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An interesting day for housing.  Nick Clegg made a speech promising more housebuilding…. again.  Housebuilding figures for London showed that all the dire warnings about Boris Johnson’s programmes were wrong – they are even worse than predicted by the ‘scaremongers’ during the mayoral election.
But a report published today on housing and the economy sets the real agenda for the future.  Let’s Get Building is written by John Perry for a group of housing organisations*.
The report marries the well-known information about the need for more affordable homes with the increasingly desperate need to generate economic growth.  It shows that housing construction is a particularly rapid means of stimulating the economy and that, unlike the often-talked about but rarely delivered major infrastructure projects, many schemes are ‘shovel ready’.  Each £1 spent generates £2.84 of economic activity and, if the £1 is public money, most of the money is returned to the sector in increased taxes and reduced benefit spending as people become employed to do the work.  More than 90% of the money would stay in the country, with minimal implications for imports, and there is considerable current capacity in the industry so it would not generate inflationary pressures.
In addition to the general economic argument, the report makes the case for the additional investment to be focussed on social rented housing because there is insufficient effective demand for new private housing and because the public spending advantage – in terms of knock-on savings in the system – is strongest.
There is common acceptance that there is huge unmet demand for homes and that buying homes has become unaffordable (the requirement for high deposits now being as important as being able to make repayments). Many more people are now looking to rent privately instead – people who might previously have bought but also people on low incomes who are now no longer able to access social rented housing due to reduced supply and changes to the homelessness legislation.
Demand is therefore rising for private rented homes across the board in all price ranges, putting upward pressure on rents.  Yet new caps on benefits and new payment arrangements are making landlords less willing to take people on housing benefit (and remember, the great increase in households on housing benefit is mainly people in work).  Where households on lower incomes are or become private tenants this is invariably at rents that are much higher than social rents – so the policy increases rather than decreases the pressure on the housing benefit budget.
The report identifies that there is extra capacity to build amongst councils and councils with ALMOs (arms length management organisations).  In addition to using any spare capacity of housing associations, council resources need to be tapped.
The end of council housebuilding led to the long period of inadequate supply that we have been experiencing for 30 years.  Housing associations never filled the gap left when Thatcher ended councils’ role in new provision.  Only in the last few years have councils looked to take up the role again, and the reform of council housing finance to bring in the self-financing regime has created new opportunities for them to do so.  Councils have already shown that the can gear up quickly – for example some 26 councils are participating in the ‘affordable homes’ programme – and most of the actual work – design and build – will be commissioned from the private sector, boosting the order books of struggling companies.
The report shows in plenty of detail how a new programme of homes for social rent could be financed and how councils are now ideally placed to facilitate investment on a significant scale.  But it also explains how this investment programme would have a big effect on revenue budgets and help government to stem the rise in housing benefit spending.  These savings would be particularly large if the new homes built were targeted towards taking households out of expensive temporary accommodation.
Finally, the report acknowledges that any increase in net spending (ie investment minus savings and extra tax income) would add to the currently used definition of public borrowing, PSNB (Public Sector Net Borrowing, still commonly referred to as ‘the PSBR’).  Here the authors argue that additional investment is justified under the existing rules, but that a review of the fiscal rules to bring them in line with international conventions would help remove discrimination against worthwhile and prudent investment by the UK public sector.  The authors have even gone to the trouble of commissioning Capital Economics to survey the City to discover no adverse reaction to the proposals.
I would go so far as to say that this is the most important report on housing and how to get investment moving for years.  It sets a serious agenda for the future.
It should be acceptable to all mainstream political parties.  It should be easy for Labour to adopt and offers a way out of Labour’s many dilemmas over housing.  And, instead of breaking yet more promises, I strongly recommend that Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson should sit down and read it cover to cover.
* Association of Retained Council Housing; Chartered Institute of Housing; Councils with ALMOs Group; Local Government Association; National Federation of ALMOs.

It’s easy to lose count of the number of the times the Government has ‘declared war on red tape’.  David Cameron had another go yesterday in his speech to the CBI which seemed to have been written by a special computer programme which stitches Churchillian clichés together into sentences – ‘in the global race, you are quick or you are dead’ – that sort of thing.  LOL.
Cameron poured scorn all around:
‘Consultations, impact assessments, audits, reviews, stakeholder management, securing professional buy-in, complying with EU procurement rules, assessing sector feedback … this is not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on Earth. It’s not how you get things done. As someone once said, if Christopher Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be stuck in the dock. So I am determined to change this.’
