It is to their credit that Labour’s frontbench housing team, Hilary Benn and Jack Dromey, have invested a lot of energy in seeking to understand the workings of the private rented sector and to develop a distinctive new policy.
Their latest document sets out the policy directions they wish to move in and they have addressed the two thorniest issues: rents and security of tenure.
They trace the huge changes that have taken place in the sector in the last two decades, as the failure of supply, first in social renting then for affordable home ownership, together with the emergence of buy to let mortgages, created a whole new market for private renting. The emergence of ‘generation rent’ has been spectacular, even if it has not been led by consumer preference – there is still a strong preference for home ownership or social tenancies.
One of the biggest changes has been the reinvention of private renting for families – now 1.1 million families with children are private renters and the number is growing fast. It is for these families that the toxic mix of high and unpredictable rents and insecurity of tenure is most damaging. Benn and Dromey point out that private renting families are eleven times more likely to have moved house in the last year than those with a mortgage. Frequent moves raise costs for both landlords and tenants and only benefit agents and help drive rent increases. They are extremely destabilising for families and even the Government accepts that there is an impact on children’s attainment. Private renting is increasingly the destination of homeless families but the end of private tenancies is also now the biggest cause of homelessness – the revolving door.
Benn and Dromey are developing policies that reflect the practical realities of the current housing market and strengthen the business model for most private landlords. The interests of tenants and landlords could be better aligned than many recognise – both could benefit from longer term tenancies and more predictable indexed rents, although agents would lose out. They also challenge the practice that buy-to-let mortgages often insist on tenancy lengths of one year or less.
Most calls for change or regulation in private renting are met with howls of outrage about bringing back ‘old-style rent controls’ that stopped landlords making a return. Benn and Dromey are clear that that is not where they are heading and that the viability of the sector is crucial. They intend to look at the tax treatment of private renting to see if arrangements could be made for depreciation and the treatment of rent rather than profit as income. Lessons from other countries, and especially Germany and France, with more successful private rented sectors and a less short-term culture, need to be learned.
Launching the document, Labour’s Shadow Housing Minister, Jack Dromey MP, said:
‘Families need stability to plan where they send their kids to school and certainty to manage their household budgets.
‘That’s why Labour is committed to reforming the private rented sector so it works for Britain’s families. With longer term tenancies and predictable rents, the private rented sector will offer the affordable and stable homes that renters need.
‘Families will feel that their rented house is a home and it will help strengthen communities as people put down roots and get to know their neighbours.
‘Labour’s One Nation housing policy offers stability for families, certainty for landlords and strengthened communities.’
More quotable quotes
Stuart Law, Chief Executive of Assetz plc, ‘one of the top property investment specialists in the UK’ told Moneyweek magazine (7 Dec 2012): ‘Short term contracts are really destabilising. They really upset tenants. I’ve turfed some out to do renovations or just to up the rent, and they get really upset’. And his investment advice? ‘I keep saying, year after year – sell your retail shares. In the end, this is all going to come home to roost on the high street. Because I will keep putting rents up, and will find tenants who will pay the rent, and they will stop buying handbags, and stop going out for expensive meals. I will have that money. I will decimate the high street. So sell the retails shares.’
One Nation?
Category: Uncategorized
Categories
Miliband wages war
It’s rare to be able to say that a weekend with no major political events is of great significance, but this weekend may well have been one such. The story in the Observer that Ed Miliband is going to ‘wage war’ on George Osborne over benefit cuts following the Autumn Statement was backed by a number of interviews by leading Labour figures such as Ed Balls and a series of important articles challenging the myths and stereotypes of ‘benefit recipients’ and ‘welfare scroungers’, including by Will Hutton and Owen Jones.
There was also an important letter to the Observer from 60 charities and organisations pointing out the risks of the latest ‘punitive’ and ‘unfair’ cuts to children and other vulnerable people, arguing that ‘The truth is that the vast majority of those who rely on benefits and tax credits are either in work, have worked, or will be in work in the near future. They and their families are making their contribution to society and are entitled to genuine security, as Beveridge intended.’
It feels like Labour might just be shaking off the craven attitude to welfare that has dogged it for many years. Of course it’s possible to see the dilemma involved in speaking out against the dominant narrative of the deserving and the undeserving poor, more recently described as the ‘strivers’ versus the ‘shirkers’. But some elements of Labour have been complicit in creating the narrative and it is time for a new approach.
It is nothing new for the Tories to seek to victimise, stigmatise and blame certain groups for the ills of society but recently it has been raised to an art form, notably by Iain Duncan Smith. People on welfare benefits, council tenants, disabled people, homeless people are subject to endless propaganda and anecdotal insults: scroungers, subsidised by the state, swinging the lead, queue jumpers, reinforced every day by the majority of newspapers.
