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Monimbo
A minor bit of today’s housing news is about John Healey MP backing a private member’s bill which, it is claimed, is a ‘blitz on council house sub-letting’. As someone who thought John did a half-decent job as housing minister I’d not normally want to take him to task.  But there are reasons for questioning whether this particular bandwagon is a good one to jump on, even if his former opposite number Grant Shapps has already done just that.
First of course it needs to be said that council tenants who move out and make a fast buck by sub-letting the property without handing it back to the council are acting despicably, especially in areas of housing shortage (which let’s face it, means pretty much everywhere).  It’s even worse when the new ‘tenant’ is using the property for selling drugs or something else which harms the neighbourhood.  So it’s right that the problem is tackled and that such sub-letting should be illegal.
But as our esteemed co-bloggers at Nearly Legal have pointed out, not only is the practice already recognised as fraud, and so is already illegal, but councils like Camden have had successful prosecutions against tenants who have done it, as indeed has Tory Westminster.  The private member’s bill from Conservative MP Richard Harrington is therefore a complete waste of parliamentary time, as unlawful sub-letting is already a criminal offence.
Why then are the likes of Harrington and Shapps trundling on with their bandwagon?  First of all they presumably want to give the impression that ‘for far too long’ (to use a phrase beloved of Shapps) tenants have been getting away with murder (or sub-letting), and that only judicious action by a Tory MP has alerted us to the problem.  Well surely if they want to play that game (and it’s not the first time), Labour ought to be making clear that it’s a ruse and have nothing to do with it.
Second, once again, social housing tenants are being targeted, as they have been recently with anti-social behaviour and other measures.  This, surely, is the real reason for the private member’s bill. It’s to remind tenants once again that they are only temporary custodians of an asset owned by the state.  “An Englishman’s home is his castle” is not intended to apply to social housing tenants, who’d best be moved on to a proper home in the private sector.
The message to Labour should be this: don’t be fooled into going along with measures which encourage social housing, and especially council housing, to be treated like an emergency social service. Even if extreme shortages and spending constraints are putting enormous pressure on landlords to use their stock as effectively as possible, we ought to think twice about any measure of this kind which the government supports.  The chances are that its real aim is not what it says on the tin.  And it’s not Labour’s job to undermine the objective that – ideally, if resources allow – social housing should be about providing homes that people can feel proud of and want to raise their families in.
I heard an anecdote recently from a social housing manager which reminded me of this point. He’d been chatting to a tenant who’d moved into a housing association house after many years in different private lettings.  She said that she was so relieved to be in a place she could now call ‘home’, after having so many landlords who had imposed petty rules and having never been offered a long-term tenancy.  It was encapsulated in a trivial conversation she’d had with her son, who’d asked whether in this house he’d be able to put posters on his bedroom wall. For the first time, she could say ‘yes’.
 
 