Mr Cameron needs to attend one of Michael Gove’s history lessons.  Not only did Columbus have many advisors, it took him 5 years to convince his stakeholders – the Spanish and Portuguese Courts – to fund the project.  It sounds as contorted as a European procurement exercise.  He had to deal with those who still believed he would sail off the edge of the earth – there’s a real health and safety issue.  He did many studies which today might be called impact assessments and was subject to several audits of his plans to justify the proposed cost.  An equality impact assessment might have concluded it would be best to stay at home.
But I digress.  Cameron had many targets – cutting down on judicial review caught the media attention this morning – but one Labour innovation particularly annoys him: ‘So I can tell you today, we are calling time on equality impact assessments.’ He said ‘these things’ should be left to ‘smart people in Whitehall’ to consider when making policy instead of ‘churning out reams of bureaucratic nonsense.’
Anyone who has watched the Whitehall policy-making and legislative process knows how prone to error and miscalculation it is.  The clever people in Whitehall are not always very knowledgeable about the real world and, if I’m frank, tend to have middle class prejudices about poor people.  The really really clever people – like the civil servants who worked on the stunningly complex reform of council housing finance – spend a lot of time talking to outside experts and stakeholders, constantly informing and revising the policy they are developing, trying to get it right first time and trying to identify in advance the potential unintended consequences.
Impact assessments have become an integral part of the policy-making process.  They are often written by people with different forms of expertise and offer a structured way of looking at policy from a range of different angles.  It’s not just that they challenge discrimination, although they do, it’s that they challenge ‘straight line thinking’.  Some of the most insightful things written about new legislation have been in the impact assessments.  They have genuinely made a difference to the quality of the work done in Whitehall.  Nor do they need to slow things down as Cameron suggests.  They are built into the timetable and should be done alongside the other policy development work.  Indeed, by predicting possibly discriminatory outcomes and adverse reactions they can speed up the process.
In the world that Cameron wants to go back to no-one used to consider how proposals would specifically affect women or minority groups or disabled people or LGBT communities, and so no-one was charged with developing mitigating or countervailing measures if the impact was adverse.  Cameron is hubris personified: he and his chums in the elite know what is best and people with different views should stop being irritating.  Sir Humphrey would approve.
As Yvette Cooper commented: ‘This is even more proof of David Cameron’s personal blind spot on women and his lack of concern about the unfair impact of his policies. The idea we can leave equality to the ‘judgement’ of this prime minister and his cabinet with so few women is just a joke.’

The problem with the Government’s consultation on the definition of child poverty lies in the very first sentence: ‘The Coalition Government is committed to ending child poverty.’  Indeed this sentence is repeated so often it is a case that they ‘doth protest too much, methinks’.
In principle what the Government wants to do has some logic to it.  Child poverty should be defined more widely than just by measures of relative income.  Indeed, with a flash of honesty, it admits that the recent fall in child poverty rates is not due to any improvement in the incomes of the poorest but to a fall in the median income to which they are compared.  So introducing a multidimensional definition, to include for example housing conditions, educational opportunity, parental health, and household debt, should provide a clearer picture of the reality of child poverty today.
The chapter on housing is a decent summary of the argument that bad housing has a huge impact on children’s health and wellbeing and their future opportunities.  The quoted number of children living in overcrowded, badly repaired, damp and poorly-heated homes is testimony to the scale of the problem.  But it also makes a simplistic association between ‘troubled areas’ and ‘living on estates’, which are of course different things.  I also have suspicions about including family stability and parental worklessness in the measure and whether this is an attempt to open the door to Ian Duncan Smith’s favourite hobby horses.
Despite their assertion, the evidence that the Government has no real commitment to ending child poverty is just too strong.  Their measures on tax credits, welfare benefits, housing rents, homelessness and the cuts to children and youth services make things so much worse for so many families with children.
The latest evidence comes from Sarah Teather MP, an apologist for the Coalition whilst in Government as Minister for Children and Families and now – since being sacked – desperately trying to rebuild her reputation and save her seat.  Her interview in Saturday’s Guardian reveals a lot about the Coalition.
According to author Toby Helm, Teather ‘makes no bones about the fact that, for her, the cuts and caps already agreed by the coalition are unacceptable and wrong.’  Referring in particular to the overall benefit cap, she says that ‘having a system which is so punitive in its regime that it effectively takes people entirely outside society, so they have no chance of participating, crosses a moral line for me.’
