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Over the past few months I have been pursuing Freedom of Information requests concerning the Government’s ‘Affordable Rent’ programme.  We have expressed concern about this programme ever since it was scribbled on the back of a fag packet in a hurried response to George Osborne cutting the housing investment budget by more than 60%.
The basic idea was to slash the amount of subsidy per rented home by requiring providers to borrow a larger share of the cost privately, recouping this through a huge increase in rent.  There were many in-principle objections to the policy: it would use up housing associations’ capacity to borrow and significantly increase their risks; it would be unaffordable for most people coming in to social housing (despite the Government claiming disingenuously that it would meet the same needs); it would make more people – in and out of work – dependent on housing benefit and increase the benefit bill, which would have to ‘take the strain’; and it was allied to the Government’s policy of reducing security of tenure for new social tenants.
The policy did however expose a fault-line in the social housing world.  The cynical branding of the scheme as ‘Affordable Rent’ caused endless confusion and still does.  Some providers and some councils were hostile to the new scheme, mainly due to high rents, but others embraced it enthusiastically, notably those that were already dropping social rented housing and moving towards market-based rents.  Even those that were hostile were seduced by the argument that this was ‘the only game in town’ – it was better to build ‘Affordable Rent’ because the alternative would be to build nothing.  Some exceptional councils like Islington found ways of keeping a social rented programme going.  The policy also had widely different impact in the regions – rents at up to 80% of market levels is a disaster in the south but were lower than some existing social rents in parts of the north.  So a nationally consistent response was hard to achieve.
Two factors characterised the policy from the start: incompetence and delay.  Virtually a whole year of output was lost as providers struggled to understand the new rules and prepare complex financial plans and risk assessments.  As a result, ‘affordable’ housing starts tumbled towards zero and the programme became hugely back-loaded into the final year, substantially increasing the risk.  Even now most of the schemes are ’indicative’ not real planned homes on real sites.  The programme had unclear objectives: Who was it for? What size mix was required? (for example Boris Johnson in London has consistently said he wants more family homes).  To what extent should providers cross-subsidise from small homes to family homes to keep those rents down?  Who was making the decisions – the provider, the government and HCA, or the local council?  Was social rent excluded entirely?  What would happen in existing schemes subject to s 106 deals?
Endless negotiations and threatened stand-offs followed, to the extent that only this week the HCA announced that the final contract has at last been signed.  Information about the programme has been scarce and questions were met with the reply that the information was commercially confidential.  The CORE statistics on new lettings revealed some information about the small sample of properties that had come through the system, but we need to know what it is planned for the whole programme.  When Ministers started bragging about how many ‘affordable homes’ would be produced, and Boris Johnson boasted that rents would be ‘only’ 65% of market rates in London, the door opened for FoI requests seeking information about the basis on which these claims were made.
Communities and Local Government responded properly with the information that they had, which wasn’t much.  But it did reveal that across England 82,000 existing social rented homes would be ’converted’ from social rents to ‘affordable rents’ to help pay for the programme.  That is a significant share of re-lets – homes that were provided under previous schemes to be let at genuinely affordable social rents that have been hijacked for this purpose.  CLG also revealed the national average rent and the regional distribution.  However, their information was based on the initial bids of providers and not the signed contracts which followed negotiations, and it became clear that CLG had little idea of how the programme was developing. The FoI response did however reveal more information about ‘Affordable Rent’ than CLG revealed to the Public Accounts Committee when it prepared its recent report into the programme.
The Mayor of London was altogether more slippery about responding to the FoI requests.  Sometimes the more someone talks about transparency the less they practice it.  The GLA argued that it was too expensive to collect the information until I pointed out that the Mayor had already made statements on issues like output and rents, so he had clearly been briefed.  They argued that the information was commercially sensitive but I made clear I was after monitoring data not details of contracts.  Finally they released anonymous information about provider contracts, the average rents they would charge and the relationship between these rents and market rates.
But then it became clear that the information was wrong.  When Inside Housing magazine tracked down the provider with the highest average rents they claimed the information was wildly incorrect.  Of course, both Red Brick and Inside Housing are entitled to rely on information provided by statutory agencies and the error belonged totally to the Mayor, who has now been forced to re-issue the information with an apology.
I am relieved to discover the highest average rent for a provider is not over £440 per week as the original information said.  But this experience reiterates the point that the amount of public information available about the programme, and especially the biggest segment of it in London, is inadequate, as the Public Accounts Committee found.  The HCA has published more information, on providers, funding and numbers of homes, but not rents and not expected completion dates.  The GLA has published much less about London.  Even though it is much smaller than previous programmes, ‘Affordable Rent’ is the main Government effort; it is still a large amount of public money and we are entitled to scrutinise what is being provided with it and whether it meets proper housing objectives.
Omnishambles, did I hear you say?

