How much has government housing investment been cut since 2010? Headlines at the time reported that it fell by 60% and many people’s impressions are that it has since stayed at something like that level. But as the UK Housing Review has shown by looking at the detailed figures over the last four years, the reality is very different.
Everyone agrees we need to build more homes for social rent and last year the rules were changed so that both Homes England and the London Mayor can help finance them via capital grant. The problem is that the sheer scale of output required – as many as 90,000 new homes per year – means that grant costs will be very high. Over £6 billion would be needed to support a programme of that size. Is there any other way to pay for it?
Continue reading “It’s time to look again at revenue support for new build”
According to Crisis, to tackle new housing needs and address the backlog of overcrowding, sharing and unsatisfactory living conditions, we need to build 90,000 social rented homes per year in England. Yet currently we struggle to produce 5,000. This means that, far from meeting new needs, we’re not even building enough to replace the social rented homes that are regularly being lost. Theresa May promised to revive social renting “in those parts of the country where the need is greatest” but it’s in these parts where the supply is falling fastest.
Do you remember when housing associations were falling over each other to prove how ‘green’ they were? But since the recession and David Cameron reportedly telling his aides to “get rid of all the green crap” the funding has been cut and the social sector’s priorities have changed. Yet we all know that the linked problems of climate change, over-use of fossil fuels and fuel poverty are now far more urgent. The fact that even newly built homes are leaking so much energy they cost their occupants £200 annually in higher-than-necessary fuel bills shows how many backward steps we’ve taken while the problem has got worse.
Continue reading “Our homes are wasting energy on a prolific scale”
It’s taken over five years but the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has now won an argument that was championed from the start by CIH. Back in July 2013 the housing minister wrote to CIH’s chief executive setting out plans to deter ‘illegal’ immigrants by obliging private landlords to check the passport of anyone applying for a letting. CIH immediately said that it feared the checks would affect people living legally in the UK, because landlords would very likely play safe by discriminating against anyone who couldn’t produce a UK passport. Along with JCWI, we repeated our arguments in the run up to the pilot scheme that took place in the West Midlands. We were assured in October 2014 that discrimination was ‘the most fundamental question’ to be addressed in the official evaluation of the pilot.
Continue reading “Ministers should have listened to Right to Rent criticism six years ago”
In 2018 Amnesty International produced two reports on Nicaragua, accusing the Nicaraguan government of ‘a strategy of indiscriminate repression’. The context was violent protests which broke out in April last year and ended last July. The Nicaraguan government was accused by AI of using ‘arbitrary detention’ and ‘excessive, disproportionate and unnecessary force’ in dealing with the opposition’s violence.
A new report, Dismissing the Truth, not only refutes the claims made by Amnesty International but shows that the evidence they produce is biased, incomplete and in several cases simply wrong. The report, prepared for the Alliance for Global Justice in the US and the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group in the UK, was researched and written by an independent group of people based both in Nicaragua and in the US/UK. It uses eye-witness accounts, reports from government and human rights bodies, media analysis and knowledge of the places where events highlighted by AI took place, to examine AI’s analysis and claims.
A review of a book by George Lambie.
Those who love Cuba live in fear that what seems an inevitable future change towards a more market-oriented economy will sweep away all that is good about the country – its excellent health system, the absence of extreme poverty, its schools, its largely crime-free streets and the day-to-day solidarity that Cubans show both to each other and to outsiders. Will all this be lost because Cuba succumbs to international capitalism?
‘Make America Great Again’: Trump’s slogan seems both to yearn for a time when the United States had more influence, and to call for its pre-eminence to be restored. In its own way, it asserts that the US is – or should be – different. In fact it was only Trump’s predecessor, Obama, who was the first president to talk regularly about American exceptionalism, yet to Trump it is something that is long lost and it is his job to recover it. Yet belief in the US’s exceptional nature has been a constant feature of the country’s history, whoever has been president, and continues right up to the present day.
Its starting point in the early nineteenth century was the ‘Monroe doctrine’, the assertion of the US’s pre-eminent power in the western hemisphere, replacing the old colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal. Its domestic counterpart was the US’s God-given ‘manifest destiny’, which justified settlement of the whole North American continent, regardless of the presence of the people to whom much of the land already belonged. Whereas the Monroe doctrine at first reflected a degree of respect for the then newly emerging Latin American nations, by the end of the century it only thinly disguised a new kind of imperialism which justified US intervention anywhere in the hemisphere.
An article to celebrate 30 years of the magazine Social Housing.
Social Housing magazine was a child of its time. Created in 1988 just as housing associations’ access to private finance was formalised, it was there both to report on what was happening and to provide guidance to everyone involved. It was a time of expansion. By 1990, Housing Corporation investment reached £1bn for the first time and associations built more than 20,000 new homes. Five years later their building peaked across the UK, with almost 39,000 units completed. In 1998, Chiltern District Council was a pioneer in a process which would lead to 1.3 million council dwellings transferring to associations in England using private finance, eventually accounting for half of associations’ stock in both England and Scotland.
Continue reading “UK social housing performance over the last 30 years”
A fraudulent election one year ago gave Juan Orlando Hernández a second term as president of Honduras. The protests that followed were violently repressed. By the year’s end, 126 demonstrations had been held, leaving 30 people dead, 232 injured and more than 1000 in jail. But on 22 December 2017 the US government congratulated Hernández on his success, referring with no apparent irony to ‘the close election result’ and ignoring a call by the Organisation of American States for a new ballot.
One of the worst stains on Hernández’s first term in office was the murder of Berta Cáceres in March 2016. Cáceres was a leading activist of the indigenous Lenca community and campaigner against dams and mining projects. After a ham-fisted murder investigation, seven men have been found guilty of killing her, but there’s little prospect of those who commissioned the crime being punished.
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on