Helm continues: ‘She accuses parts of government and the press of a deliberate campaign to ‘demonise’ those on benefits and of failing to understand that those in need of state help are just as human as they are. 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 core of Teather’s argument is that the entire policy will not only be cruel and socially disruptive but also self-defeating because families and – most tragically – many thousands of children will be driven out of their homes and schools and forced to live in areas where rents are lower but where there will be less chance of adults finding jobs.’
At last someone with inside knowledge of the Coalition is telling the real story.
And the reality is that child poverty will get worse whatever measures are used.

• By guest blogger Monimbo

The Growth and Infrastructure Bill going through parliament at the moment is a threat to affordable housing supply.  Is it also an example of what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’?
Writing in the Guardian about responses to the destruction in New York caused by Hurricane Sandy, Naomi Klein describes how big firms are moving in offering private sector solutions and shows how the hurricane’s aftermath is in danger of becoming ‘just one more opportunity for further deregulation’.
In Britain we haven’t (recently) had a Hurricane Sandy but we do have our own ‘crisis born of corporate greed’ which has led (among many other things) to a collapse in the housing market. Everyone knows that builders aren’t building enough houses because potential buyers can’t get mortgages and in many cases also because builders themselves can’t get finance from the banks. To give some credit where it’s due, the government has recognised this with its FirstBuy and NewBuy schemes, although there is criticism that they are too focused on first-time buyers of new property. Local authorities are also doing their bit with several launching mortgage schemes, such as Sandwell.
But we are also getting a dose of disaster capitalism as developers lobby hard to get rid of regulations that supposedly stand in the way of the investment they would otherwise undertake.  The evidence that the planning system continues to be an obstacle to development, even after detailed guidance was replaced in March by the 50-page National Planning Policy Framework, is mixed at best.  There is even less (no?) evidence that building regulations hold up development, but that hasn’t stopped the government setting up an independent review to look into how many of them can be dispensed with in the supposed interests of ‘economic growth’.
As is happening with homelessness and allocations policies, the government is also tripping over its own initiatives in its hurry to act.  It’s been anxious to weaken (and is said to have considered abolishing) the planning requirements to provide affordable housing, known as section 106 agreements.  At first it was content to let councils renegotiate them, which 40% have apparently already done.  Then in August it decided to consult on renegotiating any agreement that dated from before April 2010. It also announced that expert brokers would be used to get projects moving that were stalled because of section 106 deals.  Its stimulus package of 6^th September promised:
‘…removing restrictions on house builders to help unlock 75 000 homes currently stalled due to sites being commercially unviable. Developers who can prove that council’s costly affordable housing requirements make the project unviable will see them removed.’
Although consultation on the August document didn’t close until 8^th October, within ten days it published the Growth and Infrastructure Bill which will allow any section 106 agreement (irrespective of date) to be challenged immediately.  It is hard to see how the Bill can possibly have taken into account responses to the consultation, several of which were submitted close to the deadline.
This week the Bill has been examined by Commons committee.  David Orr from the NHF has already seen his argument that the Bill could stop the development of 35,000 affordable homes dismissed by Eric Pickles.  Gavin Smart from CIH argued that Pickles’ evidence that 75,000 housing starts were held up includes a range of reasons for delays, such as lack of bank finance or lack of buyers who can get mortgages. It doesn’t give evidence of specific problems about section 106.  In the impact assessment for the Bill, the government says it is targeting sites where housing markets are weak.  But it is far from clear how changing section 106 deals will make a scheme viable if the overall market is still moribund.
Compared to the use of the banking crisis as a smokescreen for massive spending cuts and attacks on welfare and public services, deregulation may seem a minor problem.  But as Gavin Smart also pointed out, section 106 led to 29,000 affordable homes being built as recently as 2010.  This was a huge contribution, even if this scale of output is unlikely to be repeated soon. As direct government subsidy is drastically curtailed, the last thing we need is an irresponsible end to the main source of indirect subsidy: obligations on builders either to provide affordable homes within new developments or, if not, to pay for them to be built elsewhere.
None of this will stop the government, of course.  Disaster capitalism isn’t interested in evidence-based policies, but in deregulation, and much more besides.

It doesn’t sound very exciting but the Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2012 came into force yesterday.
