A horrible cough and cold picked up in Liverpool meant a weekend with a box of lemsip, a
Henning Mankell novel and watching lots of football without feeling guilty. It was an error to switch on the computer and risk my temperature going even higher because the name Grant Shapps appeared in several places.
We are used to the parade of statistics about social housing claiming to show that it is
full of benefit dependent scroungers, caused so we are told by the policy of allocating housing according to housing need. Having set up the Aunt Sally to throw sticks at, the Tories are feeling confident enough to take more steps in their campaign to end social
housing. Westminster has elbowed its way to the front with their apparently reasonable new allocations policy giving significantly higher priority to employed people. Shapps was quick to congratulate them, saying that he plans to extend the policy nationally.
Westminster’s cabinet member for housing, Jonathan Glanz, said the scheme “acknowledges and rewards” people who are “contributing to the economy…. We have
got so many people not working that it gives worklessness an attractiveness as a way of life.” The ex-Guardian journalist David Henke has shown what the implications of rents policies might be in changing the the social composition of Lady Porter-land – a long term ambition of the Council – and Guthrie McKie, Labour’s housing spokesperson, said: “The Council is shifting its housing failures on to the most vulnerable people in our community. Due to its failure to provide sufficient social housing, the Council is doctoring its allocation policy… The Council is hell-bent on turning Westminster into a ‘no go’ area for the poor and low-income families.”
Shapps popped up in several papers, including the Telegraph where he said: “Up until now, access to council housing has too often been blocked for hard-working families who do the right thing. So I’m determined to end the something-for-nothing culture and replace it with a system that actively recognises individuals who work hard and play by the rules.”
A conspiracy theorist, which I am normally not, might see a link between this and the other housing story given major prominence in advance of the Tory Party Conference – giving new impetus to the Right to Buy by massively increasing discounts. The link is that people on benefits are highly unlikely to exercise the Right to Buy.
It has been a feature of council housing since the RTB was introduced in 1980 that, as council homes are bought by tenants who work, the proportion of remaining tenants who are economically inactive rises. Many buyers still live in the same home on the same estate with the same social composition, and others have sold on to new occupiers who could afford to buy them out. But the headline statistics show that council tenants are less likely to be in work, therefore more reform is justified because the tenure has failed.
Shapps’ thumbs were itching to tell us all about it on Twitter: “The right to buy is back” proclaimed The Great Builder. And he provided a helpful link to a CLG webpage of questions and answers.
You might think given everything that has previously been said about council tenants that there is no-one left, apart from Frank Dobson, with anything other than housing benefit to live on. But to justify the new RTB policy the Government has to employ reverse spin: suddenly there are plenty of tenants earning money through work who may have a bit to
spend. CLG tell us that “38% of social tenants are well-off enough not to need Housing Benefit and over 800,000 tenants are in full-time work. Nearly 60% of social housing tenants who are couples with children do not claim housing benefit. Therefore many social tenants will be able to meet the cost of the mortgage after allowing for the discount.”
Pass the lemsip. Perhaps Kurt Wallender has the answers.
Category: Uncategorized
Ed Miliband and Caroline Flint are pursuing the right strategy for social housing as the announcement to give working people more access to social housing shows.
It is right that Labour members, supporters and councillors should be concerned about those vulnerable and in need. There is absolutely no denying that if a working household gains access to a social home it is quite possible that someone facing greater need will not have that home.
But there is a stronger political argument that goes beyond the policies of dealing with housing need today to ensuring the state can provide for all in the future.
Risky thing to say, I know, but here goes:
The public provision of housing, services and welfare is under sustained attack from the right. Those attacks are proving successful, because those public goods and in particular government’s administration of them has been losing legitimacy in the eyes of the majority.
This is not a fact to be disputed – polls show it and set up a street stall in your local high street and you’ll hear it. People believe they pay in more than they get out and believe public services disproportionately benefit ‘others’: liberal professionals, the poor, benefit claimants, ethnic minorities, those in the biggest cities, migrants and asylum seekers – take your pick. That is especially so for low and middle earners. Remember at the last election, Labour held its working-class vote (socio-economic groups D+E) and its middle-class vote at the top (groups A + B), but experienced a massive swing to the Conservatives among low and middle earners.
That’s why Ed Miliband is right to focus on the squeezed middle. It’s why he’s right to align the interests of the worst off in society and low and middle earners behind the institutions that make us a fairer and more equal country. Social housing is one such institution and it needs to support those in the middle as well as those at the bottom.