Lib Dem MP Sarah Teather recently revealed how deliberate this strategy is within Government. The purpose is twofold: to divert blame from those responsible for unemployment, poverty and homelessness onto the victims themselves, and to set a political trap for Labour which will identify it as the Party of welfare. But as always, there is more than one political trap available: the more Labour is seen to support welfare cuts the bigger the hole it has to scramble out of, and the divisions in the Coalition are becoming more open. Vince Cable this weekend said that Ministers should not insult and demonise people on benefits, most of who are out of work for no fault of their own.
Ed Miliband has been most successful when he has been politically courageous and he should seek to get this debate on to positive ground, enabling Labour to defend vital social programmes with greater legitimacy. This approach was well summed up by Rachel Reeves when she said ‘George Osborne is even cutting maternity pay for mums who take time off work to be with their newborn baby. We need to get the benefits bill down, but the way to do that is to get the economy moving and get people back to work.’
There is also endless mileage in alternative arguments: the constant revelations that the super-rich and big corporations don’t pay much tax; the huge subsidies flowing to landlords instead of building more homes; the fact that much of the welfare bill goes to support people in work; and the increasingly muddy dividing line between work and unemployment as growing millions of people are underemployed, in and out of casual and part-time work and facing constant uncertainty. It is entirely possible to defend the working poor whilst refusing to join in the attack on those who are not able to work or have no jobs to go to – an attack being led by those that Owen Jones, with his usual flourish, calls the ‘ideologically crazed cabal’.
If Labour needs to be brave, the real fault line remains in the Coalition. We know the Tories will defend the rich and attack the poor. But are the Lib Dems at last willing to stand up for the decent society they say they believe in?
Categories
Helping social tenants into work
Monimbo
Contrary to the impression often given by government, social landlords are far from complacent about tenants who are out of work. In fact, four out of five London social landlords offer into-work services.
Family Mosaic and Home housing associations are to be congratulated on commissioning a very topical piece of research, Home-work: Helping London’s social tenants into employment, carried out by the Centre for London, which reviews what social landlords do and how they could do more. It’s hardly necessary to explain its topicality at a time when benefit cuts and welfare reform, rising rents, a housing crisis and stagnant incomes for those in low-paid jobs combine into a perfect storm affecting London’s poor.
It’s worth bearing in mind how unequal London is: some of the richest people in the world live in the same city as many of Britain’s poorest. London has above average proportions of both unemployment and poverty (a poverty rate of 28% compared with the UK average of 22%). It also has a quarter of its population in social housing compared with a national average of one-fifth. While London’s social tenants are no more likely to be unemployed than those elsewhere, those without jobs tend to be somewhat different. Older and ethnic minority tenants do better in London, but lone parents do worse. It so happens that there are more lone parent tenants in London too, so that a significant proportion of jobless social tenants are single mothers with children, and this group also does worse in terms of getting part-time work.
The researchers review the explanations for these differences. They find no evidence that ‘lifetime tenancies’ have any detrimental effect. They are less sure whether there may be neighbourhood effects, e.g. concentrated poverty within social housing estates. But they think the main barriers are poor qualifications among many tenants, the unclear gains from working compared with benefits, the uncertainty linked with moving off benefits into low-paid jobs and possibly back again, and the costs of childcare.
Some remedies like the Living Wage could make a big impact in overcoming these barriers, but the report concentrates on action that can be taken by landlords themselves. They welcome the fact that most already have into-work services of different kinds, but suggest they are often not evidence-based, are poorly co-ordinated and often not evaluated. The implication is that these services should move into the mainstream and not be add-ons, and there is guidance from the London Development Agency (pdf) on how to do this. They are keen too that more landlords provide childcare facilities for tenants as this cost is another significant barrier.
They also look at the implications for rents. While dismissing the government’s ‘pay-to-stay’ scheme as creating a disincentive to work, they come up with some controversial proposals of their own. They suggest that while social landlords shouldn’t impose higher rents in a single step as pay-to-stay envisages, they might progressively increase rents with earnings, charging higher increments of rent not big enough to be a work disincentive.
The scheme is shown in the diagram. The green columns show tenants’ income bands (based on UK figures, in £1000s). The blue line shows what tenants pay on average at the moment: zero if on full housing benefit, with a sharp taper leading to whatever the full social rent is for their home. Pay-to-stay would add a vertical step (red dots) for tenants earning more than £60k. The Centre for London suggests a less steep taper, starting at the median wage and reaching to just below market rent levels for tenants earning about £32k.
The extra rental income, which would be more than the small sums that would result from pay-to-stay, could finance more into-work services. Interestingly, they also suggest that part is reserved to create a fund for those who lose their jobs and have difficult paying their rent, and suggest ways that this could be done. The money might also be used to reduce rents for tenants who go on training courses.
These ideas need a lot more thought and would be demanding to implement. Nevertheless, there are some straws in the wind here. The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) has published a report with L&Q housing association looking at similar issues and promising more research. Furthermore, the recent Let’s Get Building report showed that many local authorities are contemplating higher rents to fund new build.