Behind the apparently harmless jargon of this statutory instrument is a story of indifference to human need and hypocrisy of the highest order.
In short, the Order sets out the matters that a local authority should take into account when using their new power under the Localism Act to discharge their main homelessness duty by finding accommodation in the private rented sector for a priority homeless household.
The order refers to the standards of physical accommodation and management which should be achieved, for example ensuring electrical and gas safety and that landlords are fit and proper persons.
The Order also sets out what seem to be reasonable conditions about the location of the private rented accommodation to which homeless households should be referred.  Councils ‘must take into account’ distance, potential disruption to employment, health, education or caring arrangements, and the accommodation’s proximity to local services and transport.  But in reality it’s a bit like saying we should all ‘take into account’ our health when tucking into a large pile of jam doughnuts because the Order is a million miles away from what councils – and the Government itself – are planning for homeless households.
Just as Grant Shapps wrote to 20 councils telling them they shouldn’t use bed and breakfast accommodation for more than 6 weeks whilst fully aware that many simply could not avoid doing so under current Government housing policies, Mark Prisk has signed this Order in the full knowledge that homeless households will be transported huge distances with the guaranteed disruption that his Order supposedly seeks to avoid.
Prisk even has the nerve to say the new system would provide ‘certainty for households’ and would offer ‘new protections’.  Compare that with the case studies offered recently by the Guardian and the Child poverty Action Group, which showed that the outcomes for families are often horrendous.
At the same time as the Minister spouts about it not being fair or acceptable to place households many miles away from home, councils and his officials are planning to do just that.
Many newspapers and magazines have now carried stories about councils, especially London boroughs, moving households many miles away from home.  Many more are procuring accommodation right now.  Towns and cities have been mentioned in all parts of the Midlands and the South.  The vast majority will not meet the location criteria set out in the Order, and everyone knows that.
To be stating one policy whilst practicing another is simply hypocritical.  Patrick Butler in the Guardian has reported on what official Government advisers are telling the sector.  He quotes a Government representative, Andy Gale – confirmed to me by another person present who was appalled by his message and tone – briefing that councils would have to undertake a procurement exercise for private rented accommodation and that, for many London authorities, this would involve looking outside the area.  He briefed that the changes have to be ‘sold’ to council members including how to deal with questions like ‘is it about cuts’ and ‘surely the homeless are in the greatest housing need’.  He talks about people playing the system.  And, as Butler quotes, he exposes the underlying rationale behind the new brutal regime: ‘The overall conclusion of introducing this framework is inevitably that new statutory homelessness applications will become minimal.’
Gale, and presumable the department on whose behalf he was speaking, accepts that councils may seek to discharge their duties in distant towns, and that they may face legal action.  Rather than show how councils can meet their obligations, his paper advises councils how best to frame their policies to avoid legal challenge.
On the ground, there is common acceptance that the mixture of welfare caps and changes in the homelessness duty will lead to many households having to move out of London.  For example, 7 West London boroughs have joined forces to adopt a Homelessness Strategic Action Plan which explicitly aims ‘to manage the movement of households out of London in anticipation of the overall benefits cap and other benefit changes’.
The Government’s adoption of the title ‘Affordable Rent’ for its programme of unaffordable housing has rightly been called Orwellian by many.  One meaning of Orwellian is ‘denial of truth’.  A homelessness policy where the Government does exactly the opposite of what it says it is doing is fully deserving of that description.
For more information and discussion about the new regulations, I recommend reading Jules Birch’s blog posts – on Inside Housing and on his own blog .
 
And late addition – Nearly Legal has published Andy Gale’s briefing paper, so you can read more of his progressive thoughts if you want to.

By Bill Peters
In his courteous and low key speech to the annual CML Conference on 7 November new Housing Minister Mark Prisk, like his predecessor Grant Shapps, fully acknowledged the mountain that the government had to climb in terms of generating new supply across all sectors while at the same time highlighting the measures put in place. He also stressed his desire for partnership working with lenders and builders just as he had in his first speech to housing associations  and no doubt every other group he has spoken to since.
The speech reveals an awareness of the problems but no real sense of urgency about dealing with them and not least as a vital aspect of re-booting the economy. Though the fireworks may be being kept in the cupboard prior to the updated housing statement which will emerge sometime around 5 December the Minister chose to highlight three issues – asking lenders to shout ever louder that mortgages were available, that the new Right to Buy was worthy of close lender attention  and perhaps most bizarrely of all that lenders should support the growing self build market  on which he put not inconsiderable store. This will no doubt prompt readers of  Red Brick to reflect that self help is now becoming a central plank of policy given the inability of the centre to deliver itself!