The National Housing Federation’s report Home Truths has caught the imagination of the media this morning.  Even the Daily Mail is shocked by the growing numbers of people in work who need housing benefit to pay for their homes, a key fact that undermines the Government’s normal line about housing benefit being spent on the workshy and people living in luxury homes.  Good examples of coverage include the Telegraph and the BBC.
The report’s simple format – rehearsing key facts about housing – gets important points across very well.  Although the story that has grabbed the interest is the huge increase in housing benefit claims amongst working people, other facts will bear endless repetition.  For example:

• 1,837,042 households on housing register April 2011 England
• 50,290 households accepted as homeless 2011/12 England
• 50,430 households in temporary accommodation Q1 2012
• 72,876 private housing starts England 2011/12
• 43,164 housing association housing starts England 2011/12
• 1,830 councils housing starts England 2011/12
• 37% increase in private rents in last 5 years
• 11.1 – the ratio of average house prices to average earnings in England, ranging from 7.1 in the north east to 15.6 in London.
• £50,682 – the income needed for a 75% mortgage on an average home.
• 94% – the increase in house prices over the last decade (2001-2011) in England.
• 29% – the increase in earnings over the last decade in England.
• 86% – the increase in the number of people in work claiming housing benefit since 2009, an increase of 417,830.

NHF Chief Executive David Orr commented:

“The housing market is at the point of no return; with rising house prices, rising rents and millions of families really struggling to afford their home. It’s no surprise that one in 12 families in England is on the waiting list for social housing. Sadly the future is looking even bleaker.”

In addition to the report, the NHF website has more background information and references as well as resources such as an interactive map of private rents around the country.

Towards the end of the last century I spent some months working in Southwark preparing and drafting the Council’s then housing strategy.  So it was interesting to read the report of the Southwark Housing Commission some 14 years later.  Surprisingly, most of the issues were much the same, showing that not enough progress has been made in the intervening period.  Strategies are an important but not sufficient element in achieving change.
The Commission makes many recommendations about the future of council housing in the borough that are sound.  Many, like the need to improve repairs and maintenance and the responsiveness of housing management are not new and are not controversial.  There are many examples around the country of councils that have made significant progress in these areas.  Nor will there be much argument about the Commission’s conclusion that the council will need to run its housing with ‘a more business-orientated mindset’.  The controversy lies in the Commission’s discussion of the future role of council housing in the borough and in particular whether the council should aim to retain its stock at its current size or reduce it by as much as 50%.
The Commission comes to stark conclusions about the state of the council’s 39,000 homes – with 18,000 homes still below the decent homes standard and a growing proportion of the stock reaching the end of its useful life without major investment.  This is a consequence of the type of construction undertaken after 1950 and the inadequacy of investment in long term maintenance since.  Southwark did not benefit enough from the ‘decent homes’ funding made available by the Labour Government after 2000 – although different people will have different views as to whether this was the Government’s fault for insisting on ownership and management options that tenants did not want or just the inevitable outcome of the council and tenants’ own decisions on issues such as stock transfer and setting up ALMOs.  Most tenants still continue to prefer to keep the council as their landlord, and that should be the starting point.
If it is easy to be dazzled by the scale of the challenge in Southwark, and to descend into doom and gloom, the Commission’s analysis provides some new grounds for optimism.  In particular, HRA (housing revenue account) reform – proposed by Labour and implemented by the Coalition – could be the game-changer.  Back in 1999 the council did not want to go down the road of large scale stock transfer, so the success of the housing strategy depended almost entirely on national government funding decisions – the annual HRA settlement and annual investment allocations.  The council now has choices and much more power over the destiny of its housing stock.  It has control of its own rental income and a sizeable borrowing capacity.  It has a real opportunity to prepare a genuine (rather than a hopeful) 30-year strategy for its stock and full responsibility for its implementation.  The report shows that a judicious mix of redevelopment in the worst cases, physical improvement in many others, and using borrowing capacity to build new homes to replace those lost through right to buy and demolition, together with a major drive to improve the quality and responsiveness of housing management services, could mean that council housing in Southwark has a positive future.
The Commission considers three options for the future size of the council stock – maintaining the current number (39,000), reducing to 30,000 and reducing to 20,000.  I am not convinced that they have got to grips with the option of reducing by almost half – there is no real discussion about who the stock would be transferred to, what might happen to it and whether it would be guaranteed to continue to meet housing need rather than be marketised in some way.
The Commission itself concluded that even a stock of 39,000 – the largest of any London borough – would be insufficient to meet the predicted need for homes that are affordable to people on low and moderate incomes.  Even if it could meet the borough’s own needs, those with long memories will recall that most of Southwark’s homes were built by the LCC/GLC, with resources provided by all Londoners, partially to help relieve housing pressures in other boroughs with less land.  As the ‘social cleansing’ of poorer people from high value central boroughs takes place, Southwark may need to fulfil this role again.
Crucially, the Commission’s assessment is that all three stock sizes would be viable options: “The Commission holds the view that all three options are possible and potentially financially sustainable, and that each has its advantages and disadvantages.”
Social rented homes have become such a precious resource that it is surely right that the Council Leader, Cllr Peter John, in response to the Commission’s report, has ruled out drastic reductions in the stock and has also reiterated the borough’s commitment to building 1,000 new council homes by 2020.

