, the future of which will only be secure if it shown to pay its way. Individual tenants, as well as leaseholders, are increasingly being asked to pay service charges on top of their rent, charges which do not always count for housing benefit purposes, eating into their other income. And over the next few years tenants on housing benefit will see a growing gap between their HB and their actual rent as HB increases fall behind inflation and specific measures such as the bedroom tax are introduced. What seem like small sums at the margins of a high turnover account might become critical to some individuals.
If it is inevitable and understandable that councils will be ‘creative’ in current circumstances, it is important to retain the integrity of the HRA as a council housing trading account, on the principle that it exists to pay for tenants’ services from tenants’ rents. And as HRA surpluses are an important source of financial strength to enable new council housebuilding, the implications are much wider than they seem.

The welfare reform debate inside the Labour Party appears to have reached a crossroads ….. again. There are 3 basic positions vying for attention: those that think some cuts and reform are justified because of the deficit; those that think welfare reform is popular with the public therefore Labour should go along with it in order to win; and those that think the current scale of cuts are not justified economically and that, even if they were, they should not be targeted on the poorest.
I am in the third camp, but it does not mean that I am not in favour of major reform. And I am strongly in favour of Labour winning Elections. But the debate needs to go a lot deeper than the ‘how to deal with the deficit’ and ‘strivers versus scroungers’ arguments that Labour constantly gets pushed in to.
The welfare debate cannot be removed from the wider context of society. Income inequality has been rising since around 1980, according to figures produced by the Resolution Foundation’s Commission on Living Standards. In 1977, of every £100 value generated by the economy, £16 went to the bottom half of workers in wages. By 2010 this had declined to £12, down 26%. Annie Quick in the New Statesman this week comments that the bottom fifth would be £2000 a year better off – their incomes would have been 18% higher – if the income distribution had stayed the same.
The decisive shift towards greater inequality came in the 1980s under Thatcher; the trend continued under Labour and there can be no doubt it has accelerated again under Cameron. The prevalence of sub-minimum-wage jobs (where there is a scandalous lack of enforcement), devices like zero hours contracts, self-employment and labour casualisation, and pay cuts, mean that there has been a substantial squeeze on wages at the lower end of the scale. This squeeze on wages is now in turn being used to drive the case for cutting benefits: the Tory line that people should not get more out of work than in work (they don’t but that’s a different point) has gained a lot of traction. The Tories have engineered the position where the in-work poor and the out-of-work poor are racing each other towards penury.
In housing, there is a strong case for reform of the housing benefit system but it is nowhere near the argument that Iain Duncan Smith puts. We should start by repudiating the Tory narrative that HB is ‘out of control’. The size of the HB bill is the direct and predictable consequence of rising unemployment and policy decisions taken over many years – the failure to build in response to the collapse in affordability of home ownership; the minimal building of benefit-light homes for social rent; the sale of council houses which become privately rented at twice the rent or more; the policy of pushing more poor people into private renting generally; demographic change. The most rapid increase in HB claims has been from people who are in work: it must annoy the Tories to realise that the more they complain about HB the more working people realise that they can claim it – and the higher the bill goes.
That we have ended up in a bad place is undoubtedly true – 95% of the money going into housing goes to help people pay the rent rather than building homes – but we are here as a consequence of deliberate policy. Governments have wanted to marketise housing, increase rents and, in the words of former Tory Housing Minister Sir George Young, ‘let housing benefit take the strain’.
This week’s statement by Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne that the way to get the housing benefit bill down is to build more affordable homes is therefore very welcome. This is a genuinely radical shift in thinking and emphasis and leads to potential reforms that deserve strong support. Byrne told the Evening Standard that the initial step must be to get people into work through the jobs guarantee and ‘to show how savings can be made on housing benefit by increasing the amount of homes there are for people to go to.’ He said: ‘Billions are spent with private landlords yet we ask nothing in return. We are spending £24 billion on housing but hardly building any houses. No wonder rents are soaring. We simply cannot go on like this.’
Labour should put its energy into thinking through practical policies that achieve a switch from benefits to building. A coherent switching policy would work in tandem with principled opposition to the appalling bedroom tax and the clearance of poor people from more affluent areas. The Tories are offering punishment of the poor, Labour could offer a genuine alternative – cutting benefits by putting people back to work and building homes that people can live in with much smaller benefit support.
We should not pretend it is easy. In 2012 the IPPR report Together at Home recommended a radical shift in public spending away from benefits and back towards bricks and mortar. Finding the precise mechanisms for achieving this has its difficulties because the investment has to be made before the savings in benefit can be realised. In my view, IPPR went down the wrong path by suggesting that this could be achieved by what they called ‘progressive localism’, rolling all housing budgets together and then localising them, leaving it to local discretion what the balance between benefits and investment should be in any particular area. As with council tax benefit, this would lead to an entirely unhelpful postcode lottery and potentially bizarre conflicting policies within the same housing market areas.
The answer lies in matching our housing aims closely to our aims to achieve growth in the economy. The collapse in construction activity was central to the second dip of the recession and almost caused the third. The sector continues to decline despite all the talk and Government meddling with planning and the rest. Labour has to be even bolder in its commitment to affordable housebuilding. A modest increase in investment subsidies, say back to 2008 levels, could generate a large council housebuilding programme and help housing associations to build many more genuinely affordable homes at social rents. The multiplier effects would give the economy a major boost in the right way: creating lots of jobs without generating inflation and without sucking in imports. By rehousing people in receipt of housing benefit (in work or not) currently living in expensive private rented homes (and in particular temporary accommodation), the benefit bill would start to come down.
Housing investment could be the way out of Labour’s welfare reform dilemma. We could achieve cuts in the cost of benefits. We could have an attractive policy based on getting people off the dole into real jobs. And we could shift decisively away from policies that punish people for being poor.