This of course then takes you to the silences in the speech –no mention of New Homes Bonus and how it might be helping open up supply or not, no mention of how the government was pressuring builders to increase output in return for the huge support it was giving the industry  and no mention of the regulatory blockage around NewBuy which was apparently highlighted in a subsequent panel session by both lenders and builders. The FSA has so far failed to agree the regulatory capital treatment of NewBuy and through which lenders can be clear as to the capital consequences of lending under this scheme, a failing even more astonishing given that Mark Prisk is married to Lesley Titcomb the acting Chief Operating Officer of the FSA!
If government is to have any role in housing supply then surely a central function is to hold the ring and ensure all the different agencies deliver what is needed to make sure we get a huge step change in supply. The days, weeks, months and years are going by –we are already on our second housing minister in this administration and so far we have seen no real improvement in the flow of new homes and no real sense it is on a strong upward path. The Minister now needs to set out how many and when so he can be held to account and he can hold others to account. The cost of the current failure is being borne by households (for example ONS recently highlighted the rise in the number of adult children living at home, we have rising waiting lists and increased homelessness) and the economy.

By guest blogger Monimbo
Red Brick quite rightly castigated both Iain Duncan Smith for peddling more of his myths about housing benefit and Andrew Marr for failing to challenge him in his show on Sunday.  Full Fact has now examined IDS’s claims about people getting over £100,000 per year in housing benefit, showing that probably it amounts to five cases.  And as Polly Toynbee points out in Tuesday’s Guardian (‘Paying the minimum required for survival is only part of the cure for Britain’s dangerous levels of inequality’) it is not as if the money went to those families anyway, it went to the landlords who are raking it in and able to charge virtually any rent they like in the current shortage.
Andrew Marr not only failed to challenge the IDS myths, he didn’t even show how the IDS welfare reforms will hit people who are on the margins, whether unemployed or working.  These ‘reforms’ are going to do terrible damage, made worse by the fact that they are being staggered over a period of years. While this might (conceivably) make more administrative sense than a big-bang approach, it has two inescapable disadvantages.
One is that people are going to be hit by ‘reform’ after ‘reform’ affecting their benefits and their calculations about their earnings and rents if they are on low pay, so they will (perhaps) reconcile themselves to one only to be hit with the next.  The second problem, which of course for the government is a blessing, is that cumulative effects are harder to identify and publicise.  Both of these factors are made worse by the fact that not only are the reforms staggered over time, but they affect multiple benefits so people may be hit by a housing benefit change followed by a cut in council tax benefit followed by more changes linked to universal credit.  If it is difficult for professionals to keep up, for those at the receiving end it is going to seem like a never-ending maelstrom.
Your Homes Newcastle (the ALMO) has given one small example of the effects, on a single tenant called Joe.  He works when he can on ‘nil hour’ contracts, where he gets sent home if there is no work. Just at the moment he gets £67.50 in jobseeker’s allowance. He lives in a two-bed council flat – after paying his crisis loan of £2, water rates of £6, gas and electricity of £25, and TV license of £5.50 a week he is left with £28.90 to live on. From April 2013 he will lose £7.57 per week from housing benefit (through the bedroom tax) and have to pay £3 towards council tax. He will then have just £18.33 to live on.  If his flat carries any service charges that are ineligible for universal credit when he moves onto it, he will no longer be able to eat.
Let’s suppose Joe finds a regular part-time job on a low wage which restores or improves the amount he is left with each week.  Once universal credit comes along (and it will affect different people at different times, right up until 2017), he may well have to find a job with longer hours just to retain his new earnings.   Any claimant of working benefits will be required to meet an earnings threshold equal to national minimum pay rates for a 35-hour week, to be earned if necessary through working longer hours, getting their employer to increase their hourly wage or getting an extra job on top of their current one. Research by the Resolution Foundation shows that nearly 1.2 million working adults face losses under universal credit if they do not comply with new requirements.
