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Select Committee publishes evidence on homelessness: no surprises, things are bad

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date March 4, 2016

Last week the Select Committee for the Communities and Local Government Department published the evidence submitted to its inquiry into homelessness.
Many of the submissions are worth reading and they provide testimony to the housing crisis, the impact it has on homeless people, and the strain that all services to homeless people are under. The only missing player would appear to be the department responsible for it all. That is hardly surprising as the one thing that is stunningly clear from the evidence is that Government policy is failing to meet the housing and other needs of homeless people.
There are many local authority submissions, and some interesting contrasts – from some councils lauding their ‘options’ schemes and former Government adviser Andy Gale seemingly denying there is such a thing as ‘gatekeeping’, to the Housing Law Practitioners Association (HLPA) showing that there may be some good practice but there is also a large amount of illegal gatekeeping going on. (For anyone particularly interested in the technical issues around homelessness law and practice, the HPLA submission is a key source.) There is a lot of debate in the evidence about the ‘prevention’ model adopted in Wales but, if that policy is adopted in England, it will have to be carefully designed to ensure that ‘prevention’ does not join ‘housing options’ as another synonym for gatekeeping.
Unsurprisingly, the evidence from CIH, JRF and Shelter is comprehensive and they all link the rising trend in homelessness to the lack of availability of social housing, the rise of insecure private renting, and the impact of welfare reform. Organisations providing specialist support services and assisting single people (and especially young people) show how bad things are getting, especially in London. Also noteworthy is the evidence from Women at the Well, a Kings Cross organisation working with homeless women, about the whole issue of ‘hidden populations’ of homeless people.
I found the evidence from Westminster City Council hard to take. Like most London councils, they face a serious homelessness problem, a shortage of social homes, an impossibly expensive private sector, and a growing problem securing temporary accommodation. But having observed that council’s housing policies for forty years, I know that they have always complained about their special position in the centre of London and tried to dismiss the problem as being largely to do with transient people, despite the fact that homelessness in the borough is predominantly home grown. Throughout that time – and not just during the era of Lady Porter’s ‘Homes for Votes’ – they have constantly failed to take opportunities to build additional social rented homes for their population through their own building programme and by failing to make the most of the section 106 provisions. Even now, with the crisis in homelessness that they describe in their submission, they are promoting private development on key sites like the Jubilee sports centre in north Paddington with scarcely any affordable homes. They have made long term political choices and their proposed solution, that they should more easily be able to provide homes outside the borough, both permanently and for temporary accommodation, should be seen in that context. It is no surprise that other boroughs and districts outside London give them a hard time when they have patently failed to provide as many homes as they could.
Reading through some of the evidence reminded me of the last comprehensive select committee review of homelessness, 12 years ago when I was specialist adviser to the then ODPM Committee. One task was to read and comment on a huge array of submissions. Looking back at the Committee’s 2004 report it is fascinating how much has changed, largely for the worse. It will provide a stark contrast to the new report when it is produced. For example, I doubt very much if the Committee in 2016 will be able to start its report in the same way as the 2004 Committee did:

There is no question that the Government has taken on the problem of homelessness. The Homelessness Act 2002 represented a breakthrough in strategic thinking, and the extension of the Priority Need categories has brought large numbers under the protection of legislation. New obligations have been imposed on local authorities to help more people than ever before. We are glad that the Government recognised the scale of the homelessness problem.

The next paragraph of the report however foretold of the problems to come:

Having reduced the number of rough sleepers, and families forced to live long term in bed and breakfast accommodation, ODPM now faces a new crisis. The growing pressure in temporary accommodation needs urgent attention, and investment. New housing is not being built quickly enough, and too much of it is destined not to be used as much needed social housing. We regard the provision of new social housing as an absolute priority for the Government. This problem will not go away; indeed, it may get much worse.

At that more optimistic time, along with the Committee and most in the housing world, I saw the 2002 Homelessness Act as a great step forward. But the ambition was always undermined by inadequate housing supply. Too many councils, having been pushed by the Act into undertaking a comprehensive review and adopting a strategy, looked for ways of simultaneously preventing homelessness and reducing their exposure to homeless acceptances. In my view the latter became the dominant motivation. To compound matters, the law of unintended consequences was applied to an apparently progressive Government target, to halve the numbers in temporary accommodation. This also encouraged too many councils into a heavy gatekeeping policy, trying to stem demand because it was much harder to improve supply.
The evidence submitted to this 2016 review is pointedly less positive than that submitted in 2004. Shortage of social housing is intensifying and there is much more emphasis in the submissions on the role of the private rented sector in generating homelessness – in 2004 the great expansion was not really underway. Rough sleeping then was declining, now it is rising rapidly. Providing more social housing was seen as the key way forward, now it is simply not on the Government’s agenda. Then the use of temporary accommodation was in decline, now it is rising steeply again.
And as we wait for the next Osborne budget and another round of cuts, it is worth remembering that total expenditure on homelessness by London boroughs has now topped £600 million a year.

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Land ahoy!