This article by Steve Hilditch was published on the Guardian Housing Network blog this morning. 
Tinkering around the edges won’t invigorate the construction industry – new housing needs political will.
Concern about house building is rising as fast as actual house building is falling. A new report from BNP Paribas Real Estate shows that English councils have reduced their housing targets to 160,000 a year – down 13% from the now defunct Regional Spatial Strategies, and a whopping 70,000 below the number of new households formed each year – a gap equivalent to a town like Bournemouth.
Real delivery is different again: only 110,000 homes were completed in England in 2011 and completions are down 18% in the first quarter of 2012. Commentators are gloomy; key indicators – from construction employment to new orders — are pointing down, and from a very low base.
Housing minister Grant Shapps will no doubt find a statistic somewhere that gives grounds for optimism, but the finger of blame for the double dip recession can be pointed firmly at the housing construction sector.
Fiddling at the edges, as Shapps has already been doing, is not enough. Targets reflect our hopes and desires, but in real markets people only build what they can sell and make a profit on.
It will take many years of economic recovery to re-establish a self- assured housebuilding sector. Even then, there is no economic reason why the output from profitable housebuilders should coincide with our national aspiration to build homes. When you look over the long term, the private sector has never built the number of homes that the nation requires.
It is not an ideological statement to observe that we have only built enough homes when there has been very active intervention by the public sector. We won the numbers game when councils were building a lot of homes and their contribution, ended by Margaret Thatcher, was never replaced by housing associations despite all the hype.
We need to think big, in billions of pounds. We need to put the public sector to work, with councils commissioning new homes for all tenures, but especially shared ownership, intermediate renting and social renting, deploying their underused capacity to borrow prudentially.
Most councils are itching to act. The private sector would do most of the work.
Borrowing and debt have become dirty words but it is the sensible way to achieve long-term investment. There is nothing wrong with borrowing if it creates real physical assets and you can pay it back. It is a lot better than borrowing to fund unemployment.
Please don’t tell me there is no money: with a wave of a hand, last week the governor of the Bank of England marginally adjusted quantitative easing, but it was enough to finance the current housing programme for a generation.
It is a question of political will to get that money working for housing rather than rebuilding bank balance sheets for no wider social purpose. An emergency public sector housebuilding programme would kick-start the economy, reinvigorate the private construction sector, and create real jobs. If you work through the multiplier effects, by reducing benefit payments and increasing the tax take, in Treasury terms it will pay for itself. What’s not to like about that?

When is localism not localism? Well, we shall soon find out as Islington Council has announced it is pressing ahead with its plans to build new social rented homes using its own resources rather than participating in the programme being run by the Government’s Homes and Communities Agency.
Islington’s Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr James Murray, said:

“We have 13,000 families on the waiting list in Islington, most of whom are in severe overcrowding. Only family-sized homes, rented by the council or housing associations, will help families like this – in almost all cases, private or even intermediate housing will not. That’s why we are sending a clear message that for this council, social housing comes first.”

Islington’s move coincides with a report from the National Audit Office which highlights the significant risks involved in the Government’s so-called ‘affordable rent’ programme, which effectively ends Government support for social rented homes in new development.
There are many ‘in principle’ objections to the ‘affordable rent’ programme.  The two key ones are that rents will be set at up to 80% of market rent, which is unaffordable in many parts of the country, and that many of the tenancies will be insecure and time-limited.
But whatever the principles involved, it is also clear that the management of the programme has been seriously deficient.  Inept might be another word to describe it:

• There has been (at least) one missing year between the end of the previous National Affordable Housing programme and this new programme getting under way.  As a result, affordable housing starts (which includes the AR programme) have collapsed in the hiatus.
• According to the NAO one in five of the contracts for a programme that supposedly started in 2011 have not yet been signed.
• The programme is heavily back-loaded so half the homes are planned for the last year, 2015, with a major risk of slippage.
• Rents of 80% of market rents look unachievable as both providers and councils took fright at the difficulty of letting at such high rents.  If the average is closer to 65% in practice the Government will probably claim credit for keeping rents down rather than putting them up.
• There is a paucity of information about the impact the programme will have on the finances of housing associations – with grant cut by two-thirds and rents far short of initial predictions, the gap has to be filled by more borrowing, eating into associations’ borrowing capacity and increasing their risk.
• And finally, Peter has to pay Paul as a significant proportion of the extra high rent will be met by housing benefit – estimated by NAO to be around £1.4 bn.