The Chancellor insisted in the Autumn Statement that pay-to-stay would be introduced, despite the very real objections and the obvious problems of imposing it on an unwilling sector. It seems most unlikely that the government will get its way. Nevertheless, we might have to accept that the old model of highly affordable rents based on substantial grants, which is still producing attractive new developments like the mixed community created by Hyde in the Packington estate, is unlikely to be fully restored by a future government. So might ideas like those put forward by the Centre for London be worth debating?
Although Hammersmith and Fulham has worked very hard to win the title of ‘worst council for housing’ in recent times, old favourite Westminster is never far behind. The council still has not shed the reputation gained during the leadership of Dame Shirley Porter during the 1980s when she manipulated the sale of council houses in the borough for electoral advantage, and suffered the consequence of the largest penalty ever levied by an Auditor.
The fact that Porter felt the need to sell council houses illegally to shore up the Tory vote tells us something about the borough that is not normally recognised: despite its enormous wealth and posh bits, like Mayfair and Knightsbridge, the borough has always been very mixed. When I went to live there in the early 1970s areas such as Covent Garden, Pimlico, East Marylebone, Bayswater, Church Street and the whole of North Paddington were largely working class. Porter’s illegal policy followed the election of 1986 when Labour came within a few votes of winning control of the whole council.
A lot has changed since then. Whole neighbourhoods have been transformed by gentrification, a market movement which has benefitted the Tories politically. But the city is still a mix: insofar as voting is an indication, Westminster North remained firmly Labour in 2010 despite the catastrophic collapse in the Party’s vote nationally. The borough still has some of London’s most deprived Wards. But inner London is now in the grip of a form of super-gentrification, immune from the recession and bolstered by huge overseas investment in central London property. And the poor pay the price.
The Tories and the LibDems, and the bulk of the media, now see the borough as a place where poor people should not live, no matter how many generations of their family have lived there. The fact that many poorer people – often doing the jobs that make London work as a city – have been gradually priced out of their own borough is now being used to justify removing those that remain. Rents have become so ridiculously high that many people in work need housing benefit support – the very ‘strivers’ that George Osborne applauds whilst stabbing them in the back with cuts to tax credits and HB. The only bulwark against these trends would have been the building of secure social housing at affordable rents, but there has been precious little of that for 2 decades and Westminster has missed opportunity after opportunity to build more.
Westminster Council has campaigned to dilute the homelessness duty for many years. They like to play the victim, picking up the tab when lots of people arrive in the borough just to declare themselves homeless. In fact, the vast majority of people accepted by the council have a clear local connection and the issue has always been lack of supply not excess demand. Until now that is. Because now the Council faces both poor supply and an explosion in demand as the welfare ‘reforms’ work themselves through.
It is curious to note that both the housing Ministers of State at CLG are Westminster old boys, Mark Prisk being politically active during the Porter era and Nick Boles being a former cabinet member for housing there. Prisk may be feeling conflicted because, like Grant Shapps before him, he can only protect the Government from accusations that it is responsible for rising homelessness by blaming the councils. To their embarrassment, that includes Westminster.
Labour Leader Paul Dimoldenberg has been monitoring the rapid growth in the number of homeless families kept in B&B accommodation over the six week limit. The number has risen from 36 in April 2012 to 140 now and is showing clear signs of being out of control. This week Prisk wrote to Labour MP Karen Buck accepting that Westminster’s action in keeping families in B&B for more than 6 weeks ‘is unlawful and unacceptable’. He noted that ‘The detrimental effects of B&B accommodation on families are well documented and we must avoid a return to the situation where thousands of homeless families were living in poor quality B&B accommodation long term.’ The rest of the letter dumps on the council: it’s their fault not ours.
If it was one bad borough then Prisk might have a point. All that can be said in Westminster’s defence is that it is one of many London Councils desperately searching the country to procure accommodation as the reforms generate growing homelessness. After Osborne’s assault today on people on benefits, in or out of work, things can only get worse.
By Monimbo
Last week should have been a big one for the government’s energy policy. But perhaps ministers were happy that the spotlight fell on Leveson rather than on the new Energy Bill.
Ed Davey and Greg Barker seem sincere in their efforts to promote rational policies towards energy and climate change but powerless to do anything serious because of Treasury opposition. They have been lumbered with a promise by Cameron to force energy suppliers to offer the lowest tariffs, but does anyone really believe this will cut prices? Meanwhile Fuel Poverty Action was protesting against the 24,000 excess winter deaths in England and Wales, of which one third are the result of cold homes.
Fuel poverty now officially affects 3.5m and this is forecast to grow to more than 8m by 2016, mainly because of rising fuel prices. The previous government aimed to end fuel poverty in vulnerable households by 2010, and singularly failed. The present government now wants to change the definition, which is controversial not least because it would reduce the numbers, but also because the new measure, though based on work by John Hills, appears to have significant disadvantages. Consultations ended this week and a new fuel poverty strategy is promised for next year, but as on so many issues the government shows little sign of grasping the nettle.