The 20^th Anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence was an appropriate day for the House of Lords to reject the Government’s attempt to repeal the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s General Duty. It has since been reported that the Government may accept defeat and end their plans to remove the duty. If confirmed, that would be a significant victory.
Section 3 of the Equality Act 2006 sets out the central mission of the Commission, to fulfil its functions so as to encourage and support the development of a fairer society. Without the general duty the EHRC would retain its ability to report on its specific functions and work but would be much less able to report and commentate on the overall progress of society towards fairness. The attempt at repeal was contained in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill currently going through Parliament.
The proposed repeal is one of a number of Coalition attacks on equalities work. It is also downgrading the importance of equality impact assessments in the consideration of Government decisions, it is ‘reviewing’ the general Public Sector Equalities Duty, and it has slashed the EHRC’s budget from £70m at inception to less that £27m in 2015.
These ‘reforms’ did not come out of a principled review of the Equalities legislation or its effectiveness but from the so-called ‘Red Tape Challenge’. To have the whole structure of equalities law and implementation in this country reduced to an argument about red tape was extraordinarily offensive. It also told us a lot about this Government.
Despite standing next to Doreen Lawrence at Stephen’s memorial service, David Cameron has led the attack. In his speech to that bastion of fairness, the CBI, in November 2012, Cameron attacked ‘bureaucratic rubbish’. He said the Government would free up decision-making by cutting back on judicial reviews, reducing government consultations, and ‘stopping the gold-plating of legislation’. His example of ‘gold-plating’ was the Equalities Act and he cited the ‘reams of pointless reports’, by which he meant equality impact assessments. After all, he said, ‘We have smart people in Whitehall who consider equalities issues while they’re making the policy.’ Well, they hadn’t done very well in the previous century had they?
There is great concern that the Government has its eyes on the repeal of the Public Sector Equality Duty, the general obligation on all public bodies to have regard to equalities issues in fulfilling their functions. It is undertaking a review. The duty, as the TUC has argued, is particularly critical in a time of cuts, where the impact of reduced services is likely to be felt by some groups more than others. The TUC has produced an excellent guide.  It has its roots in the Macpherson Inquiry which found the Metropolitan Police to be ‘institutionally racist’ in the aftermath of Stephen’s murder.
Equalities work is being constantly undermined. Eric Pickles evidently thinks equality impact assessments and equalities monitoring are intrusive and unnecessary. Defeating the Government’s attempt to remove the broad remit of the EHRC is important, but they should be aware that they will face an even bigger battle if they come back with a proposed repeal of the Public Sector Equalities Duty.