Radical solutions to the housing crisis must focus on land
A new report from the London Assembly has taken a good look at the question of land and has recommended a clear route forward for the next London mayor to move towards introducing a Land Value Tax (LVT). The report proposes a step by step approach with an initial review of the powers that would be necessary for LVT to replace council tax, business rates and stamp duty land tax; an economic feasibility study to model the likely yield of LVT compared to the other taxes; and, if the study is positive, a trial of LVT in a geographically defined area of London.
The report rehearses the reasons behind the need for a radical new departure that has the potential to release far more land for productive use to meet the needs of a city that is growing rapidly in population and requiring the regeneration of many of its older neighbourhoods. It argues that new mechanisms are needed to fund London’s growth – which will continue to feed land and property inflation under current policies. And it argues that LVT would match the current appetite for devolution – with even the current mayor arguing for London to have considerably greater tax-raising powers and the Government already agreeing to devolve business rates by 2020.
As others have before, the report illustrates how the existing structure of property taxation encourages inefficient use of land and deters development. Council tax fails to deal with high value land, business rates fail to address unused land and taxes productive enterprises instead, and stamp duty is a disincentive to land sales.
LVT is defined by the report to be ‘a tax on land, payable by the landowner, at a rate of tax which is determined by the value of the land in its ‘optimum use’ (as decided by a public authority) as opposed to its actual or current use’. There would be a clear incentive to bring forward under-utilised land and the tax has the potential to reduce reliance on Whitehall funding and could lead to substantial community benefits when land values increase following public investment.
There is considerable public support for stronger action to be taken against land banking and against corporations which hold land simply to let it accrue in value without penalty. The report estimates that there are around 2,000 brownfield sites in London that may be available for development, comprising about 2% of the land area. It also comments that almost half the notionally available sites in London were held by those who had no incentive or intention to build. Based on the GLA’s Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (SHLAA) in 2012, land classified as ‘potential housing land’ could accommodate 276,000 new homes, equivalent to 7 years extra housing supply.
The theory behind the merits of land taxation is straightforward. Unlike other assets, land has borne no cost of production and it only has value because of its scarcity. As the report says, ‘land value owes nothing to individual effort and everything to the community at large’. The tax is transparent and the asset it taxes is unmoveable – it cannot be shifted to the Cayman Islands!
The report notes that the modern case for a land tax can be traced back to Winston Churchill in 1909. He argued that landowners should be taxed on the benefits they accrue from external developments, which have been provided by the labour, investment and tax payments of others, often through public investment. Although developers do make section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy payments, these represent only a small fraction of the uplift gained, for example, by new transport infrastructure. If owners of underused or vacant land paid more through a more broadly based land tax, ordinary taxpayers would be required to pay less.
The GLA report is frank about the objections that have been made about LVT. There are significant challenges in introducing any new tax and making it operationally workable. Many of these are practical around identifying ownership but the idea of ‘optimum’ land use is new and potentially complex, and existing land value is often a moveable feast depending on the variable potential value of different developments. It is also frank about the political challenge, pointing out the ridiculous position where council tax is still based on 1991 values due to the perceived political risk of revaluation. The switch would create substantial winners and losers, and the losers will be able to afford lawyers and lobbyists! It therefore identifies some alternatives that have been suggested such as a specific derelict land tax and a system based on incentives rather than taxation, as well as better use of the mayor’s existing powers, including the power to set up area development corporations like for Old Oak and Park Royal.
The approach recommended is therefore gradual and based on a series of investigatory steps, clarifying issues and working towards holding a pilot. But it concludes that the political context is right – a desperate housing shortage, housing becoming a serious brake on growth, and a strong move towards the devolution of powers to elected mayors. For those like me who have long supported the idea of land taxation whilst being doubtful about its political deliverability, this report and its careful approach makes a lot of sense.