What can be done? Fuel poverty arises when three factors combine: rising fuel prices, static or falling household incomes and high energy consumption, often due to inefficient heating systems or poor insulation. The chart above (from a recent House of Commons library briefing) shows how typical fuel bills for gas (in particular) have shot up over the last few years. Yet the government wants to put even more emphasis on gas, over whose prices we have little control. We all know that household incomes are almost static for lower income groups, and of course that many benefit-dependent households will have their incomes cut, so there is little prospect of poorer people earning enough to get out of fuel poverty. Any help in this week’s Autumn Statement seems likely to be aimed at reducing car drivers’ rather than householders’ fuel costs.
Action on energy efficiency, which would also support the government’s legal targets to reduce carbon emissions, is now being promised in the Energy Bill. Some commentators read positive signs that this will happen, but the grounds for optimism are pretty thin. Although the government published an Energy Efficiency Strategy last month, it is long on research and ideas but short on practical action. Last week the Association for the Conservation of Energy said that by next year support for energy efficiency measures to help fuel-poor households will have fallen by 44% (compared to 2009). The reason is that the government is ending the very effective Warm Front programme, replacing it by the untried and unattractive Green Deal. The ACE report was jointly produced with campaign group Energy Bill Revolution, an alliance formed of more than 100 charities, consumer groups, businesses and unions, which wants the money raised from carbon taxes to be spent on making homes in fuel poverty highly energy-efficient.
These issues are complex and given that we have largely handed control over energy production and distribution to foreign companies whose main interest is in profits not investment (read the brilliant analysis of French company EDF by James Meek), the chances of getting an energy sector that acts in the interests of consumers and of the environment are pretty bleak. If Labour form the next government, they will inherit a situation where fuel poverty is rampant, we are more dependent on high-cost gas and insufficient investment will have been made in renewable alternatives.
Amidst the gloom, I noticed heartening news from Radian, one of the growing number of social landlords who are taking energy efficiency seriously. They have just shown that properties they built in Southampton cost as little as 41p per week to heat. Given that the carbon targets require us to retrofit no less than one house per minute to high standards for several decades, we shouldn’t be too excited by news of individual schemes, but even so of the three factors that affect fuel poverty it is energy efficiency that is the best bet for concerted action. By 2015, the Green Deal will probably be seen to have failed and a new, effective energy-efficiency programme will be needed in its place. If I were either shadow energy or shadow housing minister, I’d be talking to my colleague about how to finance this through new charges on energy companies and how to implement a massive, employment-generating programme through agencies that already have lots of expertise in delivery, including many social landlords.
By Bill Peters
Recent comments by Nick Boles, the Planning Minister, and activity by other Ministers does begin to suggest a dawning realisation that we have a housing crisis and something needs to be done about it. Boles is beginning to sound as though he accepts the case for more development and the use of more green field sites to achieve that and is politically ready to push this through? We await the housing announcements after the Autumn statement but perhaps there might be a glimmer of hope? The question will partly be how much the Treasury reigns back such ambition?
Talking of ambition or lack of it – a visit to the DCLG housing statistics site is very depressing these days. DCLG has moved its website to the new Inside Government site and in the process has pruned the statistics accessible on the site. It is now quite hard or even impossible to find some of the key historical series that help keep government to account?
So one step forward and a big step backwards? History will judge them all but it is those without homes or inadequate homes who bear the cost
Steve Hilditch adds:
I agree with Bill that Boles’ media offensive last week was an interesting development. Anything that makes the CPRE (Campaign to Protect Rural England) blow a gasket must be good. But the new Planning Minister has previously said he prefers ‘chaos’ to planning and there were signs of chaotic, and indeed confused, thinking in what he said.
First, making an abstract calculation that an extra 2-3% of land developed as housing would ‘solve’ the housing crisis tells us nothing about where it would take place – and whether it would be demand and need-led and therefore concentrated in particular places. The question is where?
Secondly he did not address the issue of brownfield land. Apart from Mr Boles, who appears not to like fields very much, there is considerable support for giving highest priority to building on previously developed land, especially in London and the South. Upping the proportion on brownfield land was one of John Prescott’s better achievements. The GLA’s various capacity studies in London show how much land is available if we look for it and have the will to make it developable.
And that brings us to the third point. Boles skated over the real reasons why new building is so low: little to do with planning, little to do with sites, and a lot to do with the lack of effective demand in the economy and confidence.
The fourth point is related – builders appear to like making more profit from a low level of activity than a lower rate of return from higher and riskier turnover. They seem to be sticking to the sure things and raking it in.
Fifthly, what Mr Boles said about affordability could be jotted on the back of a stamp. As a report showed last week, now is the best time to be investing public funds in social rented homes: by creating jobs and rehousing people currently in temporary accommodation it would have a hugely beneficial effect on the public finances.