George Osborne may have shed a tear for Mrs Thatcher this week, but a reading of the Treasury Select Committee’s report on the Budget should make him feel even more miserable, as serious questions were raised about his biggest-ever housing initiative, the so-called ‘Help to Buy’ scheme.
Help to Buy has two parts.

• First it is proposed to introduce equity loans, of up to 20% of the value of a new build home, repayable when the house is sold. This is a major extension of the First Buy scheme, and it is hoped that it will stimulate additional supply of new homes by boosting effective demand. The scheme is not restricted to first time buyers, the maximum home value will be £600,000, and there is no income cap. It is expected to last 3 years and Government estimates it will support 74,000 homebuyers at a cost of £3.5 billion.
• Second, it is proposed to offer mortgage guarantees, aiming to tackle the scarcity of high loan-to-value mortgages by providing guarantees to lenders offering mortgages to people with small deposits (5-20%), whether first time buyers or not. This new intervention, which is also meant to be temporary for 3 years from January 2014, is potentially much bigger than equity loans: it could involve £12 billion which will in turn support £130 billion of mortgages. The Government would be liable to take a hit for a share of the value in cases of default, but lenders will have to pay a fee for the guarantee in each case, which it is hoped will make the scheme self-financing.

The Treasury Select Committee raises a number of serious concerns about the schemes, which it says have not been answered by Osborne or the Treasury. Among them are:

• They are nervous that there could be a repetition of the experience in the USA where a system of mortgage guarantees (through the Fannie May and Freddie Mac arrangements) effectively stacked-up vast quantities of ‘sub-prime’ mortgages (ie to people who basically could not afford them) – a first cause of the credit crunch.
• Help to Buy incentivises the Treasury to maintain or enhance property prices because the taxpayer has a vested interest in avoiding falls in value.
• The backdrop of around 8% of existing mortgage payers already struggling to pay their mortgages, to the extent that they benefit from ‘forbearance’ measures. Lenders may not be willing to continue or to extend these arrangements to new more marginal borrowers, especially if there is a general increase in interest rates over the next 2-3 years. Repossession would therefore become a more common outcome.
• There are no figures on the likely number of beneficiaries of the guarantee scheme and in particular no numbers on the number of first time buyers who might benefit.
• Although the scheme excludes buy-to-let and interest-only mortgages, there has been no clarity on why the purchase of second homes has not been excluded.

There is a justification for further Government intervention in the mortgage market, but the case is strongest for offering specific help with deposits to first time buyers in ways which are directly linked to additional supply. No case has been made for a general scheme across the whole market, mainly because a general increase in demand (the ability of people to finance purchases) without a concomitant increase in supply is only likely to result in an increase in prices. This was the experience with the old system of mortgage interest tax relief.
The Select Committee quotes with approval Martin Wolf  of the Financial Times, who wrote:  “This is good politics and horrendous economics….. The government is encouraging people to leverage themselves up to the hilt in order to buy what is already likely to be overpriced property and, as a result of this policy, is likely to become still more so. This is irresponsible enough. But worse, the government will probably now find itself permanently using its balance sheet to support risky housing finance, as the US has done. The market cannot sensibly finance such high loan-to-value ratios. But this fundamental lesson from the crisis is now being thrown away.”
The Select Committee is also concerned as to how the schemes will be reported in the national accounts. It seems that neither of the schemes will be classified as traditional public spending. Loans can be repaid or are covered by a share in the equity, recoverable when the property is sold, but a similar argument could be put for council housing, which is, of course, treated differently. Guarantees might never be called in, but they do add to Government’s contingent liabilities. This is the second time the Treasury has been highly flexible on the matter of guarantees in housing, and it is welcome that they have moved away from the traditional view that guarantees should be counted as expenditure until proved otherwise. We hope to see yet more flexibility, especially in the treatment of council housing in Government definitions of public borrowing. One thing is clear: however the new scheme is accounted for, it tends to destroy the argument that there is no money left.
Osborne’s major housing initiative does not reflect the supposed priority of doing everything possible to boost housing supply. The Treasury Select Committee is right to conclude that that is where the Chancellor’s main concentration should have been. And it is also why it is right to see Help to Buy as a political and not an economic ploy.