The programme has been marked by a stunning lack of transparency, some might say secrecy.  Under the guise of commercial confidentiality, almost nothing is known about the contracts signed so far.  We know which providers and how many units and there has been talk in public about average rent levels (eg from the London Mayor and from Grant Shapps) but without any evidence being produced.  So we don’t know what the average rent is, we don’t know what the spread is, we don’t know whether the highest rents have been put on the smallest homes to offer some protection for family homes, we don’t know how many existing homes have been redesignated as AR to help pay for the programme, and we don’t know what type of tenancies have been offered and how many are insecure.  That’s a lot of known unknowns, to borrow a phrase, and there are probably some unknown unknowns as well.
Tomorrow marks 20 days since I put in a Freedom of Information request to the London Mayor for data about the programme.  Unless they’re working weekend overtime at the GLA, they have failed to meet their target response time.  I will of course keep people up to date with any useful response received.
So well done Islington, standing up for their communities and people in need of genuinely affordable homes in their borough.  No doubt their new planning policy – which rejects the AR model as inappropriate for the borough – will come under attack from the Mayor and the Government as they seek to expunge social rented housing from new development.  It could lead to a protracted battle between the borough and the GLA as planning authorities.  The Government will face a real ideological test – will their commitment to localism override their hatred of social renting?  That’s not likely in my view – but watch this space.           

Nothing is quite what it seems when Grant Shapps is announcing new policy.  The man who gave us the name ‘affordable rent’ to describe unaffordable housing, and sustains a Twitter hashtag devoted to his creative use of statistics, #shappstistics , is also expert at diverting scrutiny by making ‘ad hominen’ attacks on anyone who is convenient, often the housing profession and equally often the ‘undeserving’ poor.
Last week’s allocations policy announcement, assessed by Monimbo on Red Brick,  was a classic example of Mr Shapps at work.  In his press release it says he wants ‘to end the perception that council houses are only available to those willing to play the system.’  I wonder who creates that perception if not him?  Because it then says he wants ‘to reward ambition and achievement – ensuring homes go to the most in need such as hard working families – instead of those who merely know how to tick the most boxes.’  Now people working in allocations may be surprised to learn that they allocate homes to those who ‘merely’ tick boxes.  And the tens of thousands of households waiting for a home will feel that their housing needs are being ridiculed and, if unemployed, that their economic status is being used to stigmatise them.
Housing allocations is an immensely complex area where a lot of legislation, case law, and local rules have to be taken into account.  And that’s before the pressure starts over particular cases.  As supply has diminished, and as applicants have become more desperate, the job has got harder.  To mock it as a ‘box ticking’ exercise in this way is ignorant and crass, but it helps divert scrutiny of the new policy.
As night follows day, new starts of social rented homes have collapsed, new completions are about to collapse, and therefore lettings of new homes are about to collapse, making the system even more reliant on ‘re-lets’, leaving less to allocate to anybody.  The Guidance does not address what to do at this point.
Mr Shapps also has a tendency to avoid difficult issues by repeating a previous unproven but well-rehearsed assertion.  And so the Guidance evades the problems inherent in letting ‘affordable rent’ homes at up to 80% of market rents by repeating the silly claim that ‘Affordable Rent homes will be allocated in the same way as social rent properties’.  However, there is a little get out: the ‘framework for allocations provides scope for local flexibility…..’.
It may of course be chance that the new policy announcement coincided with Armed Forces Day, but it gave Mr Shapps an opportunity to get good headlines in the media wrapped in the flag.  In these moments he is so Churchillian: ‘Just as our brave troops answered their call of duty, councils will need to do the same, to ensure that heroes who want a home in their area will be at the top of local waiting lists.’
As a pre-emptive strike against another ad hominen attack I should make it clear that I have always supported priority for homeless ex-Armed Forces personnel, campaigned for this when I was at Shelter in the 1980s (when it was unfashionable), and welcomed the Labour Government’s moves to recognise the Armed Forces specifically in the homelessness priority groups and to change the local connection rules.
But the spin makes Mr Shapps’ new offer seem far more than it is, because the policy change – which I broadly welcome – is largely about ending barriers to being considered for housing and the priority attached to Armed Forces families once they have been given status in a ‘reasonable preference’ category.  They are not being given an absolute priority to be pushed to the front of the general waiting list.  And my reading of the new Guidance is that the homelessness duty to an Armed Forces family could be discharged through an offer of private rented accommodation just like everyone else.  Being offered an unaffordable ‘affordable rent’ home may not help at all.  And, as the Chair of the Army Families Federation said: “It’s a good gesture….. But if there are no houses available, it doesn’t matter what priority you have.”
And proof that Red Brick has influence in Government – the online version of the Guidance has been amended to add the crucial missing word ‘billion’.  Amongst other things, our blogger Monimbo is an excellent proofreader.