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Birthday blues

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date February 18, 2016

Here’s a revelation: I’m getting on a bit. 66 next week, but feeling older in body (especially compared to my tennis-playing and hiking friends) yet far younger in mind.
Another birthday is not the only reason why I’ve been thinking about housing and older people recently. I’ve also been reading a new report from the International Longevity Centre which is disparaging about the way our society is responding to ageing. They conclude that the social care system is crumbling; health care is failing to incentivise prevention of ill health; the housing system is failing, leading to many older people living in housing which does not meet their needs; and there is growing risk of people running out of money in retirement. As the current vogue is to accuse this older generation of feathering their own nests at the expense of future generations, this is quite a challenging list.
Increasing longevity and Government policy changes mean that many older people will no longer fit the stereotypical image of a mortgage-free old age living comfortably in their own home. More will carry debts, including mortgages, into a much later retirement, more will be asset-rich but income poor, more will have problems repairing and heating their homes, more fill face large care bills, more will want to release some of their equity to help sons and daughters get a home rather than wait until they die. They will also sit on a huge amount of empty space – while the Government punishes working age social tenants with a ‘spare’ bedroom, the real issue of under-occupation in housing remains totally untackled.
The Tories have played a clever but typically cynical political game with older people, and it has reaped dividends for them. At the election, Labour had a clear lead over the Tories among 18-34s, social classes D and E, and private and social renters but their vote share fell amongst those aged 65+ to a tiny one in four, with IPSOS MORI recording a 5.5% swing to the Tories since 2010 amongst the age group that is not only increasing fastest but is also the most likely to turn out to vote (78%). The Tories led by 47% to 23% across the age group as a whole. Looking just at tenure across all age groups, the Tories led Labour amongst people who owned their home outright – mainly older people – by 24% but by only 8% amongst those that had a mortgage – despite the housing costs of this latter group falling over the past few years due to low interest rates.
The Tories identified themselves with ‘looking after pensioners’, especially by contrasting their pension reforms and the ‘triple lock’ with Labour’s ‘75p pension increase’ (which was a one-off of course). Pensioners also know they have been protected from the ravages that have befallen working age households who have faced a major income squeeze. Like many popular Tory policies, it is a mirage – my parents were made vastly better off by the Labour Government, especially when wider policies like carer allowances, fuel allowances, and council tax benefit were taken into account. The Tories successfully promoted their headline pension policy amongst existing pensioners whilst undermining the position of poorer pensioners and those needing care, and by totally screwing future pensioners at the same time. (The Resolution Foundation’s reports on Living Standards provide all the background data you’ll ever need).
The electoral figures are worse even than they seem. Many of the older people who supported Labour in 2015 could be described as life-long habitual voters, and I suspect the numbers could scarcely fall any further because of that. It is good that Labour is perceived as a young person’s party, but not enough. The demographics were well known before the 2015 Election, but Manifesto commitments on older people were rarely highlighted in the campaign.
To win in future, Labour must have no less an ambition than to regain its former lead amongst older voters, and it needs to think more seriously about how it appeals to this group. Of course many will vote on general issues like the economy or immigration or health just like the rest of the population, but there must be an advantage in thinking through a comprehensive policy which specifically appeals to older people, whatever their tenure. Labour accepted the triple lock, which helps, but needs to check through the gamut of policies that have affected poorer pensioners, and especially the collapse of the care system. Here, as Andy Burnham rightly said during the election, it is not just about spending more, it is about spending money better, like helping people in their own homes rather than keeping them in expensive hospital beds. It is also vital to highlight and address the fears of people now approaching retirement who have been hung out to dry – especially that cohort of women who expected to retire at 60 but will not now be able to retire until they are 66 or 67.
Ageing has long been a neglected area of housing policy. There have been plenty of ideas and a few programmes but insufficient priority has been given to creating real options and on a sufficient scale. Policy should be based on giving older people real choice rather than just pushing them in a particular direction. Labour’s policy on supporting people had the inadvertent consequence of undermining very popular sheltered housing (by switching money from supporting communal schemes to individual care packages) just as the Tory benefit policies are now undermining the provision of new supported housing. Support for voluntary organisations providing low-level support like shopping and gardening has almost disappeared, as have the projects offering ‘care and repair’ services to home owners that mushroomed in the 1980s. For people with declining health who want to stay in their own home, the central issue is providing far better social care, from domestic support to nursing, and much better post-hospital support. For those who want to stay at home but release some equity, we need a better range of (crucially) properly regulated financial products that people can trust. The state should be acting energetically to help those who would consider moving to somewhere smaller. Very popular schemes under which councils would buy family homes at a discount and provide good quality sheltered housing in return should be reinstated.
These are just a few of many possible suggestions. A forthcoming report on ‘Ageing London’ from the London mayor’s design advisory group will add to the list. But my central point is that Labour should develop an attractive group of real policies, including housing options, which will have a major impact on older people’s lives and help detach them from the bad habit of voting Tory.