And lastly, I would be happy to support Mr Boles’ opinion that everyone has a right to bring their family up in a house with a garden if I didn’t know it is complete bunkum to say such a thing. And as a former cabinet member for housing in Westminster, he knows that very well. It is cruel to wave such a notion in front of the tens of thousands of people in temporary accommodation or those currently losing their housing benefit who would be delighted to get a decent flat they could afford. But somehow I don’t think he had the poor in mind when he was pontificating.
Recent comments by Nick Boles, the Planning Minister, and activity by other Ministers does begin to suggest a dawning realisation that we have a housing crisis and something needs to be done about it. Boles is beginning to sound as though he accepts the case for more development and the use of more green field sites to achieve that and is politically ready to push this through? We await the housing announcements after the Autumn statement but perhaps there might be a glimmer of hope? The question will partly be how much the Treasury reigns back such ambition?
Talking of ambition or lack of it – a visit to the DCLG housing statistics site is very depressing these days. DCLG has moved its website to the new Inside Government site and in the process has pruned the statistics accessible on the site. It is now quite hard or even impossible to find some of the key historical series that help keep government to account?
So one step forward and a big step backwards? History will judge them all but it is those without homes or inadequate homes who bear the cost
Steve Hilditch adds:
I agree with Bill that Boles’ media offensive last week was an interesting development. Anything that makes the CPRE (Campaign to Protect Rural England) blow a gasket must be good. But the new Planning Minister has previously said he prefers ‘chaos’ to planning and there were signs of chaotic, and indeed confused, thinking in what he said.
First, making an abstract calculation that an extra 2-3% of land developed as housing would ‘solve’ the housing crisis tells us nothing about where it would take place – and whether it would be demand and need-led and therefore concentrated in particular places. The question is where?
Secondly he did not address the issue of brownfield land. Apart from Mr Boles, who appears not to like fields very much, there is considerable support for giving highest priority to building on previously developed land, especially in London and the South. Upping the proportion on brownfield land was one of John Prescott’s better achievements. The GLA’s various capacity studies in London show how much land is available if we look for it and have the will to make it developable.
And that brings us to the third point. Boles skated over the real reasons why new building is so low: little to do with planning, little to do with sites, and a lot to do with the lack of effective demand in the economy and confidence.
The fourth point is related – builders appear to like making more profit from a low level of activity than a lower rate of return from higher and riskier turnover. They seem to be sticking to the sure things and raking it in.
Fifthly, what Mr Boles said about affordability could be jotted on the back of a stamp. As a report showed last week, now is the best time to be investing public funds in social rented homes: by creating jobs and rehousing people currently in temporary accommodation it would have a hugely beneficial effect on the public finances.
And lastly, I would be happy to support Mr Boles’ opinion that everyone has a right to bring their family up in a house with a garden if I didn’t know it is complete bunkum to say such a thing. And as a former cabinet member for housing in Westminster, he knows that very well. It is cruel to wave such a notion in front of the tens of thousands of people in temporary accommodation or those currently losing their housing benefit who would be delighted to get a decent flat they could afford. But somehow I don’t think he had the poor in mind when he was pontificating.
Categories
Squeezed out
By Nicola Bacon
Nicola is a Director of Social Life consultancy, a spin-off from the Young Foundation. She is a former Director of Policy at Shelter.
Last week I met a young woman who was proud of her home and her child. She was on her own and had been through a difficult time when pregnant, living in a one-room studio with a couple who were drinking heavily. She had gone to the local council (in London) for help as homeless and had been given a bedsit temporarily, then offered a housing association tenancy on a new development. She knew she was lucky, she realised that few people were offered a brand new home that no-one else had ever lived in, and she’d used the stability and security her new home gave her to keep her job, be promoted, make plans to go to college, and become an active contributor to her community. She exemplified why we need a housing safety net.
The English Homeless legislation has changed, and people in the same situation as this young woman would, from last week, not be offered a social housing tenancy. Instead, the law now stipulates that the local authority will only need to find them a tenancy in the private rented sector. Reform has been promoted as a way to boost the social sustainability of the council and housing association-owned estates and developments where homeless people have, until now, been offered long-term housing.
Eligibility for help as homeless is tight, and has become more stringent over the years. Only families with children, and vulnerable adults, who can show they lost their home through no fault of their own and who have no other alternatives, now quality for help. The cumulative impact of the change to the homelessness legislation, plus new housing benefit regulations means (as many have noted over the last few weeks) that families and vulnerable people who find themselves homeless are likely to find themselves moved to low rent areas if they go to their local authority for help. This could mean moving away from inner London to Stoke on Trent, or Basildon, even Merthyr Tydfil according to one recent report. All these are places where the privately rented housing is available, and cheap, often reflecting a wider decline in the local economy.
So – is this a social sustainability issue? The charge is that housing vulnerable people in social housing will continue to perpetuate damaging concentrations of disadvantage on social housing estates. Apart from the fact that in practice the most unstable and transient residents on housing estates are people renting from right-to-buy owners, this raises the question, where should homeless people live if they are so damaging to the wider community? And, if this is right, then what will be the impact of moving significant numbers of homeless households away from high rent areas on the lower rent areas where they end up? What effect will an influx of people with high levels of need have on places and communities that are already economically marginalized? It seems like we are going to find out the answer to this over the next few years.