By Leonie Cooper, Co-Chair of SERA

So two and half years into the Tory-led coalition government, what has been done to tackle the spiralling bills that householders face in all sectors, whether public rented, private sector rented or owner-occupied? We’ve heard a lot about cutting benefits paid to people on low incomes, but not much about cutting the costs that people face.
As ever, it’s left to Ed Miliband and the shadow cabinet to start talking about bringing rogue landlords under control, and to start talking about breaking up the monopoly of the “Big 6” energy companies. In 2008, SERA launched a pamphlet on Community Energy, jointly with the Co-operative Party, and now the ideas and examples in that pamphlet, demonstrating how communities working together to purchase energy jointly can secure a better deal, are starting to be heard more widely.
But there are another two and a half years to go before the next General Election. They may have done nothing so far, but perhaps the Tories and LibDems will have done something to tackle household bills by the time of the election? Indeed, they will have done something on household bills – but sadly, going in completely the wrong direction. Their flagship policy, the Green Deal, will actually reduce bills – but then add back onto the reduced bills the cost of the improvements made to the building. It’s hard to see why anyone would actually take it up, as there will be no reduction in bills – at a time when salaries are frozen, and many people are being made redundant as the public sector is downsized. Why would anyone tie themselves into paying for Green Deal Measured, not for a few years but for ages and ages?
Why would anyone want to get involved in the Green Deal bearing in mind it will do nothing to reduce household bills? It’s my view that they won’t – and nor will many organisations. The initial set of pathfinder companies comprises just 22 companies. The Greater London Authority conducted some research in London to find out how many London authorities might get involved in the Green Deal – of the small number that are looking at implementation in detail, they are all Labour Authorities. Haringey and Islington are taking a strong lead – both Labour-led. Inside Housing conducted a national survey, which revealed that most social landlords that responded to their survey have “no plans” to do anything on the Green Deal at all. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the new policy.
Of course, if Tory authorities hang back this does create an opportunity for Labour authorities to do some job creation for local people, investigating the opportunity to become Green Deal Providers for their own boroughs and neighbouring Tory Boroughs or Districts – but it will still leave household bills higher.
So what do we really need to do to tackle household bills? We need:

• A reformed regulator – Ofgem is simply not doing what it should be doing in terms of regulation
• To break up the monopoly of the “Big Six” energy suppliers / generators
• Local community-owned energy generation
• A de-centralised energy grid
• De-carbonised energy generation, including proper investment into large-scale renewables on land and at sea, both wind and wave.
• Full energy market reform, of both suppliers and generators
• A reduction in energy requirements resulting from both building fabric improvements and behaviour change

Under Labour, when Ed Miliband was at DECC, we had begun to make progress with the Energy Company Obligations, CERT and CESP, complemented by a fully functional  Feed-In Tariff, and to be further enhanced by the Renewable Heat Incentive.  Replacing all of this with the Green Deal and a few Renewable Heat competitions is not the way forward.
We need a transformation from the smallest and most local level to the largest scale to really deliver cheaper energy and to reduce both carbon and bills, and new regulator that will break up the Big 6 monopoly and forced bills back down.
It’s clear that this Government isn’t really interested in tackling both carbon and bill reduction – but Labour will.
Based on Leonie Cooper’s speech at the joint SERA/Labour Housing Group fringe meeting at Labour Party Conference.  SERA is the Socialist Environmental Resources Campaign.  More information at http://sera.org.uk/

Monimbo
Theresa May has pledged to restrict immigration, saying it has fuelled demand for new housing.  In her speech to the Tory conference she said: ‘Uncontrolled, mass immigration undermines social cohesion, and in some places it overburdens our infrastructure and public services.  It is behind more than a third of the demand for all new housing in the UK.’ She might have said it, but is it true?
Well one bit that is true is that migration is ‘behind’ one-third of housing demand.  In fact, the current household projections for England, still based on 2008 figures, show that migration accounts for a bit under two-fifths of the expected growth in households. New household formation requires us to build at least 232,000 new homes per year – and the projections take no account of the needs backlog (most recently assessed in a report published by DCLG).
However, we are of course now building far fewer houses than this: only around 100,000 per year.  So even if migration stopped tomorrow, total output would only meet two-thirds of the needs arising from natural population growth.  Government efforts to stimulate supply are failing, so ministers blame the problem on excess demand.
Let’s concede though that Mrs May has a point: it would be easier to meet total needs if the part generated by migration were reduced. But is this fairly described as a consequence of ‘uncontrolled, mass immigration’? Well perhaps we shouldn’t expect measured language in a party conference speech, but even by these standards the term is excessive.  There has been one major piece of legislation per year on average for the past twelve years, each one further tightening the controls.
Not surprisingly, the speech was also a very unsophisticated take on migrants’ impact on the housing market. From the most recent evidence, this is summarised by the Migration Observatory in the chart below.  It shows that the initial impact of migration is largely on the private rented sector, where of course it is bound to affect rents (especially in neighbourhoods where migrants are concentrated).  However, although migrants eventually tend to assume the same housing profile as UK-born people, this takes some time.  The impact of changes in immigration rules will take years to work through to the social and owner-occupied sectors.  In social housing, for example, latest CORE data show that just six per cent of lettings are to foreign nationals, and the proportion is not increasing.

The most important criticism of the speech however is that it implies that mass immigration can be controlled and its impact on housing need reduced.  For example, recent efforts to reduce numbers have focussed on family migration and on students.  Family migrants are almost entirely those who join people living here permanently, for example as spouses.  While this can be slowed down by raising the hurdles that people have to cross and lengthening timescales, it is difficult to reduce it significantly without affecting human rights.  Student numbers can be reduced and this has some impact on parts of the private rented sector, but at an unknown economic cost which is bound itself to affect people’s earnings and indirectly their ability to pay for housing.
The Tories’ latest suggestion, to challenge the EU freedom of movement rules, would undoubtedly have some impact on housing demand but would have other unknown consequences.  Two that come immediately to mind are the effects on the building industry of the loss of EU labour, and the impact on housing supply of more Britons being forced to remain in the UK and keeping their existing homes, if they lose their entitlement to move to countries like Spain.  Let’s remember the importance of the roughly 300,000 Brits who leave the country every year, and the consequences if many of them couldn’t do so.
In other words, there is no straightforward way in which tightening immigration controls will have a beneficial impact on the mismatch between the supply of and demand for housing.  Insufficient housing production is a problem that should be blamed on a range of factors, including government policy over the last few decades.  Migration has played a role, but heaping the responsibility for our housing problems on migrants is not only unfair and passing the buck, it distracts attention from the many other reasons why governments have failed.  It suggests that Mrs May’s proposals are the key to solving our housing problems, which might be a nice delusion that plays well to Daily Mail readers but is very far from the truth.