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A man without a plan

Post author By monimbó
Post date February 6, 2016

It’s well known that governments are much fonder of dealing with day-to-day ‘events’ than they are of planning for long-term change. But this government not only has an aversion to planning, it seems clueless as to what it might involve. Its much-lauded ‘long-term economic plan’ has resulted in so many missed targets that a full review of government finances has been needed four times (March, July, November and again on March 16) within twelve months, suggesting the plan is not so much long-term as quarterly. Even the government’s most obvious goal of starving public services of funds and cutting the size of the state is simply that, with no road map for how to get there or what public services should be left in place when it does. This was brought home most recently by the LGA’s call for an emergency plan for local government, as over the next five years in many areas it will simply fall apart. What is happening to local government now will happen to other services later, with (presumably) no contingency plans in place, let alone any sort of vision for the role of a smaller state.
By a telling coincidence, it’s not only local government that’s recently asked Cameron for a plan. Examples have come from all sides. For example in social care an emergency is in the offing that has led to the head of the NHS calling for a properly resourced plan to be in place by 2018. Yet government’s response is a bit of half-hearted fire-fighting around the edges, such as the one-year offer to protect housing support services from a devastating cut in income, that in any case only covers part of the threat to their viability. Public health plans are also in disarray because not only has funding been drastically cut, but government hasn’t yet told councils what their budgets are, seven weeks from the start of the financial year.
Another issue is energy, where lack of planning, ham-fisted cuts in subsidies and over-reliance on a dodgy nuclear deal threaten a huge supply gap by 2025. Government is not so much inactive as seemingly unaware that it has any role to play at all, beyond cutting what it thinks are unpopular subsidies for renewables and increasing tax breaks for oil and gas, just as markets (but not government ministers) may be getting the message that fossil fuels have no long-term future. Two other related areas have no discernible plans either – reducing carbon emissions and tackling fuel poverty. Both had targets and plans left by the last Labour government, and were the subject of countless ‘strategies’ under the coalition, but are now either given token attention or ignored. (The coalition’s Carbon Plan, published in 2011, was supposed to updated quarterly; the last update was in 2012.)
The existence of a government target isn’t necessarily evidence of any sort of plan to achieve it, of course. The infamous 100,000 per year net migration target is one such, where despite regular rounds of immigration legislation no one seems to have looked into whether any of the new punitive measures might actually work (‘right to rent’ checks by landlords being the latest). The NHS is still beset by targets, but as Jeremy Corbyn made clear in last week’s PMQs, there is a huge gap between these and the resources available to achieve them. Child poverty is to be redefined so that any target becomes meaningless, simply because government actions (including reducing the stock of affordable housing) have made the old target unachievable (as the government’s own child poverty commission has pointed out). Even where there has been some semblance of a plan – to radically overhaul means-tested benefits by bringing them into one universal credit – implementation has been incompetent and key objectives (like making work pay) undermined by the need to stay within arbitrary caps on welfare spending (which, having only just been set, will now be breached in three of the next five years). Labour was sometimes bad at planning too (John Prescott’s ‘ten year’ transport plan round aground within days of being published), but far better by comparison with the plan-free chaos that now persists across most public services, including of course transport itself.
In housing, a review by the Guardian of recent national housing plans, prompted by John Healey’s announcement of a commission led by Peter Redfern to look at the decline in home ownership, found that the notable examples (Barker, Callcutt and Lyons) were all instigated by Labour. Back in September, Brandon Lewis set a target of building one million homes by 2020. The plan to do this seems be the Housing Bill which, as Red Brick has pointed out, is largely devoted to dismantling social housing.
The target would mean doubling current output, so how is that to be done? Labour’s Lyons Review envisaged a bigger role for local authorities, whereas the present government seems determined to undermine the capacity it created in April 2012 when council housing became self-financing. It has attacked capacity in the housing association sector by cutting rents and turning off the subsidy for new rented housing, instead launching a huge stimulus for home ownership when all the evidence points to massive unmet demand for homes to rent, and even the leading provider of buy to let mortgages is calling for a long-term, comprehensive strategy that looks across the whole market not just at owner-occupation.

Indeed, the chart by Hamptons summarises how much the government’s target for its own investment is distorted by these aims. Over 80% of publicly funded output will now be aimed at owner-occupation, via Starter Homes or shared ownership: the former is new and untried and, while the latter is well-established, in the last five years it has only delivered at about half the output now required. The tried and tested product, housing for below-market rent, is relegated to the ‘other’ category, contributing only 12% of output. Given such a drastic switch of resources, and the limited warning to the housing industry that it was about to happen, what chance is there of these housing targets being actually achieved?
As a former student of town planning I recall that the opposite of planning was represented by a school of decision-making known as disjointed incrementalism. Cameron is a man without a plan, whose model of government could well be this one. Disjointed incrementalism was first described in 1959 by social scientist Charles Lindblom. His other name for it was ‘the science of muddling through’.