The most successful progressive institutions in Britain are those which have broad and deep social support across many parts of society. Look at the uproar over the dismantling of the NHS – an uproar which may de-rail the government yet – compared to the near-silence over the dismantling of social housing.
To risk an over simplification: If the choice we make is to ‘defend’ social housing against access to it by those working on low incomes, we pit the bottom of society against the middle and the top. That’s an argument we’ll lose. If social housing supports the majority at the bottom and the middle, not just in theory but in practice, we win.
The choice is not between social housing for those in need versus social housing for those less in need, but between the existence of social housing as a public good versus its continued erosion and dismantling.
At the Labour Party Conference, at the many housing fringes and events, people attacked the lack of political will to make housing a priority, rightly identifying the root of the problems we face now. The view seemed to be that, until supply of new affordable homes dramatically increases, giving social housing to working people was a luxury we can’t afford.
They’ve got it the wrong way round: making social housing now a public good which serves the British people as a whole is a prerequisite to building the political will and public support for the dramatic policy changes we need.
That’s why councils should be free to balance the interests of low earners with those in housing need when deciding who gets social housing.
And, on some of the policy points that have been swirling around – let me address a few:
- Need and employment are not mutually exclusive. In most London Boroughs for example there are enough people in reasonable preference categories and in employment to take up the available lettings for many years to come.
- The rent levels in social housing are more beneficial to working tenants than those out of work. It doesn’t matter to an individual what the rent is if it’s covered by benefit. It does matter if you pay for it from your own means. We lessen the extent of the benefit trap hugely by giving working people or those in intermittent employment rents they can afford without recourse to the benefits system.
- Social housing is limited and there is a choice how we use this public good to best effect. Using it to support employment when these households might not otherwise be able to work is an impactful way to use this resource with wider social benefits. It isn’t ‘wasting’ it on people who don’t need it.
- It goes without saying that more homes must be built and that is the fundamental way out of these problems – as Ed Miliband and Caroline Flint would both argue. But that doesn’t mean we should live in a policy vacuum until then and make no choices. The supply we need will take a long time to come.
Categories
Musical tenancies
Labour Housing Group Executive member Graham Martin moved the housing resolution passed unanimously yesterday at Labour Conference in Liverpool.
The resolution notes the growing housing crisis that will be created by the Government’s policies, falling housing starts, huge cuts to the social housebuilding programme, a jump in homelessness, and the rising costs of housing benefit caused by increased dependence on the private rented sector and escalating rents.
Specifically it calls for a shift in financing of private landlords away from buying existing homes, causing unfair competition with first time buyers, towards investment in new properties which would add to the stock and boost growth.
It welcomes the initiative by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to extend the tax on bankers’ bonuses to invest in new affordable homes. It calls for the defence of the rights of social tenants and the delivery of more social housing to be campaigning priorities for Labour in opposition.
In his speech, Graham warned that the Government’s policies run the risk of triggering ‘an
avalanche of mortgage repossessions’. In reference to private renting, he said ‘It is like the game musical chairs but now it is musical tenancies and as your private sector tenancy comes to an end you have to go and move. And as you play musical tenancies, your child has to play musical schools and musical doctors…. And if you are unlucky enough to need housing benefit to help pay the rent, hey presto this government has taken half the empty homes away. And now this government thinks it is such a good idea they are trying to bring in musical tenancies for council and housing association tenants.’
‘Our children need stable homes, strong communities need stable homes, and what is going on is a way to break communities.’
I supported Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership and I firmly believe he will become the next Prime Minister. But in my policy area, housing, I think he has just made a major policy error. His people should realise that you’re politically in the wrong place when you share territory with Tory Westminster Council. In the land of Lady Porter they have been looking to export their poorest people for many years, long before the Coalition’s housing benefit policies were described by Boris Johnson as ‘Kosovo-style cleansing’. By stressing employment as a factor in social housing allocation, Westminster’s new housing allocations policy is just a more extreme version of what Ed is suggesting.
Regrettably, a couple of Labour boroughs have also taken up the theme that they have too many unemployed and poor people and that they should live somewhere else (where? is not a question they ever answer). Now they have cover – the Labour Leader approves that they should by allocating homes to people who make some kind of vague contribution to society.
As with the argument about evicting rioters whose family are council tenants, there is no rhyme or reason as to why this special preference should be targeted at social housing. Why isn’t it a requirement in other policy areas as well? For example, only people who make a contribution to society should get free health care or have their bins collected or go to Oxford or get pension tax relief or be able to drive on motorways.
On these grounds, bankers, journalists, many politicians and anyone called Murdoch would fail to qualify for any services at all.