“Social sustainability” has a proud pedigree within broader discussions of sustainability. It is a concept that captures the strength of community and its capacity to support the people who live there. Social sustainability is strongly associated with a fair distribution of local resources and, more broadly, the concept of inclusion and the notion that communities that are mixed are better at supporting us all to thrive than those that are segregated.
Mixed tenure developments became the norm in housing policy in the last two decades, putting into practice Nye Bevan’s “living tapestry of a mixed community” where “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street”.
Although some of the evidence about mixed communities is not as compelling as its advocates would like, the possibility that people from vastly different life experience can live in close proximity is modeled in our big cities like London, where an enormous diversity of people and extremes of income coexist (the majority of the time) peacefully.
“Social sustainability” should not be used as a justification for moving some of the most vulnerable people away from their support networks, including moving children away from schools, in order to maintain community stability for everyone else.
The changes to the homelessness legislation make the housing of homeless people a zero sum game. One community’s gain becomes another’s loss. A more constructive approach, which really could boost social sustainability, would be to build on the experience and knowledge amongst people who manage social housing, and within the wider voluntary sector, about how to support people to thrive and move on from bad times, and how to manage the wide mix of families and individuals who live in low cost housing.
Underneath all of this, the elephant in the corner, is the problem of the shortages of decent quality, stable, affordable housing. When there is so much pressure on the housing system, it is inevitable that the people with the least power will be the most tightly squeezed, which is why we need to continue to have a housing safety net that works.
This post was first published on Social Life’s blog. Social Life has grown out of the Young Foundation’s work on communities, cities and social needs. The Young Foundation was originally established in 1954 as the Institute for Community Studies by Michael Young. Among Young’s many achievements were drafting the Labour Party Manifesto for the 1945 General Election and writing the seminal work Family and Kinship in East London with Peter Wilmot.
Red Brick has covered the changes in the homelessness legislation on several occasions, for example here and here.
Eligibility for help as homeless is tight, and has become more stringent over the years. Only families with children, and vulnerable adults, who can show they lost their home through no fault of their own and who have no other alternatives, now quality for help. The cumulative impact of the change to the homelessness legislation, plus new housing benefit regulations means (as many have noted over the last few weeks) that families and vulnerable people who find themselves homeless are likely to find themselves moved to low rent areas if they go to their local authority for help. This could mean moving away from inner London to Stoke on Trent, or Basildon, even Merthyr Tydfil according to one recent report. All these are places where the privately rented housing is available, and cheap, often reflecting a wider decline in the local economy.
So – is this a social sustainability issue? The charge is that housing vulnerable people in social housing will continue to perpetuate damaging concentrations of disadvantage on social housing estates. Apart from the fact that in practice the most unstable and transient residents on housing estates are people renting from right-to-buy owners, this raises the question, where should homeless people live if they are so damaging to the wider community? And, if this is right, then what will be the impact of moving significant numbers of homeless households away from high rent areas on the lower rent areas where they end up? What effect will an influx of people with high levels of need have on places and communities that are already economically marginalized? It seems like we are going to find out the answer to this over the next few years.
“Social sustainability” has a proud pedigree within broader discussions of sustainability. It is a concept that captures the strength of community and its capacity to support the people who live there. Social sustainability is strongly associated with a fair distribution of local resources and, more broadly, the concept of inclusion and the notion that communities that are mixed are better at supporting us all to thrive than those that are segregated.
Mixed tenure developments became the norm in housing policy in the last two decades, putting into practice Nye Bevan’s “living tapestry of a mixed community” where “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street”.
Although some of the evidence about mixed communities is not as compelling as its advocates would like, the possibility that people from vastly different life experience can live in close proximity is modeled in our big cities like London, where an enormous diversity of people and extremes of income coexist (the majority of the time) peacefully.
“Social sustainability” should not be used as a justification for moving some of the most vulnerable people away from their support networks, including moving children away from schools, in order to maintain community stability for everyone else.
The changes to the homelessness legislation make the housing of homeless people a zero sum game. One community’s gain becomes another’s loss. A more constructive approach, which really could boost social sustainability, would be to build on the experience and knowledge amongst people who manage social housing, and within the wider voluntary sector, about how to support people to thrive and move on from bad times, and how to manage the wide mix of families and individuals who live in low cost housing.
Underneath all of this, the elephant in the corner, is the problem of the shortages of decent quality, stable, affordable housing. When there is so much pressure on the housing system, it is inevitable that the people with the least power will be the most tightly squeezed, which is why we need to continue to have a housing safety net that works.
This post was first published on Social Life’s blog. Social Life has grown out of the Young Foundation’s work on communities, cities and social needs. The Young Foundation was originally established in 1954 as the Institute for Community Studies by Michael Young. Among Young’s many achievements were drafting the Labour Party Manifesto for the 1945 General Election and writing the seminal work Family and Kinship in East London with Peter Wilmot.