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Sticking it on the Bill

Post author By monimbó
Post date January 17, 2016

Is this England’s worst-ever Housing Bill? Quite possibly. Past legislation has often included useless measures (the rent-to-mortgage scheme in 1993 comes to mind) but they often sat alongside worthwhile ones (in that case, defining the welfare role of social housing). This one has nothing to offer the housing crisis, is malicious in intent and – as lawyers have pointed out – atrociously drafted. It was sketchy from the start and new measures have been tacked on since, worsening the backlog of details we’ve yet to see and making the full impact difficult to assess. It’s a truly noxious mix.
The Bill has just completed its passage through the Commons, so let’s recap. We’ll concentrate on the bits that are most damaging to social housing (and note in passing that there are indeed some useful measures aimed at private renting, even if councils will struggle to take advantage of them).
First, councils will have to sell off higher value stock when it falls vacant. They’ve been given no idea how this will be implemented only that – whether or not they actually sell the houses – they’ll have to pay the money across to the Treasury as if they had sold them. We don’t know if there’ll be any exemptions – for example, will tenant transfers still be allowed? We have a vague promise of two-for-one replacement in London, with no detail on how it will work. And why, if maintaining affordable housing in London is so important, does it have to be sold in the first place?
Second, better-off tenants – defined ridiculously narrowly – will pay much higher rents via pay to stay. Policy on rents has effectively been thrown to the winds, since both councils and housing associations will have to reduce their social rents for the next four years, and yet can still convert existing stock to much higher ‘affordable rents’ to provide income for new development. Associations – but not councils – can keep the money from ‘pay to stay’ (which is optional for associations, but not councils). Labour’s policy of ‘converging’ rents to give a logical rent structure across the social sector is, to put it mildly, a thing of the past.
Third, new social tenancies will now have to be offered on fixed terms – again, a measure that is compulsory for councils but optional for associations. The Tories had the gall to make this fundamental change to secure tenancies in an amendment to the Bill. Not only that, but they describe it as a measure to promote social mobility (well, I suppose being booted out of your home is mobility of sorts). And as the minister said in introducing the amendment, the change ‘may prompt people who may otherwise not have thought about purchasing their own home to do so where they feel they are able to’.
Fourth – and another measure which is optional for associations – is of course the much-weakened housing association right to buy, now only to be piloted and likely to result in only a few hundred sales in the first year. So a much-trumpeted election promise, rushed into the manifesto at the last minute, has effectively fallen apart. The Tories could have foreseen the difficulties themselves if they’d only looked back at what happened in the 1980s when they first tried it. Now they are stuck with a half-baked scheme, loosely connected in an undisclosed way to high-value council house sales, which will supposedly still pay the cost of discounts.
Fifth – and yet another measure which applies only to associations – is the weakened regulatory regime, made necessary by the ham-fisted introduction of right to buy and other changes. Here we have another set of amendments driven entirely by expediency, not by what is right for the sector. As CIH has said in looking at the whole issue of reclassification of housing association debt, the government’s blundering has led to the wrong debate about regulation, which should be driven by ensuring high quality services for tenants, not by the need to meet outdated accounting conventions and saving the Treasury’s face.
Sixth, and coming from right field, we have starter homes, noted here because the government thinks they constitute ‘affordable housing’ and should replace social and ‘affordable’ rented homes in new developments. Starter homes and their likely price levels led to one of the choicer exchanges in the debates on the Bill. New-boy Tory MP Chris Philp said that in ‘his’ borough of Croydon, the average 20% discount means a starter home will be ‘only’ about £220,000 or £250,000 which, he claimed, ‘is extremely affordable’. Sadiq Khan had a quick-fire response: ‘It usually takes a parliamentarian years to become out of touch, but the hon. Gentleman has done it in six months’. Starter homes trash the definition of affordability in two ways: they are too expensive, and they subsidise only the first buyer, not all subsequent occupiers like genuinely affordable homes.
It’s tempting to conclude that these six key measures show that the government as a whole is out of touch, but while this is true it doesn’t mean that their aims are unclear. And one of the clearest of those aims is to destroy council housing in its present form. (We might have said ‘social housing’ here, but housing associations – as we’ve seen – have been given a number of escape clauses.) The Bill reduces security for tenants, will push a lot of them out of the sector and will mean there are far fewer opportunities for new tenants to get good quality homes. It shows the Tories’ true contempt for council tenants: can anyone imagine similar punitive measures being taken against any other large segment of the population?
But its real significance is the way it links to the decisions in the July Budget and the Autumn Statement, which together undermine investment in the existing stock and will likely bring to a halt most councils’ plans for new building (certainly at social rents). Not only must councils cope with less rental income, but grant towards new rented homes has now been stopped (in favour of shared ownership schemes). The Bill further undermines the self-financing settlement (not yet fours old) by taking back into the Treasury the extra money from pay to stay and most of the receipts from high value sales. One housing director has already said she wouldn’t be surprised to see the ‘ring fence’ around council housing budgets disappear, given that it already has gaping holes in it. The Treasury, which hated self-financing from the start, is gleefully making the holes bigger.
Red Brick has pointed out before the dangers of social housing – and especially council housing – being reduced to what Mark Stephens calls ‘an ambulance service’, like social housing in Canada and the US. To achieve this, the Tories need to cut the size of the sector, remove tenants’ security, make tenancies turn over more quickly, let the stock deteriorate and stop adding to it. Until last summer they’d only begun the first of these: once the Bill becomes law, and the Autumn Statement starts to take effect, the attack will be launched on all fronts. Far from tackling ‘sink estates’ as Cameron recently claimed, isn’t it now clear that their real aim is to create them?