Over many years politicians and the media have been good at saying who should get social housing. But ultimately, with extreme shortage, if you want to change priorities it is dishonest just to say who you think should get the homes: you also have to say who will NOT get them as a result of your new policy. Vague statements, reminiscent of the old distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, or the poor we like versus the poor we don’t like, make bad policy.
Anyone who has ever been involved in the process of housing allocations knows that only people in extreme and acute housing need get anywhere near being allocated a social home. I would set Ed Miliband a test: go into an allocations department, look through the cases, meet up with the people concerned and then pick the family that will not get a home because you have decided to allocate it to someone who has less housing need but meets some test of their ‘contribution’.
Allocating extremely scarce housing has to be done transparently against clear rules, and judgements are often subject to Ombudsman cases or judicial review. So vague principles are not enough. How many points will ‘being in a job’ be worth compared to being overcrowded to the point where your health is failing and your children are falling behind at school? How many points will ‘being a school governor’ get compared to having a severe disability and high medical priority? How will you deal with people who were in work but had to give up because of redundancy or age or illness? Will you revert to the 1950s test where inspectors came round to judge your housekeeping standards before you got a home?
Believe me, Ed, this is a can of worms you will regret ever opening. And I suspect you only got into it because it is a policy where it feels like you can make change without it costing anything.
There has been a lot of talk at Labour Conference this year about offering apologies for the failures of the last government. New affordable housebuilding was the Titanic of policy failures, only addressed towards the end of our term: if we want to impress the electorate with our housing policies we have to talk about how we can build hundreds of thousands of additional homes in the future. Rearranging the deckchairs on the housing allocations sub-deck is a futile gesture and a diversion from the real issues in housing
This post has also appeared on LabourList at
As we have reported on Red Brick already, housing has been a big theme at this year’s Labour Party Conference. Much of the discussion has been good and positive – although unfortunately not all. The housing debate will come to the main Conference on Thursday morning. There will be a debate around a ‘composite’ housing motion (ie assembled into one from a number of motions submitted by Labour Party organisations) and it is likely to be moved by Graham Martin from the Labour Housing Group Executive. There will also be a speech from Caroline Flint.
The debate should be carried live on the BBC Parliamentary Channel (which I much prefer to the BBC2 coverage, where speakers are constantly interrupted by presenters and
commentators who seem to think they are the attraction).
Anyway, to help Red Brick readers follow the debate, below is the composite motion that
will be debated (NB it may be subject to a little grammatical tidying up before Thursday).
I think it is a motion we can all support.
Composite 4 – Housing
Conference notes with alarm the independently-commissioned forecast of the National Housing Federation (30th August 2011) that the housing market will be plunged into a unprecedented crisis as steep rises in the private rental sector, huge social housing waiting lists, and a house price boom are fuelled by a chronic under-supply of homes.
Conference notes the publication of national house building statistics on 18 August,
showing falling housing starts and completions, and the Home Builders Federation’s ‘Housing Pipeline’ report on 26 August showing that planning permissions for new housing are also falling, the sharp fall in house building to just 23,400 homes last quarter, the 18% jump in homelessness over 12 months and the £1.3 billion pa rise in Housing Benefit payments. In the last five years of Labour Government over 250,000 new affordable homes were delivered in England, while the Tory-led government is aiming to deliver just 150,000 by 2015.
In 2010/11 just 105,000 homes were built in England – the lowest level since the 1920s. These figures are an indictment of the Government which is blind to its inevitable
consequences – increased homelessness and joblessness, rising market rents, and the inability of young and middle aged households the opportunity to either buy or rent a decent home.
Conference believes that by failing to deliver the new affordable housing to buy and to
rent that young people and families need, the Tory-led Government is holding back the aspirations of people up and down the country and failing those in need of social housing.
Conference believes the Government’s plans to abolish secure tenancies, and put social tenants at risk of eviction should they get a promotion or a pay rise will create fear and uncertainty and will create a disincentive to work.
Conference believes that with nearly 2 million households (around 4.5 million people)
nationally on council housing waiting lists and the Tory/Lib Dem government threatening security of tenure, the Government is letting down young people and families who need new affordable homes in the rented sector and in the sales market urgently.
Given the huge increase in housing benefit going to fund private landlords, we also call for a shift of financing of private sector landlord investment away from purchasing existing second hand homes (in competition with first time buyers), and towards investment in New Properties. This will result in an increase in quality supply, and better opportunities for younger and middle aged families to purchase a home.