By Monimbo
Back in March, Red Brick had a good moan about the government’s draft allocations guidance, which was intended to help councils get to grips with the changes brought in by the Localism Act.  The government clearly decided afterwards that consulting about allocations policy was a mistake, since not only did it take little notice of criticisms but the final guidance issued last week has left out almost all the advice to councils to consult stakeholders and residents about any changes they plan to make in their local schemes.
Given the controversy that often surrounds issues about who gets houses and why, this seems extraordinary, and I imagine most councils will still consult widely.  Of course, the government might be tipping a wink to authorities that want to have much more restrictive allocations schemes that they can also go ahead without paying much attention to any criticisms.
One authority that is planning such a restrictive scheme is Red Brick’s old favourite Hammersmith and Fulham, though to be scrupulously fair (as always) we should point out that their proposals are up for consultation. Like the government, H&F are making great play of how in future they will be much more generous to ex-service personnel, and indeed this is one of the few aspects of the final DCLG guidance which is actually longer than the draft version.  But as the DCLG’s summary of responses shows, a lot of authorities already give extra priority to former armed forces people and in fact the last government issued specific guidance on doing so in April 2009.  One suspects this is all about being holier than thou and is very little about any practical improvement in the chances of ex-service personnel getting social housing.
It is also about hiding the nasty side of the new changes.  Despite criticisms, for example by Garden Court Chambers, there is no extra advice for councils about how to exercise their new powers to decide for themselves who can apply for housing in the first place.  So we find that in Hammersmith and Fulham’s press release welcoming the guidance, two-thirds is about the armed forces issue and only at the bottom is there a reminder that they plan to exclude from their waiting list applicants who earn more than £40,200.
Last week’s guidance says no more about this issue than did the draft. In fact it says less, as the reminder to follow equal opportunities policies has been taken out.  Given the significance of new powers such as this and the future ability of authorities (H&F take another bow) to issue only fixed-term tenancies, the limited coverage of them is staggering.  The same goes for the recommended priority for ‘hard working’ households or people who are ‘contributing’ to their community, where nothing has been added to say how these might be defined. One suspects that the minister was happy to say as little as possible and civil servants were happy not to set themselves any traps.  The Nearly Legal blog, which looks at various snags and wrinkles in the latest document, says that authorities would do well to ‘tread carefully’ on these issues and I’m sure that’s correct.
In fact the main difference between the final guidance and the draft is that it is now down to 46 pages rather than 64.  However, Mr Shapps might not like to be reminded that the equivalent publication from his predecessor, John Healey, which is still available on the DCLG website as ‘new guidance’, came in at only 30 pages, despite having a whole section on consulting people about allocations schemes locally.  One important reason for this is that John Healey’s document said almost nothing about immigration, whereas Grant Shapps devotes 17 pages to the issue.  Ironically, he could have saved most of this space, since all the detail (and much more) is already available from a well-used website which his department helped establish.
P.S. A wonderful typo in the ministerial Foreword has Mr Shapps promising to lever in less than £20 of new housing investment.  Even Red Brick didn’t think things were that bad.
In Shapps own words…….