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Waving, but not yet sinking

Post author By monimbó
Post date January 12, 2016

A hundred of Britain’s ‘most dilapidated and poverty-ridden housing estates’ are to be redeveloped, promises David Cameron. Some will be demolished and rebuilt from their foundations. Just as the last economic crisis had nothing to do with the bankers, it now seems that the cause of the 2011 riots has been pinned down to ‘decades of neglect in rundown housing estates’. But don’t worry, Cameron is going to ‘tear down’ the ‘brutal high-rise towers’ to tackle drug abuse and stamp out gangland culture. Indeed, he’s so serious about it that he’s put aside £140 million to do the job.
Only ten days after writing a blog on the government’s illusionary policies, I didn’t expect a new and even worse example to come along quite so soon. This one’s so bad it’s difficult to know where criticism should begin. Perhaps the old-fashioned physical determinism of assuming that people’s problems are caused by high-rise blocks would be a good start since – if he’d spoken to people who live in them or the councils that manage them – Cameron would have learnt immediately that many provide pleasant homes. Even where they don’t, management problems these days are often down to the fact that ownership is fragmented, with many flats having been sold to absentee private landlords uninterested in anything except getting the rent. And where there are gangs or drug abuse, it’s easier to blame these on the building or on the councils that manage them than to look at wider issues about society that might cast uncomfortable light on government’s spending priorities.
Let’s make the daring assumption that this programme might produce some action on the ground – rash, I know, given what has happened with so many other government housing initiatives. But if so, the biggest thing on which Cameron will need to be pinned down is his commitment to work with tenants – as many as 100,000 of them, he says. So let’s assume he’ll set aside any paternalistic assumptions that he (or a consultant or developer) knows what’s best for them, and that he’ll really start to listen to what tenants want for their estates.
Oddly enough, their likely first priority is unwittingly flagged up by Cameron himself, in the opening words of his Sunday Times article: he says ‘it all comes back to one word: security’. He wants to bring security to families ‘who currently have none at all’. Well this might produce an interesting discussion. He clearly expects this will mean talking about the poor design of estates and tenants’ wish to live in ordinary streets not high-rise blocks. There might be some tenants who want that, but my bet is that most will define ‘security’, or lack of it, in very different terms. Here’s a shot at a few possible answers: community policing by officers we know, that has now disappeared; community centres that catered for young people, now closed; people who are benefit-dependent having very little or no money and getting withdrawn, depressed or worse; most jobs being insecure and offering low wages. And of course, he is highly likely to find tenants worrying about the ending of secure tenancies, or about higher rents that will drive out better-off tenants, or about Greg Clark’s scheme to sell off the best bits of their estates.
The problem with any list like this is that they’re all problems that Cameron’s governments have either created or made worse. And where they haven’t made them worse yet they plan to do so soon. If a tenant says that what worries him sick is not ‘concrete slabs dropped from on high’ but the prospect of being forced to move out of the flat he regards as home, will Cameron listen? If she says that her security comes from having neighbours who are friends and going with them to Friday-night bingo (as a friend who lives in an Islington estate was telling me recently), will Cameron promise that their community will be preserved along with the essential facilities that bring neighbours together?
Conservative governments are not alone in having high-minded views on what the problems and solutions are in poor communities, that bear little relation to experience on the ground. But residents are going to be instantly suspicious of a programme where the solution seems to have been drawn up in advance: knock down the high-rise blocks and build new homes in ‘streets’. Like Lord Adonis and his proposal for City Villages, already demolished (forgive the pun) in Red Brick both by Steve and by Duncan Bowie, the new report views estates as public assets whose value can be better maximised by redevelopment than by keeping the existing homes. (Strangely, I can find no reference in the new report from Savills to the earlier, similar one from ippr).
Both reports have a major failing – well identified by Duncan Bowie – in seeming to forget that these estates are currently providing very affordable housing to tenants who can’t pay higher rents. Before any plan to reconfigure an estate is drawn up, the first consideration must be: how can we keep these tenants here, and continue to give them good homes and secure tenancies, without rents having to be increased and the community being broken up? It’s not as if these issues are new ones: in London especially they are highly topical, as a scan through articles by Dave Hill will demonstrate. Yet Cameron betrays how out of touch he is by failing to mention them.
Also largely ignored is the current role of local authorities, who happen to be the owners of the estates. Cameron says they’ve neglected the estates for decades. Well if that’s the case, who is struggling to run planned maintenance programmes within available budgets, meet the now-forgotten Decent Homes Standard and try to ensure that tenants live in warm and easier-to-heat homes (none of these issues are mentioned in the new report)? The clue that councils are not going to be offered a big role is in the size of the funding package: £140 million won’t buy much regeneration in a single estate, let alone a hundred. As he says, his kind of regeneration will ‘will work best in areas where land values are high’, which is shorthand for developers coming in and making a killing. Stand by for more schemes like Barnett’s West Hendon or Southwark’s Heygate. Not forgetting to mention, of course, the still-pending jewel in the crown: Capco’s redevelopment of Hammersmith and Fulham’s West Kensington and Gibbs Green. As Cameron aptly concludes, ‘together we can tear down anything that stands in our way’.

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What you see isn't what you get

Post author By monimbó
Post date January 2, 2016

What matters to an illusionist is how something is perceived, rather than how it actually is. Owen Jones, writing last month, was describing what he called the government’s ‘political sorcery’. He only briefly touched on housing policy. He pointed out that the prime feature of the government’s renegotiation of our EU membership – depriving recent EU migrants of in-work benefits, including their access to housing benefit and social housing – is based on the perception that millions of them are playing the system. But the truth, shown in the chart on tax credit claims from NIESR, is that relatively small numbers claim in-work (as opposed to out-of-work) benefits. In other words, it plays to people’s prejudices about migrants but has little or nothing to do with real problems.