Conference strongly believes that Labour should be on the side of all those in need of decent affordable housing, whatever their circumstances. Conference firmly believes that the development of new housing not only meets the needs of our community but is crucial if we are to see the construction sector as a leading player in bringing strong growth back to our economy.
Conference supports measures to tackle the fraudulent sub-letting of social housing, which
deprives many in genuine need of affordable housing, and notes that in Government Labour launched a national crack down on this type of fraud.
Conference welcomes Labour’s initiative to introduce a new tax on bankers’ bonuses to
raise enough money to boost affordable housing supply.
Conference urges the Labour Party to call for a programme of investment in quality new
homes, which will provide employment, generate tax income, reduce homelessness and the cost of emergency accommodation, and reduce expenditure on unemployment and housing benefits.
Conference calls upon Labour’s Shadow Cabinet and the wider Party to make an increase in quality, sustainable, affordable housing supply including social housing and housing for first time buyers, and better opportunities for younger and middle aged families to purchase a home, key themes in policy development, and to prioritise in its housing policy review an allocations policy that is fair to everyone.
Conference resolves that defending the rights of social tenants and the delivery of more
social housing must be campaigning priorities for Labour in opposition.
Tony has pointed out that amongst the soggy canapés there are loads of meetings and discussions about housing at this year’s Labour conference. Tomorrow we will find out
what if anything about housing makes the Leader’s speech, but today two of Ed Balls’ key initiatives involved housing: a specific commitment to use a repeat Banker’s bonus tax to fund affordable housing and a new commitment to reduce VAT on maintenance to encourage owners to repair homes.
One meeting Tony didn’t highlight attracted my attention and I went along to a meeting sponsored by New Statesman and the National Landlords Association on the future of the private rented sector. Although I don’t always agree with what Caroline Flint has to say about social housing, I thought she was spot on in her analysis of the PRS, the need for regulation and how it might work. I had forgotten that she was Minister when the Rugg Review was commissioned, so she has some background in this issue. She also rather shamelessly plugged her chapter in the so-called purple book just published by Progress, in which she evidently sets out her views on PRS reform.
Although the NLA seems to favour accreditation rather than registration as the basis of a regulatory system, there was a surprising degree of consensus in the room about what a regulatory system should seek to achieve: an expanding and increasingly professionalised PRS, support and help for good landlords who want to meet good standards, and strong enforcement against bad landlords who exploit tenants and refuse to bring their properties up to scratch. Despite the presence of several landlords and landlords’ representatives, there was no support from anyone for the current government’s laissez-faire (or is it couldn’t care less?) approach.
I was particularly impressed by a letting agent present in the audience who spoke strongly in favour of registration as the way forward, and there were good contributions on how to achieve longer tenancy terms, especially for families needing security and stability, how to control subsidy flowing to bad landlords through housing benefit, and enforcement by environmental health officers.
Sometimes a discussion hits the right tone of seriousness without ladles of rhetoric and generates more light than heat. Here was one and I hope there will be more, especially during the housing debate scheduled for Thursday morning – housing was one of the four issues chosen through a ballot of delegates for debate on the floor of the Conference.
The considerable presence of housing associations at the Labour Party Conference I described in my last post has, I hear, been replicated at the other party conferences. What explains the new-found interest in public affairs from our big housing associations?
Housing Association Chief Execs assumed the ‘mad’ and ‘disruptive’ policies that would ‘never work’ coming from Policy Exchange and Tim Leunig and others would be dropped as Ministers got into office and saw how things really worked.
As it is, they find themselves with the New Homes Bonus, a planning system being ripped up, being pressured to conform to Freedom of Information and having their pay publicly condemned – not to mentioned affordable rent, welfare cuts and fixed term tenancies. And they labour under the misapprehension (in my view) that a few housing associations who engaged early with the Tories in opposition and quickly in government helped design the current framework.
This time they don’t want to be left out of the game and it’s a matter of extreme self-interest to be part of Parties’ policy-making.
Despite the considerable sums they are collectively splashing on warm white wine, soggy canapés and sponsoring think tanks in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, it’s a good thing for them to be more involved.
I’m spending a few days at the Labour Party Conference this week and it’s remarkable how much focus there is on housing. Over the coming days delegates and visitors can attend:
- 2020 Vision: Housing, with IPPR and Family Mosaic
- Are we still in it together: Welfare and Housing Reform Strategies, from Moat
- Homes For The Future – reviewing possibilities for Labour’s housing policy from the Labour Housing Group and SERA
- Housing Associations and Local Government: Partnerships for Change, from the Smith Institute and L+Q.