The blurb advertising the upcoming Chartered Institute of Housing London Conference starts with a surprising statement. It says:

“Housing is key in delivering the wider economic and social ambitions for London and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson is committed to tackling the capital’s many housing challenges.”

Really? Let’s test this notion by looking at the recently published housebuilding and homelessness statistics.
At the mayoral Election last year, Boris Johnson took considerable credit for the scale of affordable housebuilding in London during his first four year term, despite the evidence that the homes being built were those approved by Ken Livingstone prior to his defeat in 2008 and funded by Gordon Brown prior to his defeat in 2010. The Coalition ended Labour’s National Affordable Housing Programme (NAHP) in March 2011 (subsequent starts under that heading were those committed before the programme ended). Instead it brought in its own Affordable Housing Programme, which introduced the so-called ‘affordable rent’ product (at rents of up to 80% of market levels). Johnson made substantial claims about how many (unaffordable) affordable homes he would provide during his current term.
The latest statistics showing GLA-funded housing starts and completions makes depressing reading. Homes started under Labour’s NAHP have suffered massive but predictable decline as the programme concluded, down from over 15,000 new affordable homes (defined as social rent, intermediate rent and affordable home ownership) in each of 2009/10 and 2010/11 to a tiny 340 in 2011/12 and 411 in 2012/13.
In theory (well, Boris-style promises) this programme has been replaced by a bright shiny new scheme. But the new Johnson AHP started only 3,659 new homes in 2011/12 and only 8,923 in 2012/13. Even affordable home ownership, which Johnson supposedly supports enthusiastically, achieved only 4,187 starts in the two years 2011/12 and 2012/13 compared to 7,124 in 2009/10 and 2010/11 under the Livingstone plans.  The decline is most severe in social rent, with most of the new AHP homes being at the much higher ‘affordable rent’. Characterised by confusion, uncertainty and difficult negotiations with housing providers over viability, the new AHP suffered severe delays. As a result, the programme is heavily backloaded (ie most homes will be provided in the final year) and there are growing and severe doubts about delivery.
Among the boroughs, only Brent and Tower Hamlets started more than 1,000 affordable homes (on the widest definition) in 2012/13 using GLA money. One of the historically strongest boroughs in terms of providing affordable homes, Hammersmith and Fulham, plummeted down to just 70 affordable starts as the Tory Council’s gentrification plans proceed.
The affordable housebuilding graph goes down but the homelessness graph goes up.
Nationally, the continuous decline in homelessness acceptances that Labour achieved from 2003 to 2010 has gone firmly into reverse. As the latest homelessness statistics show, in London the number of households accepted as being owed ‘a main homelessness duty’ in the last quarter of 2012 was 4,210. This was an increase of 22% from the same quarter in 2011 (and was 31% of the England total). In London, the main reason for the loss of last settled home is now the ending of an assured shorthold tenancy – 1,200 (28%). This is an increase of 61% from 740 in the same quarter in 2011.
The number of households in temporary accommodation in London at 31 December 2012 was 38,860. This is an 8% increase compared to the previous year (35,920) and accounts for 73% of the total England figure. The number of households in B&B accommodation in London is 2,270, an increase of 35% from 1,680 at 31 December 2011. London accounts for 57% of the total England figure.
The growing importance of homelessness caused by the ending of a private rented tenancy is of great concern. As councils are now able to discharge their homelessness duty by finding private accommodation for an applicant, families are in increasing danger of the ‘revolving door’: becoming homeless, being rehoused in insecure private accommodation and then, in due course, becoming homeless again.
Rising homelessness and falling affordable housing starts are only 2 key indicators of the growing housing emergency in London. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, seems to be spending more and more of his time angling for the Tory Leadership and going on jollies around the world at our expense. As he won’t be standing again, he is no longer accountable to London and Londoners for his hopeless policies.
So, CIH, do you still think Johnson is ‘committed to tackling the capital’s many housing challenges’?