Red Brick has covered the changes in the homelessness legislation on several occasions, for example here and here.
Post by Ade Sofala of the 4in10 campaign.
4in10 is a coalition of charities and public agencies working with and campaigning on behalf of children living in poverty in London. It is based in Save the Children’s London Office. It’s name is taken from the statistic that 4 in 10 children in London live in poverty.
David and Laura have been on their local council’s housing waiting list for a move to a larger two-bedroom flat since Jordan was born almost four years ago. At first, it wasn’t too bad having his cot and baby things in their bedroom. But now he needs a bed of his own there just isn’t room for much else apart from a small chest of drawers. David and Laura do their best but really worry how they will fit everything in when Jordan starts school.
Across London, almost a quarter of a million families like David and Laura’s are cramped into overcrowded homes. Overcrowding is well known to have a serious impact on the health, education and life chances of children. When one child falls ill in an overcrowded home, their brothers and sisters usually do too. And it can be incredibly difficult for teenagers to find the quiet space they need to concentrate on their homework and study for exams. Overcrowding is especially unfair on teenage girls having to share rooms with their brothers.
Of course, the chronic shortage of genuinely affordable social housing lies at the root of this crisis. The records show that governments of all political colours have failed to consistently provide the level of funding needed to replace all those council homes sold under the Right to Buy, let alone add to the stock. As a result, the number of overcrowded households in the Capital has been growing inexorably – up by 80,000 in the past decade alone.
Shelter says that 391,000 children live in these overcrowded homes. That’s a quarter of London’s children who are not as healthy as they might be or doing as well in school as they could be just because of their housing. In a city as wealthy as ours, youngsters just shouldn’t have to endure such inadequate housing standards. That’s why the 4in10 campaign is now calling on the Mayor of London to take more decisive action to tackle the problem.
In 2010, Boris Johnson published an Overcrowding Action Plan, which included a target to halve the number of families living in severe overcrowding by 2016. At first sight, that sounds promising. But it actually represents fewer than 5 per cent of all London’s overcrowded families. The Mayor can and should do better. In fact, 4in10 believes that, if the Mayor was to focus political attention on this problem, he should be able to halve the number of children living in overcrowded conditions by 2020.
Meeting this target certainly won’t be easy, especially when Government funding for housing has been slashed and benefits are being severely capped. But surely, the alternative of more and more of London’s children have their young lives blighted by growing up in overcrowded homes, is even worse. If we really want every young Londoner to be able to fulfil their potential in life, its time the needs of the Capital’s 391,000 overcrowded children became a genuine political priority in City Hall.
To halve overcrowding by 2020, the Mayor will obviously have to secure a big increase in public investment. Ideally, funding needs to be restored to the levels the Coalition inherited. No doubt, it won’t make the Mayor popular in Downing Street to publicly start calling for that level of funding. But if he can publicly lobby the Treasury for a new airport, there is no excuse not to demand more funding for homes for London’s children too. He should also be encouraging more of London’s councils to build some homes themselves.
That is the only way to ensure that young families like David, Laura and Jordan have a decent chance of getting the family home they need.
Please join us in calling on Mayor Boris Johnson to commit to halve the number of children growing up in overcrowded homes by 2020. You can sign our petition here.
This article by Steve Hilditch was published today by the think tank Class (the Centre for Labour and Social Studies) to help launch their project on A Social State 2015: what can Beveridge teach us about the giant evils of today?
Seventy years ago the Beveridge Report announced the pursuit of a new settlement, one that would dramatically change the structure of Britain for the better. With this in mind, what can Beveridge’s analysis of society teach us about the Giant Evils of today and how can we use this to chart an alternative course for a welfare state – or Social State – fit for 2015? The project will look at a range of welfare state concerns from education to welfare, employment to housing and health and universalism.
The large majority of people are adequately or well-housed. That’s why housing is the dog that never barks when Elections come around. But for more than a generation – since Thatcher ended council housebuilding – we have failed to build enough new homes of all types to keep up with rising demand. And chickens are coming home to roost.
The core failure to build is the root cause of our now familiar problems. House prices are far too high due to scarcity and easy credit. Rents have followed suit. Social housing is frighteningly scarce. Escalating housing benefit is the inevitable outcome of the growing dependence on expensive private renting rather than cheaper social renting. To its credit, Labour tackled the enormous investment backlog in existing social homes, but failed to build enough new affordable homes until Gordon Brown’s Keynesian fling following the banking collapse.
Three decades of failure were followed by a huge lurch backwards as Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith pursued their prejudices. Housing investment was cut by over 60%. Virtually no new social rented homes are being built, only the Orwellian ‘affordable rent’ – homes at up to 80% of market rents. Demand from both ends – people excluded from home ownership and a rising tide of homeless and displaced people – has become focused on private renting, and rents have rocketed. Even William Beveridge couldn’t solve the problem of rent and we have not tackled it properly in the 70 years since.