- Housing the Nation- Making the case for better homes, from Places for People
- Building our future: Will planning and housing reform deliver the communities we want? from the TCPA
- A Tale of Two Cities: The impact of housing reform in Liverpool and London, from the Peabody Trust
- Social Housing: Fixing the current mess, from Policy Exchange.
- How will we deliver affordable housing in the future and improve people’s lives? From Hyde Group
And these are just the events going on during the few days I’m here and don’t include planning related events. I don’t envy Caroline Flint and Alison Seabeck who are succeeding on covering all of these – all credit to them for engaging with such a wide range of topics, organisations and members.
Conference delegates have also just voted to make housing one of only four motions to debate this week.
As I said, you can’t move for housing policy at this conference.
Categories
LibDems in denial
They say politics is a rough old trade, but any hope that there might be a frank debate on housing during the Party Conference season were dashed immediately at the LibDem conference in Birmingham. The line was just to deny that their policies have any downside at all.
LibDem President Simon Hughes MP knows that attack is often the best form of defence.
He set the tone at the start of the week by giving the impression that the worst thing happening in housing at the moment is that Frank Dobson MP is a council tenant, or as Inside Housing quoted Hughes as saying, he lives in ‘a bloody Camden Council flat’.
Then we had Andrew Stunell MP’s subterfuge: trying to pretend that ‘affordable rent’ homes are social housing, stretching credulity to the limit. He also made much of the Coalition’s efforts to bring empty homes back into use without mentioning Eric Pickles restrictions on the use of Empty Dwelling Management Orders to protect property owners’ ‘fundamental rights’.
Finally we had Pensions Minister Steve Webb MP. Surely a man with such expertise in
the field of tax and benefits would have something intelligent to say about the housing benefit reforms. None of it. His line was that while Labour accused him of adopting a policy akin to the slaughter of the first born, the truth was that cash spending on housing benefit at the end of the Parliament would be the same as at the start, around £22bn. So
all is well, he is just ‘reigning in the remorseless growth in spending’. No mention of rent inflation, or of policies, like affordable rent, that are driving up housing benefit costs, or of the increasing caseload of private tenants having to share the available cash, or of the policy of pushing homeless families into the more expensive private rented sector. And certainly no mention of Boris Johnson’s description of the policy as ‘Kosovo-style cleansing’.
Never can a LibDem audience have been so supine. It looked to me like they think that
the only hope of political survival is to keep their heads down and claim that they are having influence. In housing they have nothing to show for their efforts because they have gone along with the Tory agenda in its entirety – the end of social rent, moving towards market rents, reducing tenants’ rights, laissez-faire in the private rented sector.
It will be interesting to see how the Labour Conference pans out. We are told that there will be honesty about the record in office, which should start with an admission that far too few homes were built. But this has to lead to new policies that will produce many more homes – market homes and genuinely affordable homes. There will need to be a radically new approach to capital investment, so I will be paying as much attention to Ed Balls as I will to Caroline Flint.
Categories
Stunell's subterfuge
Andrew Stunell seems such a nice man, and he’s a Methodist Lay Preacher to boot.
But an observer of his speech to the LibDem Conference yesterday might be forgiven for thinking he was stretching the truth just a little. Given the LibDems good track record in
supporting social housing over many years, and their general embarrassment over the housing policies of the government, I can only assume he was struggling to find anything to say that shows that the LibDems have some influence over Pickles and Shapps.
He started off in the right territory by calling housing the ‘Cinderella’ policy. “It is one of the most important issues facing the entire country” he said. “The record of previous governments on social housing was nothing short of a disgrace……Social Housing just wasn’t important enough for the last government.” Now I agree that far too few social homes in particular were built under Labour, but surely Mr Stunnell realises that you can’t build more social homes with a 60% cut in funding?
But then comes the subterfuge. “That’s why we’ve introduced the Affordable Rent programme…. we’re on course to build 170,000 new social homes in the next four years…… thanks to Liberal Democrat influence in government, we have a social housing target that we can and will meet…. ..the first government to deliver an increase in social housing during its term of office for more than thirty years.”
So affordable rent is the new social rent. Despite the fact that they bear no relation to each other at all. The rents are much higher, up to 80% of market rent, and the terms are not secure. Not only are new homes to be let at ‘affordable rent’ levels, but many re-lets of existing social rented homes are going to be as well.
Boris Johnson is the expert at smoke and mirrors in terms of housing statistics. He is
very clever about including almost everything built under the much abused term ‘affordable’. But even he hasn’t had the gall to claim that affordable rent and social rent are the same thing. At least not yet.