After a week free of blogging due to manic activity getting ready for the hugely successful London Labour Housing Group Policy Conference on Saturday, that all-too-common feeling of outrage descended on me again this morning whilst watching a BBC News 24 report on the start of the total benefits cap in 4 London boroughs.
I love the BBC but sometimes it is just crap. So, they tell us with no hint of contradiction that the £500 cap is the same as the average worker receives; it affects 40,000 households, and over 8,000 people have already taken up work ‘because of the cap’. Minister John Hoban then trots out the same guff in interview without a hint of contradiction.
So let’s be clear. All of the ‘facts’ that the BBC dutifully reported are, at best, controversial and, at worst, downright misleading.
£500 may be average take-home pay of people in work but it is not their average income taking account of in-work benefits (tax credits for example or in-work housing benefit). The comparison that the Government makes with people on out-of-work benefits simply does not compare like with like. This seems like a generic Government failing as Grant Shapps did exactly the same thing recently with housebuilding figures.
It seems that ‘40,000 affected households’ is a back-of-the-fagpacket figure dreamed up by DWP to replace their previous and equally fanciful estimate of 56,000 (I believe they call it ‘ad hoc analysis’). In truth, they have very little idea. The ‘8,000’ who have taken up work reflects normal movement in and out of work and has little if anything to do with the cap.
As the excellent TUC Touchstone blog points out, in February 287,500 people moved onto Jobseekers’ Allowance and 292,000 moved off – it is no surpise that 8,000 of those who moved off were also subject to the cap, and will now escape it by being in work. But DWP also beg the question – if you count those coming off, what about those going on? How many of those who went on to JSA are also now included in the cap?
According to the Guardian Politics Blog this morning, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady has complained to the UK Statistics Authority, calling for an investigation into the alleged misuse of statistics by the Department for Work and Pensions in claiming that the government’s welfare changes are working.
Frances says: “It was wrong for Iain Duncan Smith to claim that the impending benefits cap has spurred people into finding jobs. The government’s own analysts say that 16,000 fewer people will be affected because ministers have changed the rules about who is eligible, not because of any change in behaviour. The Department for Work and Pensions is a serial offender for misusing statistics. Perhaps ministers should be subject to a three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule. If you need to make the supporting evidence up, then you must have a pretty weak argument.”
And on Touchstone the TUC says: “This is the latest in a long line of recent DWP misprepresentations, which all stem from the problem that the evidence doesn’t appear to fit with what the Secretary of State believes. But not content with ignoring the facts when formulating his policies, it now appears that he is also happy to disregard them when reporting on their impacts. Meanwhile, in the real world, thousands of families prepare to lose their homes, children will be taken out of school, bed and breakfast crisis housing booms and more than five jobseekers continue to chase every post. It’s a shame that the Secretary of State can’t spend as much time tackling our jobs crisis as he does fiddling the statistics.”
Benefits is not my strongest suit so I normally rely on the writings of real experts like Steve Wilcox who edits the UK Housing Review and Declan Gaffney who writes an excellent blog for people with a slightly techie interest in the detail, and is also superb on analysing the myths on welfare and welfare recipients.
This, and information from lots of other sources, is all publicly available and directly contradicts what Government is saying. So is it too much to expect that the BBC (and other media outlets, they are not alone) might at least check out some of the figures before quoting them as fact?

