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Right to rent immigration checks put vulnerable people at risk
One year ago, on 1 February 2016, the government implemented its “right to rent” scheme, requiring landlords who let property in England to carry out checks on the immigration status of potential tenants, as part of a government drive to create a “hostile environment for illegal migrants”. The government plans to extend the scheme to…
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No separate queue for Cubans
‘We’re leaving,’ my Cuban friend N. told me in November. ‘We’re building a raft.’ I was shocked, partly because he planned to leave, partly because of the way he planned to do it. I consulted another friend, who’d spent several months in a coastguard team, hauling people out of the water when their rafts fell…
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What are the ingredients for successful Gyspy and Traveller sites?
As a new report highlights the importance of providing sites for the estimated 150,000 members of the Gypsy and Traveller population, John Perry explores what it takes to provide sites which work. Last month came a reminder about what was claimed five years ago to be Britain’s biggest unauthorised Traveller encampment, when the local authority…
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How can housing organisations respond to Louise Casey’s review into integration?
As Dame Louise Casey’s independent review into opportunity and integration reveals the challenges facing the UK CIH’s senior policy advisor John Perry asks how housing organisations can contribute. Louise Casey asks some uncomfortable questions about Britain’s failure to integrate newcomers to the country. She’s not the first to have done so, but has produced the latest…
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Pinning down the government’s house building figures
How many houses we need to build each year in England is the subject of much debate – but almost equally contentious are the statistics that show how many we are building. Just a month ago the Home Builders Federation claimed the government was misplacing enough houses to build a town the size of Stevenage….
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8a Victoria Street
D.H. Lawrence’s relationship with the place where he grew up, Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, was always ambivalent. Its rural surroundings were ‘the country of my heart’, but the streets of miners’ cottages where his family lived were ‘sordid and hideous’. He freely used Eastwood characters in his writing, and to many locals he was ‘that mucky…
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From rent to buy
There are signs the government may drop its focus on homeownership in response to the referendum’s economic impact and the apparent slowing down of the housing market. But is the real choice between assisting homeowners and helping tenants? Or might we get the best of both worlds? As recently as 2008, a quarter of the…
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Here’s how you can get access to all the housing data and analysis you need
For those who don’t know it, the UK Housing Review is the annual publication that charts in detail the changes in the housing market, government housing policy and investment, social housing, help with housing costs and a host of other topics. Since 1999 the Review has been published by the Chartered Institute of Housing, and…
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Tackling discrimination in housing
Given the increase in race-related hate crime before and since June’s referendum, housing organisations need to be even more alert to possible discrimination in housing than they were before. CIH has already warned about the likely effects in the private rented sector of the new ‘right to rent’ document checks that began in England in…