As Polly Toynbee also says, ‘Labour is failing to challenge this government’s constant smears about idle scroungers’.  Most of the poor are already in work, struggling to juggle their benefits, tax credits and wages while paying ever increasing rents.  Labour is right to back the Living Wage, but it won’t begin to tackle the growing struggles that the working poor or would-be working face, unless it also shows how it will put a stop to the erosion of benefits and start to tackle the housing crisis. ‘Benefit cuts are popular for lack of Labour defending the already poor from cuts that send them into food-bank destitution.’  That’s Toynbee’s conclusion, and she is right.

It would be hard for anyone to read the new report on welfare reform from the Child Poverty Action Group and the Guardian’s survey of how councils in London are responding to the welfare caps, then go to BBC i-player and watch Andrew Marr’s interview yesterday with Iain Duncan Smith, without feeling a deep sense of outrage.
Duncan Smith peddled every myth and fairy tale going.  There were all these people getting £100,000 for rent, families with generations of people not working, people having children just to get more benefits, it goes on and on.  All have been debunked by respected fact-finders and by benefit experts who actually deal in statistical analysis.  But not a single challenge from the so-called journalist Marr: as easy rides go, this was the easiest.
Marr’s fawning coincided with an excellent Guardian piece by Patrick Butler and Ben Ferguson that illustrates the increasingly desperate search being made by London boroughs to find homes for households made homeless and likely to be made homeless by Duncan Smith’s benefit caps.  17 of the 29 boroughs that responded to their survey said they were already placing homeless families outside the capital, or have secured or are considering temporary accommodation outside London for future use.  The fact that so many boroughs are doing the same thing gives the lie to the claim that this is just about families who want to live on housing benefit in rich areas like Mayfair or Kensington.  Market rents outstrip benefit cap levels in many of so-called ‘cheaper’ outer London boroughs like Haringey, Waltham Forest, and Barking and Dagenham.  Butler and Ferguson say: ‘Councils said the move was inevitable because there is virtually no suitable private rented temporary accommodation for larger families in London that is affordable within government-imposed housing benefit allowances’. 
Another excellent Guardian piece by Amelia Gentleman looks in detail at how being moved away from home and established networks has affected one family, and case studies are also a focus of the CPAG report.  It’s only by looking at the impact on individual families that the real nature of the reforms becomes clear.  The people being affected are the polar opposite of Duncan Smith’s crude demonisation: they are typical families who are seeing their aspirations smashed by the reforms.
The Government’s story that all this would lead to landlords reducing rents has also been exposed.  Rents continue to rise and more landlords are refusing to take people on housing benefit, another turn of the screw both for the families and for councils.
Councils and organisations like the co-authors of the CPAG report, London Advice Services Alliance, are trying to advise people but the options are becoming slimmer.  Discretionary transitional funds are proving wholly inadequate.
The Government continues to maintain the fiction that this is nothing to do with them and that boroughs should not act outside the law: councils ‘must secure accommodation within their own borough so far as reasonably practicable’.  But this is plainly fatuous when most councils in London are in breach and they all cite the shortage of supply and the welfare reforms as the reasons.  Most of the boroughs concerned are doing their best in impossible circumstances although it is impossible to feel sorry for the Hammersmith and Fulhams and the Westminsters who deliberately exclude affordable housing from their future programmes.
As a response to the emergency, CPAG recommends that homeless families in temporary accommodation should be exempted from the caps (at a cost of £30m).  This is a sensible and pragmatic proposal.  They also want the mayor and London councils to co-ordinate their responses and the work of advice agencies much more effectively.
And, like everyone else, they say that the only medium and long term solutions are to build more houses.

The National Audit Office does not normally indulge in hyperbole, so when they conclude that the housing benefit reforms ‘will put pressure on the supply of affordable local housing’ they mean what they say.
In their report on the implementation of the housing benefit reforms by the Department of Work and Pensions they show how the changes will lead to shortages of private rented accommodation at or below Local Housing Allowance Rates: ‘on current trends 48 per cent of local authority areas in England could face shortfalls by 2017 ‘. 
The report summarises the scale of the cuts the Government is attempting to make in HB.  Spending of £23.4 billion in 2011-12 on 5 million households is planned to be reduced to £21.6 bn in real terms by 2014-15, a cut of £2.3bn.  1.4 m private rented sector households and 600,000 social tenants are likely to be affected.
In its understated way the NAO makes it clear that there are major problems with implementation.  For example, they say that the administrative burden on local authorities ‘has not been fully assessed’, which means no-one knows, and that DWP ‘clearly has further ground to cover in helping to raise awareness of the effect of the reforms on claimants’, which means tenants are ill-prepared for what is about to hit them.  The Government seems to be putting its publicity effort into telling tenants about the right to buy instead.