Summary:
Following FoI requests, the price of the ‘Affordable Rent’ programme is becoming clear.  

• The average ‘affordable rent’ per unit will be £6,909 a year, ranging from  £5,195 in the North East and Yorkshire to £9,487 in London (over £182 a week).
• More than 82,000 social rented homes will be hijacked – ie ‘converted’ to ‘affordable rent’ in England – to inject an estimated £90 million a year into the scheme to help pay for it.
  

The Government’s ‘Affordable Rent’ programme has been a mysterious affair.  Never has a programme been invented, promoted, negotiated and implemented with such little information being available to anyone wanting to scrutinise whether it might meet housing objectives and achieve reasonable value for money.
‘Affordable Rent’ is hugely controversial, for several reasons.  First it means the virtual abandonment of the social rented programme as we have known it for decades.  Secondly, it moves rent levels towards market rents – officially, ‘up to 80% of market rent’ – levels that are by common consent not ‘affordable’ in high rent areas by people on low or modest incomes.  Thirdly, it is linked to the ending of security of tenure and the introduction of insecure fixed term tenancies.  And fourthly, the programme is part funded by taking a large number of existing social rented homes that become available to let and ‘converting’ them into ‘affordable rent’ lettings at much higher rents.
The Government has boasted about the number of new AR homes that will be provided as evidence of their commitment to ’affordable homes’.   But simple questions about the programme, like the range of rents to be charged, the average rents in each local authority area, the bedroom size of the accommodation being built, and the number of existing social homes to be ‘converted’ have not been answered.
Freedom of Information requests that I have put in to the Mayor of London (see here) and to the Communities department have begun to elicit some of the missing information about the planned programme as a whole.  The recent ‘CORE’ statistics also revealed some information about lettings to the first homes produced, but that is inevitably an early and small sample (around 4,600 lets).
The response from CLG – rather less tardy and grudging with the information than the Mayor, I have to say in passing – is based on the original bids made by providers last year, which may have changed before the final contract was signed and may change again as the programme is implemented.  It is extraordinary that more up to date and detailed monitoring is not taking place.  However, the FoI reveals:

• The average ‘affordable rent’ per unit will be £6,909 a year (£133 a week) across England.  This is 72.6% of the assessed market rent for these properties (which averages £9,513 a year).

The average figures for each of the operational regions are as follows:
Region                                  Affordable Rent            Market Rent       % of market rent
East/South East                                   7,050                        9,099                        77.5%
London                                                  9,487                       14,584                        65.1%
Midlands                                              5,684                         7,208                        78.9%
North East/Yorks & H                       5,195                          6,684                        77.7%
North West                                          5,411                           6,810                        79.5%
South/South West                             6,511                           8,345                        78.0%
ENGLAND                                          6,909                          9,513                         72.6%

• More than 82,000 social rented homes will be hijacked – ie ‘converted’ to ‘affordable rent’ in England –  to help pay for the programme.