In a highly competitive market the poor lose out. The return of one of Beveridge’s five evils – squalor – is in evidence all around us, from the re-emergence of ‘bed and breakfast’, to more homeless on the streets, to rising overcrowding and sharing, to the new phenomenon of ‘sheds with beds’. The housing and welfare benefit reforms, in their bewildering variety, leave millions of people facing unbridgeable gaps between income and housing costs. Benefit recipients – according to ex-Minister Sarah Teather – are deliberately demonised. Yet the rapid growth in new housing benefit claims is coming from people in work who can no longer meet their housing costs.
The new Government in 2015 will inherit a housing emergency. But the crisis can be tackled if there is the will. So what needs to be done?
First, we need a big increase in the building of social rented homes. Construction caused the second dip in the recession and might cause the third. Housing schemes sit on the shelf and could be activated rapidly. Housebuilding is labour intensive, creates strong multipliers through the supply industries, does not suck in imports, and reduced unemployment means that the Treasury gets most of the investment back. Building social rented homes (which eventually pay for themselves) means the housing benefit bill would start to fall as families living in expensive private rented homes or hugely expensive temporary accommodation move to much cheaper social rented homes. After the successful reform of council housing finance, many Councils have considerable capacity to finance and build new homes. A more radical reform of the public borrowing rules could unlock a wave of investment that has been stymied for many years by Treasury orthodoxy.
Secondly, we must restore a pro-active planning system that aims to meet community needs. Tory theory that higher developers’ profits would encourage more housebuilding is misconceived. It just leads to higher profit. Land values should be controlled through land value taxation and more public ownership. The creeping segregation we are seeing under the Tories should end: we should fulfil Aneurin Bevan’s vision of ‘the living tapestry’ of the mixed community.
Thirdly, the Banks must be made to work for new home owners. Even if first time buyers can afford repayments they cannot raise the huge deposits that are required. There are ways of easing this but it is unacceptable for the Banks to be so unresponsive when they have had such extraordinary support from the taxpayer.
Fourthly, we must regulate letting agents and private renting, starting with the most squalid homes. Standards must be raised and bad practice tackled. Longer tenancies should become the norm and rent caps should replace benefit caps.
Finally, we must restore the homelessness and benefits safety nets. Housing benefit caps are likely to stay but must reflect conditions in the real housing market and not leave people having to choose between food and rent. The Coalition has effectively ended the homelessness safety net. Forcing families to move hundreds of miles from London – the majority of London boroughs are now doing this, it is not just a ‘rich central London’ issue – is a disgrace because of the human cost involved and especially the impact on children.
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Transforming slums in Africa
According to Dallas Campbell on the BBC’s Supersized Earth, you could fit all the World’s urban areas into half of Australia.
That’s fairly extraordinary when you consider that recently the number of people living in urban areas exceeded those living in rural areas for the first time. And that the World’s cities are growing by 200,000 new inhabitants a day. Cities account for some 70 per cent of global GDP.
Around one billion people live in urban slums, about one in seven of us. The figure is projected to rise to 1.4 billion by 2020. Many are built on marginal land next to rivers railways roads and rubbish dumps. Poor quality and overcrowded housing in slums has a significant impact on people’s lives: diseases spread more easily, disasters like flooding are amplified, and people are denied both privacy and safety. Basic services are often absent. The threat of eviction is often ever present.
Yet slums are not always what they seem: many are economically vibrant and some become transformed into permanent settlements.
For millions of people, gaining secure tenure of safe land is the first step towards building a permanent home and accessing other opportunities.
Since 1987, when it was set up by British housing activists, Homeless International has been the main UK charity that supports slum dwellers to improve their lives and find lasting solutions to urban poverty. Homeless International’s vision is ‘a world in which all people can exercise their right to land, basic services and shelter’. They help communities transform slums by supporting them to work together to secure land, build homes, access safe water and sanitation, and negotiate with governments – ensuring that they have a voice that gets heard.
They work by supporting the development of local organisations in Africa and Asia that have their roots in poor communities. These organisations often grow from small social movements into self-reliant organisations that are able provide shelter and basic services solutions that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.
Homeless International believes that sustainable solutions to homelessness can be created if people have access to land, finance, information, organisation and technology – and if they have an opportunity to play a lead role in designing solutions that work for them.
A small amount of resources is used to help a lot of people and HI deserves the support of the whole housing movement in the UK. You can find ways to get involved and to support their work on their website. Photos from Homeless International website.
Support social enterprise in Africa this Xmas!
And if you’re looking for a Xmas present that will support social enterprise in Africa, John Lewis are selling Alive and Kicking’s footballs. If you buy a ball, A&K donate another ball to a school in Kenya – and you can track online where your donated ball has gone.
A&K are the only people making footballs in the whole continent of Africa, and there is great potential for a social enterprise to create jobs and sustain communities.
Many of the workers in the Kenyan factory live in Africa’s second largest slum, Kibera in Nairobi.