Jones catalogues other issues which the government has successfully portrayed to their advantage in the same ways – the deficit, its cause, the compelling need to scale back the state. All these are examples of illusionary politics. As he notes, politics is now about sentiments and emotions, even more than about concrete problems. Sentiments are fed not by facts but by emotionally compelling stories of abuses of the system which in the public mind become a general picture of what’s wrong with state benefits and public services.
The same sorcery applies in housing. Council housing is ‘taxpayer-subsidised’, its lucky occupants enjoy ‘lifetime tenancies’, ‘local’ people can’t get houses when they are relet and many occupants are abusing the system by enjoying low rents while they are on ‘higher incomes’. Red Brick has consistently debunked these myths, most recently in Steve’s latest piece and in my July post, but it doesn’t stop the government from perpetuating them. While council housing is beyond the pale, housing associations also came under unjustified attacks designed to secure their acceptance of right to buy (since when the attacks have ended). There are always one or two examples to back up any of these smears, enabling any refutation to be easily dismissed. In any case people have already absorbed the message from the media headlines and pay little attention to any evidence which contradicts it.
As Owen says, this because few voters are political geeks interested in policy details or whether one policy contradicts another. So, for example, the Localism Act promised to give local homes to local people by allowing councils to impose stiff residency tests (cutting London waiting lists by one-third in just two years). But just as prospective tenants thought they might be able to move in next to their in-laws, the government now plans to insist on compulsory sales of high-value council houses that might mean no new lettings at all on the most popular estates (and private landlords buying vacant homes to let to higher-paid tenants who of course aren’t even on the waiting list). Has the clear policy contradiction ever been mentioned by mainstream media?
The biggest illusion of all is surely that the government plans to address the housing shortage. We are the builders, says George Osborne, introducing a Spending Review and a Housing Bill that instead will push up house prices and offer further subsidies and favourable rule changes to developers, who will probably respond by raising output slightly but above all will ensure that their already high profits soar even higher. He constantly draws attention away from his own policy failures: official statistics show private builders completed 125,000 homes per year on average under Labour governments from 1997-2010, while since then they have managed an average 90,000 per year. In Labour’s best two years for private building, 2006-2007, more private homes were built than in three years under the coalition, 2011-2013. Who are the real builders, then?
There will be one million more home owners said the DCLG after the Autumn Statement, while the numbers buying a home with a mortgage have fallen by half a million since 2010. Both before and after the election the government has put the new right to buy for housing association tenants on a policy pedestal, just as critics have pointed out that only small numbers will benefit, at huge cost per household in subsidy. The government now admits it will have to phase in the scheme to avoid an additional burden on public spending, meaning that only a few hundred tenants are likely to benefit in the first year. But what matters is the illusion, not the detail.
There are so many examples of illusionary housing policies that it would be difficult to make a complete list of the government’s doublespeak. Social housing rents are being cut to help those on low incomes, whereas the IFS showed that the main beneficiary is the Treasury. Councils are being empowered to build more homes whereas their capacity is actually being reduced. Housing investment will provide ‘the largest housing programme by government since the 1970s’ even though it won’t get anywhere near doing so. In any case, most of the increase will arrive after the end of this government’s fixed term of office. ‘Increased central funding’ for tackling homelessness ignores the fact that local government will, according to the IFS, have taken an overall 79% cut in its revenue budgets by 2019/20 compared with 2010/11. Government meets its self-imposed ‘welfare cap’ by the same date, but only because the costs of temporary accommodation for homeless households are to be shifted out of the welfare budget and onto local councils. In February, landlords across England will have to start making immigration checks to stop ‘illegal’ migrants from getting new lettings, even though there is little evidence that they are or that the checks will be a deterrent to undocumented migration.
With only a few notable recent exceptions like tax credits, evidence that proves government policy is an illusion is ignored by the media. Even the campaign to maintain tax credits was successfully exploited by Osborne, who stopped the tax credit cuts only to retain them for universal credit applicants, with the same long-term effects. The media (and the Opposition) allowed him to get away with this blatant sleight of hand.
The point is that Cameron/Osborne are carrying out illusionary politics on a grand scale. While Gordon Brown as Chancellor might have set out headline policies for the tabloids while quietly getting on with real policy changes such as bringing council housing up to the Decent Homes Standard, Osborne runs the whole gamut of illusion from macro-economic policy down to the fine detail of ending ‘lifetime’ tenancies, introducing ‘pay to stay’ and ‘cutting’ rents. Nothing escapes his sorcerer’s eye.

Owen Jones argues that Labour urgently needs to address this new way of making and presenting policy, not by copying it but by devising its own effective counter-strategy. It needs to find much better ways to appeal to people’s emotions. In the same way as the Tories have successfully dangled the false hope of getting on the property ladder, Labour needs a coherent housing message that (Jones says) ‘can easily be turned into a pub conversation’. A starting point could be the aspirations of millions of younger households who’ve again be promised home ownership but by 2020 will still be tenants, paying high rents and still unable to save for a deposit. A distinctive set of policies is needed, with a convincing explanation of how they will be funded and carried out, framed so that real households can visualise how they personally (or their sons and daughters) might benefit. This might just do the trick after another five years of Tory illusions.