In terms of operational regions, this means that the number of social rented homes that will now not be available for letting at social rents will be:
16,504 – East/South East;
14,632 – London;
11,801 – Midlands;
11,810 – North East/Yorkshire/Humber;
17,092 – North West;
10,542 – South/South West.
Total 82,381 – England.
On conversion, the average rent for these homes will increase from £4,625 to £5,724, an uplift of £1,099 on average across the country.  The uplift will range from £625 in NE/Y/H to £2,142 in London.  These conversions will therefore subsidise the Affordable Rent programme by around £90m a year.
Information was NOT COLLECTED on bedroom size categories and the rents that would be charged for each, despite the fact that this was one of the controversial areas of the policy – and maximising the number of family units was an explicit objective of the policy, at least in London.  It was also widely reported that some housing associations were so worried about the high rents they would have to charge for family accommodation that they were raising rents on small units to cross-subsidise larger ones.  It is surely right that information should be in the public arena to determine whether the outcome was fair and reasonable.
CLG point to the guidance that has been published previously about the programme notably the Affordable Homes Framework and the procedure for assessing market rents.
The AR programme causes different problems in different parts of the country.  In high value areas the relationship with market rents leads to rents that are way above what is normally regarded as ‘affordable’.  Yet in low value areas a rent of 80% of market might be lower than the local ‘target rent’ for social rented homes, which is then used as a floor in the calculation of an AR rent.  That helps explain why rents are closer to market levels in the cheaper parts of the country.
In London the average rent in some providers’ contracts is as high as £305 a week.  We do not know how this varies according to the bedroom size of the property, but it is a large sum of money in anyone’s terms.  In their desperation to make the scheme work the Government is letting housing benefit take the strain in the first instance, but no-one believes that this will be sustained in the medium term and when the new Universal Credit system is introduced.
The loss of more than 82,000 socially rented homes is a huge blow to the supply of genuinely affordable homes.  The programme itself is back-loaded, so most homes will be produced in the third year, but it is not known when the impact of ‘conversions’ will be felt.  But it will be soon and it will be severe.
These homes were built on the basis that they would be let to tenants at social rents and they have been hijacked to support the new programme financially.

Report by Secretary of Labour Housing Group, Paul Eastwood
Housing was top of the agenda at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester this week, with the announcement from Ed Balls to commit to building 100k new homes a year warmly welcomed. At several workshops, Jack Dromey also reinforced the message for housing to be a main campaigning priority between now and the General Election, and for us to aim to revive the construction industry and build our way out of recession. Jack made clear that Right To Buy under a future Labour Government would be conditional on a new home being built for every home that was sold.
Labour Housing Group submitted a ‘contemporary motion’, which was included in a composite that was discussed at the sustainable communities debate. In the contemporary issues ballot, housing received the highest number of overall votes (2.6 million votes from CLPs and Affiliates ), ahead of Banking, Growth, and Jobs; Economic Alternative; and Employment Rights.
Within its motion, LHG asked Conference to note the following key points:

• we are facing a housing crisis. The social and personal impacts of this are with us now

• the proposals in August from the Policy Exchange recommending the sale of Councils’ most “valuable” properties as a way to fund new house building should be condemned. We must protect the social housing stock, and add to it wherever possible.

• in the last quarter only 21,540 new homes were completed, with a 97% collapse in provision of affordable homes, and a 68% reduction in provision of social homes in 2011/12.  This year capital funding has been slashed by 63%

• by cutting investment in housing this Government is making the crisis worse not better. Investing in housing will help us build our way out of recession

LHG asked for:

• an emergency tax on bankers’ bonuses, to provide new homes, create new jobs, and reduce payments of welfare benefits

• a condemnation of the recent relaxation of planning requirements to provide affordable housing, and asks the Party to commit to a programme of building homes let on properly affordable rents, and with long term security of tenure.

In addition to LHG’s proposals, the composite motion on housing called for:

• better regulation of private lettings, to protect tenants and responsible landlords

• reforms of the Right To Buy ensuring that all receipts are retained locally and  ring fenced for reinvestment in housing

The motion urged Conference to:

• make addressing the housing crisis a top priority

• ensure “affordable housing” was affordable to those on modest wages

• prioritise the social house building programme

• invest in green technologies, sustainable materials, and carbon neutral housing

• introduce rules to ensure that companies building social housing employ and train apprentices

• reaffirm Nye Bevan’s vision of mixed communities living side by side, in homes of high quality at an affordable price.