No doubt readers aren’t interested in my general views about Margaret Thatcher. You can assume that they aren’t as rose-coloured and sycophantic as everything that’s been on TV this evening (thank goodness for Kevin Maguire providing a smidgen of balance). So what did her 11 years as Prime Minister mean to housing?
The only housing reference made so far in the media’s extraordinary obituary-fest has been to the right to buy, as if it was the only housing policy at the time. The policy was wrong on so many levels and has been a long-term disaster, but it is hard to think of a political phenomenon like it (possibly until Boris Johnson came along). It steamrollered over Labour and touched an aspirational nerve in working class Britain that no-one at the time was prepared for or could explain. It became the iconic Thatcherite domestic policy (alongside destroying the trades unions) despite the fact that it was barely mentioned in the 1979 Tory Manifesto, where it was hedged around with caveats about sheltered housing and re-sale restrictions.
It always feels as if the Tories stumbled across this rich seam of political gold quite by accident, without realising what they’d done until they’d done it.
Thatcher’s impact on housing came in other ways as well. Her support for rapid deregulation and unfettered financial markets – notably the ‘Big Bang’ in 1986 – led inexorable to the banking boom, the easy money culture, and the crisis 20 years later. It is hard to remember the days when banks did not provide mortgages and building societies provided mortgages but not other financial products, and everyone operated under strict rules. Deregulation has bedevilled the housing market since.
For those of us at the sharp end of housing in the 1980s, we watched as housing investment by councils plummeted as councils were effectively prohibited from building and buying property on anything like the scale of the 1970s. We were told that council housebuilding would be replaced by the new ‘third arm’ of housing associations, but it was a lie: despite their success, they never filled the vacuum left by the councils. And attempts to revive the free market in housing led to the introduction of shorthold tenancies and a new generation of insecure tenants.
Rising housing demand, boom conditions in home ownership, and the ending of council housebuilding had an inevitable outcome: the galloping homelessness crisis of the 1980s. Areas like Bayswater in London changed in a few years from a residential district with quite a few budget hotels into the homelessness capital of Britain. Sticking homeless families into B&B for years became the new scandal.
It wasn’t all bad. Nearly, but not quite all. The 1980 Act gave us the right to buy, but it was added into a Bill inherited from Labour that also gave council tenants security of tenure, and a whole ‘tenants charter’ of rights, for the first time after years of campaigning. These are the same rights that Cameron is now busy removing. And I suppose the first steps on the shared ownership road were taken during her decade.
There is a straight line from Thatcher’s legacy – right to buy, end of council housebuilding, letting housing benefit take the strain of rising rents, rising homelessness, encouraging sub-prime lending for property purchase – to the housing crisis we are experiencing today.
And, before our very eyes, we see Cameron making the same mistakes all over again.

After Frederick West was convicted of despicable murders, no-one wrote a headline saying he was the ‘Vile Product of Home Ownership’.
After Harold Shipman was convicted of mass murders, no-one wrote a headline saying he was the ‘Vile Product of Full Time Employment’.
It is disgusting therefore that the Daily Mail produced the headline ‘Vile Product of Welfare UK’ after the conviction of the child killer Mick Philpott.
This was not the hyperbole of a headline writer who has drunk too much coffee and got carried away. Exploiting extreme cases is a key tactic in the Mail’s mission to demonise the poor. And they are not alone: as Owen Jones in particular has argued many times, it is a theme of many papers and is picked up slavishly by the radio and TV. That’s why people like Philpott are so attractive to the media, and why he was invited on shows like the despicable Jeremy Kyle Show and starred in a documentary by Ann Widdecombe: to illustrate to the world how monstrous and degenerate welfare recipients are.
This is deliberate politics. The best way to defend benefit cuts is to attack benefit recipients, and Philpott offered a perfect opportunity. Holding a sick bucket just in case, I read the Mail columnist AN Wilson’s piece. He says Philpott ‘is a perfect parable for our age. His story shows the pervasiveness of evil born of welfare dependency.’  ‘The trial….. lifted the lid on the bleak and often grotesque world of the welfare benefit scroungers’. ‘Those six children, burnt to a cinder for nothing, were, in a way, the children of those benevolent human beings who, all those years ago, created our state benefits system.’ ‘Whole blocks of flats, whole tenement buildings are filled with drug-taking benefit fraudsters, scroungers and people on the make.’
In this way the case is made. The Duncan Smith narrative that our problems as a society arise from ‘welfare dependency’ is justified by example. Focus shifts from the swingeing and punitive cuts that he is implementing: after all, he is only trying to save benefit recipients  from becoming Mick Philpotts. Unemployment is not a systemic failure; look, these people chose to be unemployed to get the benefits. And typical council tenant: having more children just to get a bigger house.
When former Children’s Minister Sarah Teather was sacked she blew the whistle on what was happening inside Government. As Toby Helm wrote in the Guardian: ‘She accuses parts of government and the press of a deliberate campaign to ‘demonise’ those on benefits….. With vivid outrage she describes the language and caricatures that have been peddled. ‘I think deliberately to stoke up envy and division between people in order to gain popularity at the expense of children’s lives is immoral. It has no good intent.’ ’
The Mail and the Government are in this together, and it is shameful.