The Government has tried to deflect criticism of the changes by putting money into a discretionary fund available to local authorities to help deal with transitional issues – £390 m between 2011-12 and 2014-15.  NAO show that this fund amounts to 6% of the savings being made and that ‘It is not clear how the overall level of funding has been determined or whether it is likely to be sufficient to tackle the effects of reforms’.  In other words, it will be wholly inadequate.
But perhaps their strongest warning lies in the following conclusion: ‘We see the main ‘unplanned’, and perhaps ‘un-plannable’, challenges facing the Department as being those areas where the interaction of local authority funding capacity constraints, social housing stock, rental market conditions and the local economy may produce extreme impacts.’ 
Note the words.  Extreme impacts.
The chair of the public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge MP, said she was ‘astonished that the department of work and pensions still does not understand the wider impact of these changes. There is a real risk of increased homelessness.’
It’s like waiting for Hurrican Sandy: it will be best to prepare for the worst.

In the heady days before and after the passage of the 2002 Homelessness Act I worked with Shelter on its plans to make the most of the new legislation.  Although there were several important changes to general entitlements, the point that most excited Shelter and its then Director Chris Holmes was the introduction of duties on local authorities to review homelessness in their areas and to formulate statutory homelessness strategies.
Holmes wanted Shelter to transform itself from being an external critic of local government to becoming an active partner in a joint enterprise to end the scourge of homelessness.  Although only partially successful, a lot of groundbreaking work was done across the whole country.
In the decade since, the optimism about being able to tackle homelessness at its roots has dissipated, to be replaced by a much harsher blaming culture and, now, under the Coalition, the dismantling of the homelessness safety net.
In the years immediately after the Act, councils, encouraged by a highly active team at CLG, introduced a range of new strategies and policies so that the management of the homelessness function improved significantly.  Councils were, however, under huge and increasing pressure due to the shortage of social housing.  Over time it became hard to distinguish between well intentioned policies, such as homelessness prevention and providing housing options services, and increasingly tough gatekeeping exercises where the main purpose was to reduce and divert demand.  In particular, the Government’s top target of reducing the number of homeless households in temporary accommodation by 50%, on the surface an aggressive and progressive policy, drove many authorities down the gatekeeping path to the point where rules were stretched to the limit and sometimes broken.  Because the key indicators – numbers in TA, homelessness acceptances – were moving in the right direction little attention was paid to what was going on.  And, despite the growing barriers, those people accepted as unintentionally homeless and in priority need knew that at the end of a very long hard road a social rented home with a genuinely affordable rent and security of tenure would provide a platform for them to rebuild their lives.
As the years progressed, homeless people became parcelled up in the campaign by elements of the media and politicians like Ian Duncan Smith to stigmatise and demonise all ‘welfare’ recipients.  Some Labour politicians signed up to the new blame culture and some gave in too easily to the pressure it brought, but the Coalition has turned it into an art form.  Homelessness is primarily an outcome of our generation-long failure to build affordable homes, but people on housing waiting lists are encouraged to blame the homeless for taking all the homes.  Why should ‘they’ get all the homes when ‘we’ hard working families cannot?  The image of the teenage single mother getting pregnant to get a council flat has become an icon alongside the shirker lying in bed all day living the life of Riley on the state and the lower orders breeding like rabbits just to get more benefits.  The name of the game is blame the victim and divide and rule.  The truth is that homeless households are little different from the general population represented on local housing waiting lists.
I think it is fair to comment that the homelessness safety net is being dismantled.  The next step is that, from November, defined homeless households who would normally have had the right to be offered a council or housing association home will have to accept private rented accommodation if it is offered by the council (under certain terms), as is explained by Ben Reeve-Lewis in his excellent piece last week on Guardian Housing Network.  As we become a backward country in social policy terms, the analysis that it is reasonable for homeless households – by definition families with children or people who are vulnerable in some way – to be ‘discharged’ into the high cost and low security private rented sector has attracted surprisingly little comment from the social housing movement.  Even within the sector homeless people are blamed for everything from causing their own homelessness to exploiting the system to being responsible for concentrations of deprivation and anti-social behaviour on estates.
The myths and stereotypes are winning the argument and to turn it round we need to show rather more old-fashioned solidarity.