TV is an incredibly powerful medium and last night’s Newsnight investigation into the use of bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless families got the point across more effectively than a hundred reports.  If you missed it, make sure to check it out on BBC i-player.
Tim Whewell has an understated style and gave clear explanations both of the policies that have led to a new explosion in the use of B&Bs and of the laws that are being broken by councils.  The families that featured were articulate and were given an opportunity to explain their circumstances and the issues they faced.
Essentially, a number of councils, mainly in London, have faced a surge in homelessness and they have a duty to secure accommodation at least whilst enquiries are undertaken.  Having kept the use of B&B under firm control for many years now, the lack of available accommodation at an acceptable price – the Government were warned! – has once again led to families being kept in B&B longer than the statutory maximum of 6 weeks and at huge cost to local taxpayers.  Conditions, as we saw in the programme, which featured Croydon, are often scandalous: we saw examples of dangerous overcrowding, with families virtually living on a bed in a room with no circulation space, wholly inadequate bathing, toileting and cooking facilities, fire hazards and infestation.  Owners are making money hand over fist.
The numbers have risen alarmingly over the last two years and the programme revealed a significant amount of denial and buck passing.  Jon Rouse, ironically the former chief executive of the Housing Corporation and now of Croydon Council, tried to pretend all was well and under control when the evidence of the film was the complete opposite.  How he can claim the properties were regularly inspected is beyond me and was clearly beyond the evidence gathered by the indpependent environmental health officer used in the investigation.
Buck passing was clearly central to the briefing given to new Lib Dem Minister for defending the indefensible, Don Foster – who was almost as embarrassing on his first Newsnight interview as his boss Nick Boles when he appeared last month after the reshuffle to talk about planning.  Foster was fresh from the Lib Dem Conference where a new policy was agreed which completely contradicts everything he will now be doing in Government.  But his main line of defence – we give these councils money to manage homelessness, so it’s their fault not ours – reminded me of the great Michael Green, sorry Grant Shapps, when he was Housing Minister.  At least Shapps didn’t hide like his replacement, Mark Prisk, who should have fronted this rather than leaving it the rather lost and hopeless Foster.  Shapps also tried to blame the councils, last year writing cheekily to the worst offenders expressing his shock at the use of B&B, but it is a localist con.  The fault for lack of supply and the increasingly harsh attitude to the homeless lies firmly with central Government.
Whewell’s report gave me a strong sense of deja vu.  It was so reminiscent of the 1980s when a range of councils reached a sudden tipping point and couldn’t keep up with the numbers of families becoming homeless.  Low emergency use of B&Bs turned into frequent use and then before anyone knew where they were it was out of control.  Hundreds, thousands of people in hotels across the whole country.  It took years to get it back under effective management, at huge cost to the people involved.  We are now looking over the same precipice.
The most depressing echoes of the 1980s were the conditions the families were living in, the rooms, the hallways, the bathrooms, the kitchens, and their desperation.  Not even Nick Knowles could take that on.  No doubt next week we will get flowery language from Cameron Gove and Pickles about their commitment to children getting a good start in life.  But the true impact of their policies can be found in the hotels of Croydon.

