September 13, 2018
Despite all the fuss about migration levels, the numbers applying for asylum in the UK are at historically low levels. They ran at over 100,000 annually in the early noughties, then fell to around 30,000 per year and are back near that level again after another short peak linked to the migrant crisis in the rest of Europe. Most people who apply for asylum in the UK are turned down, but the proportion ultimately successful is rising, from consistently under a third a decade ago to over 40% now. The low numbers could have eased pressure on asylum accommodation, where applicants can live while awaiting decisions on their cases, but the Home Office is its own worst enemy in this respect: it has a backlog of nearly 15,000 unresolved cases over six months old (and some very much older than that).
Asylum seekers don’t have to accept accommodation, but those who would otherwise be destitute can apply for it. Before 2000 there were few if any asylum seekers living in Scotland – then Glasgow was chosen as one of the accommodation ‘dispersal areas’ after a change in government policy towards moving asylum seekers away from the south-east of England. At the time, the idea was to use surplus council flats (the same happened in other places, mainly in the Midlands and north of England). The Home Office set up contracts with local authorities to administer ‘dispersal’ and provide housing. From the start, this was on a no-rent basis – the person housed would get a flat, some furniture and white goods, and a very basic subsistence allowance (now £37.75 per week). Councils like Glasgow – still the only one in Scotland – could use surplus funds from the contract to fund community services. Glasgow set up a series of neighbourhood networks to support communities where newcomers were being housed.
Continue reading “Asylum seekers in Scotland – what’s the background to the SERCO contract issues?”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: asylum |
September 10, 2018
Sandinista Nicaraguans march for Peace and Justice for their dead, wounded, and disappeared. Managua, September 8, 2018.
This article is by Camilo Mejia, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience because he refused duty in the US army in Iraq, who is also son of the famous Nicaraguan singer Carlos Mejia Godoy.
In its September 7 article, the once progressive Guardian reports that Nicaragua was brought to a standstill by a general strike called by the Civic Alliance, one of the main opposition coalitions behind the attempted soft coup, citing how banks and upscale shopping malls in Managua are all closed in support of the strike. What The Guardian fails to mention is that those upscale businesses only represent a small portion within the Nicaraguan sector, which is mostly driven by micro, small, and mid-size businesses that are part of the country’s popular market economy, which in turn employs about 90 percent of the country’s workers. In truth, commerce was business as usual throughout Nicaragua, as these images show.
Continue reading “The Guardian continues its shameless misinformation campaign against Nicaragua and its people”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention |
August 4, 2018
Leaving the European Union is supposed to free us from red tape. Depending whether Brexit is hard or soft, it could give Britain more freedom to set its own rules. Will this be of any benefit to the housing sector? Let’s look at some of the possible changes.
EU procurement rules are one example. Ending them could eventually create more freedom, but in the short term the public sector will still need to comply with the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. Future trade agreements are also likely to come with new procurement rules, covering issues such as openness, fairness, transparency and non-discrimination. So the changes might not be very great. But if the UK did get more freedom, reforms might for example allow tenders to be restricted to British firms. As CIH already advises, contracts can and should anyway take into account the ‘social value’ that can be obtained: this shouldn’t change.
Continue reading “Will housing receive a ‘red tape bonus’ from Brexit?”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: migration policy, housing investment, housing associations |
July 26, 2018
Low Hill, Wolverhampton
Before parliament went off for its summer holidays, the housing minister Kit Malthouse said he was ‘at a loss’ to understand why councils don’t use their full borrowing capacity to build new homes. Always willing to help out a new minister, I’ll offer a quick guide to why this apparently lamentable situation has come about.
Continue reading “Why councils don’t use their borrowing capacity”
Category: Housing | Tags: council housing, borrowing rules, housing finance, housing investment |
May 30, 2018
The problems experienced by the Windrush generation highlight the effects of the “hostile environment” created by Theresa May when she was home secretary. Anyone needing rented housing is affected, alongside those going to hospital or applying for a job or bank account. Social housing applicants have long had to comply with eligibility rules but landlords in England now have to check their right to rent. Rough sleepers and those in poor-quality rented accommodation can be affected by Home Office enforcement action. How can social landlords respond? Here are seven tips.
First, it’s vital that housing staff know the rules or can get expert guidance. We at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) have received reports of people being told they are not eligible for social housing because (for example) they are EU nationals or have limited leave to remain. Many people in these groups are eligible and will continue to be after Brexit. You can find all the rules on the Housing Rights website run by the CIH and BME National. Remember that there may be different rules for housing allocations, homelessness and benefits.
Continue reading “The hostile environment: what social landlords need to know”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: private rented sector, migration policy, immigration checks, destitution, right to rent |
May 22, 2018
When Spanish ships first reached the Americas in 1492, they had no idea of the size of the lands on which they’d set foot, nor did they realise that they were twin continents in their own right. Columbus died believing he’d found an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, because although the early explorers new the world was a sphere, they thought it was much smaller than it turned out to be. Only eight years after Columbus’s first landing, the mouth of the Amazon was discovered, and the river’s size could be guessed by the extent of the ‘sweet water’ that it produced, changing the colour of the Atlantic Ocean across more than two million square kilometres. But the Amazon basin remained unknown to Europeans for 50 more years, and then its discovery was an accident.