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'Furious commitment' to end homelessness and bad housing: essays in memory of Chris Holmes

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date December 21, 2015

A collection of essays in memory of the life and work of Chris Holmes has been published online and is accessible to all. The essays, including contributions from Hattie Llewellyn-Davies, Nick Raynsford, Ann Power, David Orr, Jeremy Swain, Nicola Bacon, Rachel O’Brien and myself, have been written especially for this memorial publication.
The essays reflect the theme of Chris’s “furious commitment” to end homelessness and bad housing.
It is appropriate that they are published this week due to the close association of Xmas and homelessness in so many people’s minds. Furious commitment is exactly what we all need in 2016 to reverse the upward march of the homelessness figures.
The link to the essays is
http://bit.ly/1O1TFxT

I hope you enjoy the essays in memory of such an inspiring person.
Happy New Year.
Steve Hilditch

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A bitter pill to swallow

Post author By Steve Hilditch
Post date December 11, 2015

I had intended not to write any blogposts during my extended visit to the antipodes this winter. But the addition of new clauses at very short notice to the Housing and Planning Bill which introduce ‘mandatory fixed term tenancies’ of 2 to 5 years and end security of tenure for new council tenants touches a raw nerve for me. This is a smash and grab raid, stealing a core right from tenants with no real opportunity for debate outside the Bill committee. I am delighted Labour has opposed the change forcefully.
The policy, and the stealth with which it has been introduced, is symbolic of the contempt and loathing this government shows for people on low incomes. They can be moved around like pieces on a chess board to suit the convenience of the government and landlords, or at least be kept in a state of uncertainty as their ability to stay in their home while they are ‘reviewed’ by a housing officer in what will feel like an arbitrary manner. They must not be allowed to settle, to integrate into communities, to put down roots, to provide stability for their children, to build successful lives for themselves.
For people like me, who associate our own ‘social mobility’ with the platform of security and stability achieved by our families due to living in council housing, this is a bitter pill to swallow.
The Tories are not the only people to blame, of course. During her short period as housing minister, Caroline Flint flirted with this idea as well, and plenty of housing ‘professionals’ have made the case for ending what they like to call ‘lifetime tenancies’ – an invented term, quickly picked up by Grant Shapps to make the whole business seem unreasonable. Even now the ethically impoverished National Housing Federation can’t bring itself to defend what remain of tenants’ rights: their argument is that housing associations should be able to let ‘their’ homes to whoever they like and on whatever terms they like. At present they have got their way: the new fixed term tenancy model will apply only to councils while the government continues to work out what to do about the reclassification of housing associations as public sector for the purpose of defining public borrowing.
The story of security of tenure for council tenants is one of bitter struggle. Councils have not always been benign landlords. Even when they wanted to build a lot of council housing to help emancipate the working class they often managed the homes with a rod of iron. They never really shed the mantle of Octavia Hill and consumer rights were a foreign land. Some used the threat of eviction to exert social control and to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor. Labour eventually listened to the case for a charter of tenants’ rights and the Callaghan government sought to enact security of tenure, balanced by strong grounds for possession. Unlikely as it now seems, it was the Thatcher government that put ‘secure tenancies’ into law in the 1980 Act, picking up the Labour legislation and realising quickly that secure tenancies were a necessary foundation for the ‘right to buy’. Thatcher had an ulterior motive, but the tenants’ charter came into existence and brought with it a profound change in the style of housing management, more considered, more balanced, more respectful, more participative, and, when eviction was thought necessary, more evidence-based requiring a judgement in a court of law. Secure tenancies underpinned the modernisation of the social housing sector, even leading eventually (and regrettably) to tenants being called ‘customers’.
Social rented housing is our most precious housing asset. It’s existence broke the historic inevitability that people on low incomes and vulnerable people would also endure homelessness and dreadful housing conditions. It removed the blight of bad housing from generations of children. In my view it was the strongest mechanism of all to achieve genuine social mobility and to give children born into poor families similar opportunities to those enjoyed by better-off families. Many of the key tensions around social housing – the most controversial being who gets it, and who doesn’t – arise not from failure but from its success and popularity and the shortage of supply.
Of course the government and big parts of the housing industry will seek to pacify opponents of the change. It will be helpful to tenants, they say, to have their tenancies reviewed every 2 or 5 years. Most will be renewed, they say. Well, what is the point of that? The policy fails in either direction. If non-renewal is the primary outcome, the vast majority of tenants will end up in private renting, far less suitable for families and more expensive for tenants and the state. If most fixed term tenancies are renewed, the policy will not achieve its purpose of getting moreturnover to create more space for new tenants. The argument that the government is trying to make that people will be helped into owner occupation is, well, pants. A few more will exercise the right to buy, but where is the justice in that? Remain a tenant and get kicked out, buy and you can stay.
We now have a sector that, instead of managing estates effectively and helping tenants to progress in their lives, will be collecting vast quantities of data about their incomes in case they are ‘high earning’ (£30k per household), monitoring what they get up to so they can review their tenancy every few years, and of course checking the immigration status of new tenants to boot. The new Victorians are firmly in charge.
There is an old saying that to incentivise the rich you have to make them richer, to incentivise the poor you have to make them poorer. This is now writ large in housing. If you are or are able to become a home owner, all manner of gifts – let’s call them subsidies – will be showered on you. The Prime Minister will talk endlessly about the important security and stability that being a home owner gives you, and that this in turn creates the conditions for social advancement. Meanwhile, if you are a social tenant, you will be accused of being subsidised even when you are not, your ability to pay your rent will be constantly threatened by bedroom tax or benefit caps or benefit sanctions, you will be denigrated and demonised in the media, and your ability to stay in your home will be subject to the whim of a landlord even if you meet all the terms of your tenancy.
Security for me and not for you. Subsidy for me and not for you. Social status for me and not for you. Insecurity at work and now at home. A two nation government without a doubt.