That is why we have taken decisive steps to tackle this problem, including an affordable homes programme set to exceed expectations and deliver up to 170,000 new homes and lever in £19.5 of new investment…

By Pete Challis
It may not be the main topic of conversation at ‘country suppers’ but the Prime Minister displays appalling ignorance of the way housing benefit works.  Here are two examples – but readers may have others.
People working
Cameron appears not to know that one in six people claiming Housing Benefit has got a job and that the fastest growth in HB spending has been amongst working people who can’t afford their housing costs.  He seems to have been afflicted by the same memory loss that Iain Duncan Smith frequently displays.  Or perhaps he’s learning to ignore facts altogether, like Grant Shapps – see Twitter hashtag #shappstistics
The other day Cameron contrasted people in and out of work with young people ‘living at home’ and young people getting ‘housing benefit’.
We are sending out strange signals on working, housing and families. Take two young people: one who has worked hard, got themselves a reasonable job and is living at home thinking, “Can I afford to buy or rent a flat?” whereas another has got himself on to Jobseeker’s Allowance and then gets housing benefit.
Since Conservative Minister Peter Lilley changed the rules in 1996, young people under 25 have only been eligible for the ‘shared accommodation rate’ of housing benefit. It is not £90/week as Cameron claims. The rate ranges from £45/week in Sunderland to £123.50/week in Central London. There are only 3 of the 152 Broad Rental Market Areas (the areas used by Rent Officers to determine the maximum that will be paid) where it is more than £90/week, and in 116 it is less than £70/week. The average is £65.30/week. The Government extended this to single people under 35, in January.
The full list can be found here http://www.voa.gov.uk/corporate/RentOfficers/LHARates/lhaJuly2012.html
Non dependant deductions
Cameron’s wide ranging ‘Welfare’ speech exposed contradictions between his rhetoric and Government policy on Non Dependant Deductions (NDDs).
“If a family living on benefits wants their adult child to stay living at home they are actually penalised – as soon as that child does the right thing and goes out to work. You get what’s called a non-dependent deduction, removing up to £74 off your housing benefit each week.  I had a heartrending letter from a lady in my constituency a few weeks ago who said that when her son leaves college next month, her housing benefit will drop significantly, meaning her family may have to split up.  This doesn’t seem right”
 David Cameron 26 June 2012
What he failed to mention was that his Government has been making things far worse.  In the 2010 Budget George Osborne not only ended the freeze on NDDs that had been in place since 2001 but increased them faster than inflation in order to return them to 2001 levels in real terms – as the Impact Assessment from DWP makes crystal clear:
12. The decision to uprate the non-dependant deduction rates in three stages to what they would have been had they been fully uprated since 2001 in line with growth in eligible rents and Council Tax was announced in the June 2010 Budget as part of a package of measures designed to bring Government expenditure under control and reduce the fiscal deficit. Uprating the non-dependant deduction rates is a reverse of the policy since 2001-02 to freeze the rates and is intended to provide a fairer deal for taxpayers and provide an expectation that adults make a reasonable contribution towards their housing costs.
Source: Equality Impact Assessment: Income related benefits: change to the on dependant deduction rates: Feb 2011
June 2010 Table 2.1. Budget Policy Decisions
Deductions for non-dependants: reverse previous freezes on uprating and maintaining link with prices from 2011-12.  £ million.
2010-11    0            2011-12    +125           2012-13    +320         2014-15    +340

The Government’s plans to remove the homelessness safety net are proceeding apace.  There is only a month left to respond to the consultation about the suitability of accommodation when local authorities discharge their main homelessness duty by securing private rented accommodation for a homeless household.
By definition under the Act, households to whom local authorities owe a ‘main homelessness duty’ are not intentionally homeless and fall within a priority group, mainly households with children or those who are vulnerable due to old age, disability or other reason.  Despite a backdrop of much tighter gatekeeping and an increasing refusal rate, after many years of declining numbers homelessness has started rising steeply again, leading for example to the greater use of bed and breakfast hotels.

By Pete Challis
Continuing our Orwellian theme: despite Government claims to the contrary, rents are rising and so is housing benefit.
Recent data, published by the Department for Work and Pensions and the Valuation Office Agency show that rents are increasing and housing benefit expenditure continues to rise, calling into question the claim made by David Cameron.