It is commonly supposed that before the Conquest the Americas were sparsely inhabited. Yet Charles Mann argues in the book that in the US was called ‘1491’, that it is possible that the total population at the time was actually greater than Europe’s. There is an ongoing controversy about this, not least because only a few of the more advanced civilisations left written records and these are not easily decoded. Part of the controversy centres on an area – the Amazon – where there were no written records at all and few if any permanent structures. John Hemmings, in ‘Tree of Rivers’, judges there to have been 4-5 million people in the Amazon basin before the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived, pitching his estimate between the extremes of those that have been put forward by different scientists.
Continue reading “River of Darkness”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: Ecuador, Brazil, Amazon river |
April 28, 2018
Jeremy Corbyn launched Labour’s affordable housing green paper last Thursday, promising one million new homes over ten years of which a significant number would be for social rent. The ambition was clear: funding will be restored to the level when Labour last held office, and councils will once again become “major deliverers” of social housing. This would contrast with recent Conservative governments which Corbyn said “have made it their mission to eliminate it”. The only time England has built enough housing, he added, was when councils have stepped in to do it.
Shadow housing minister John Healey was at pains to point out that housing associations would also retain a big role. And it’s clear they will need to, as one of the unanswered questions is how councils will build up the development capacity that has been depleted over the last eight years. As one participant said in discussion afterwards, the skills no longer exist in many local authorities and if many start new build programmes for the first time in years, they will all be competing for the same scarce skills such as architects and quantity surveyors.
Continue reading “Encouraging messages, now Labour must work on the detail”
Category: Housing | Tags: council housing, borrowing rules, housing investment, housing policy, rents, housing associations |
April 17, 2018
In response to demands that he produce the evidence for his claim that immigration is driving up house prices, the housing minister has now published the calculations. Do they back up his argument?
First, it must be said that researching the drivers of house price increases is fraught with difficulty as there are so many factors involved – not least a degree of sometimes irrational human behaviour given that houses are not merely places to live in but for many are an investment, a source of income or bought in order to speculate on future prices. Especially in the past few years, would-be owner-occupiers have been operating in the same market as a rapidly expanding private rented sector. So if projecting the demand for housing in terms of the number of units is a challenge, translating that into effects on house prices is much more so.
What strikes the reader immediately about the new calculation is its simplicity. The original piece of work produced what was really a rule-of-thumb relationship between household growth and house prices: if the former increases by 1%, the latter will go up by 2%. The context – the years up to 2008 when the research was published – was a period of very strong house price growth.
Continue reading “Raab’s use of outdated and oversimplified evidence is foolhardy”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: migration statistics, housing market |
April 12, 2018
Dominic Raab, the housing minister, has rightly been asked to produce the evidence to back up his claim that immigration has put up house prices by 20 per cent over the past 25 years when the research suggests that immigration is just one factor pushing up housing demand and a minor one at that.
The Migration Observatory, which publishes regular briefings on housing and migration, says that evidence on the link with housing costs reaches no firm conclusion.
Two recent studies have even shown that an increase in an area’s foreign-born population brings a slight fall in house prices. Christine Whitehead looked at housing demand from highly skilled migrants and concluded that the effect on the market is very small, even in London. Meanwhile, the last report from the official Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in 2014 concluded (from lack of evidence to the contrary) that “migrants reduce house prices”.
The housing minister says that the MAC “airbrushes” the impact on housing, citing unpublished evidence from the ONS to back his claim that house prices have increased by 20 per cent in 25 years because of immigration.
Continue reading “Raab’s claims about immigration oversimplify a complex housing problem”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: migration statistics, housing market |
April 12, 2018
On 9 April 1948, the Colombian politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán stepped out of his office with a group of friends to walk to Bogotá’s Hotel Continental for lunch. An assassin confronted him in the street and shot him three times in the face and chest. He died shortly afterwards. His supporters caught the 20-year-old culprit, Juan Roa Sierra, and beat him to death. His body, naked except for a blue and red striped tie, was dumped in front of the Presidential Palace. It remained there for two days. ‘El Bogotazo’, the night of violence sparked by Gaitán’s assassination, left more than 3000 people dead and Bogotá half in ruins.
Gaitán had carried the hopes of a new radical politics in Colombia. At the age of 26, he had led the condemnation of the army’s massacre of striking banana workers in Ciénaga in December 1928 (a central episode in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). During his speech to the senate, Gaitán displayed the skull of a child killed by the tirade of bullets aimed at the peaceful demonstrators. In 1948, after a short spell as mayor of Bogotá, he was leader of the Liberal party and its candidate for the coming presidential election. With the support of the growing urban working class, he stood a real chance of forming the first government led by someone outside the country’s elite. It wasn’t to be. More than 200,000 people were killed in the ten-year civil war (1948-58) known as La Violencia. Decades of guerrilla warfare followed, from which Colombia is only now emerging.
Continue reading “The man with the typewriter”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Cuba, Colombia, Latin writers |
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on