Ed Balls’ commitment to using funding from the sale of 4G telephone licenses to support an extra 100,000 affordable homes and to enable the suspension of stamp duty on homes costing less than £250,000 was creative and very welcome.
It is welcome because it would be a genuine Keynesian stimulus which would help the economy in the most effective way possible – unlike many other infrastructure projects, new homes can be brought forward more quickly and housebuilding is an efficient way to create jobs and additional demand in the materials and support industries, cutting the deficit by putting people back to work, off benefits and paying tax.
It is also welcome because it shows that the arguments made in the Labour Party that housing should get higher priority are at last being listened to, and that Hilary Benn and Jack Dromey are proving to be an effective front-bench team.
The plan is that the 100,000 additional homes should comprise 50% shared ownership, 35% sub-market rent and 15% social rent.  Added to the 25,000 social rented homes already promised, which would be funded from the Bankers’ Bonus Tax, this brings the commitment to social rent up to 40,000.  This is vitally important as a signal to the sector that social rent is not dead as some like to claim. Added to the potential output of social rented homes from other sources – section 106 and homes on public land – we are seeing the start of a significant and desperately needed new programme.
Although getting the number of new homes up is important, there is a growing debate that it is not numbers alone that matter.  Not only are there issues around quality and the reinstatement of a commitment to mixed communities, there are doubts about the affordability of shared ownership in high value areas, and the purpose of sub-market rented homes needs to be clarified.
There is an important place  for ‘intermediate housing’ but rents of up to 80% of market rents cannot be seen as an answer to the housing needs of people on low incomes in high rent areas.  The idea for intermediate homes – normally shared ownership and sub-market rent – was to fill the gap between social rent and market homes, to meet the needs of people who would not qualify for the former and could not afford the latter, often key workers.  It was also a mechanism for delivering mixed communities.
We need a policy that gets a suitable mix between private. intermediate and social housing but it is in my view vital to maximise the latter wherever possible because these are the homes that will have the most direct impact on the most extreme forms of housing need.  I would be willing to trade more social rented homes (which need more initial subsidy) for fewer homes overall, and I think this needs to be debated over the coming months.
The Coalition’s concept of ‘affordable rent’ is an abomination.  It pretends that these homes are for the same people as would previously qualify for social rent, but the costs are vast for people on low incomes and the level of rents will not be supported by housing benefits in the longer term.
‘Affordable Rent’ is not about meeting need.  It has been devised to change the structure of social housing in the country – to make a permanent shift away from a norm of social rents at around 40% of market rates to a norm of ‘affordable rents’ at up to 80% of market rates, allied to the removal of security of tenure.  By holding down pay and benefits whilst increasing rents, the Government will increase the share of income taken by housing costs and gets us used to the idea of market rents for social homes.  It is a short intellectual step from ‘affordable rent’ to saying that the market might as well be left to provide all rented housing.
So far Jack Dromey has avoided the trap of being seen to endorse ‘Affordable Rent’ but we are undoubtably in a period where the numbers game is being played, driven by the broader economic need to promote growth.  So there is a focus on who can build the most homes, irrespective of what they are.  The housing question is more complex than that.  Despite the huge housing shortage, it is not always the case that getting the maximum number of new homes built is the right answer.  Just as thousands of apartments with river views being sold to foreign millionaires does little to help the overall balance of supply and demand, so building homes at ‘affordable rents’ without security of tenure will prove to be of little help to most people on housing waiting lists.

This opinion article was published in Inside Housing today.

Steve Hilditch
The Liberal Democrats’ new housing plans contradict everything the party is doing in government.
The housing policies being implemented by the coalition government bear almost no relation to manifestos offered by the Liberal Democrat or Conservative parties at the 2010 general election.
The nearest thing to a real agenda for the coalition was written by a think tank, Localis, which set out a long list of policies including reduced security of tenure for social tenants, the move towards market rents, and deregulation, all of which have been followed.
In terms of backtracking on manifesto promises, housing is another area where deputy prime minister Nick Clegg might consider an apology. At the Lib Dems’ autumn conference in Brighton, the party started again, debating a detailed new housing policy. It highlights growing unaffordability in all tenures, the instability of private renting, and the health and educational impacts of bad housing. It also features the economic benefits of building homes.
Specific commitments include building 300,000 homes a year, tackling land supply and land banking, providing greater ‘protection’ for private tenants, a stronger social housing regulator, including reinstating inspections, and localising the right to buy. Further work is to be done on the thorny issue of housing benefit.
It is extraordinary to read a document from a coalition partner that contradicts almost everything that the self-same party is pursuing in government. Lib Dem spokespeople defend the 60 per cent cut in housing investment while the party makes clear that housing investment is an excellent way to boost the economy. They defend the ending of support for new social rented homes while the party is advocating more. The party argues for more consumer regulation while it is also ending it. They support a change in the borrowing rules, thereby ‘potentially releasing some £50 billion investment in affordable housing’, and using quantitative easing to buy housing bonds, without explaining why they have not pursued these options in government.
What is perhaps most extraordinary is that, by replacing the words ‘Lib Dem’ with the word ‘Labour’, the document would be applauded to the heavens at Labour’s conference in Manchester next week. Oppositions are notoriously reluctant at this stage of a parliament to come forward with spending commitments and Labour has been cautious to say the least. Ed Balls proposes another bankers bonus tax to fund new social housing while Hilary Benn and Jack Dromey have developed detailed new policies for the private rented sector – very welcome but with no new spending.
If Labour adopted the new Lib Dem policy statement I would be content. One thing is certain – doing a deal with Labour is the only way Mr Clegg’s party will actually see its policies pursued in government.
Steve Hilditch co-edits Red Brick blog