If tenants don’t exercise their right to buy, where will the money go, asks John Perry. Indications that only a small proportion of housing association tenants are likely to buy their homes once the scheme is rolled out begs a number of questions. What will happen to the money raised from selling higher-value council houses,…
George Osborne, before he reinvented himself as Rambo, when he was still the ‘austerity chancellor’, committed Theresa May’s government to spending a huge sum to prop up the housing market. The combined total of grants, loans and guarantees devoted to helping developers and homebuyers is set to exceed £42 billion between now and 2020 (similar…
When the majority of councils shouldered £13 billion of extra debt in April 2012 as the price for leaving the old council housing subsidy system, they were promised a settlement ‘intended to endure for the long term’. But the settlement has been undermined by policy changes since then and for many councils it threatens to…
CIH has just published a brand new edition of the book Housing in Northern Ireland, edited by Peter Shanks and David Mullins. Here CIH policy adviser John Perry, one of the authors, gives a flavour of what the new book offers. Less than ten years ago there was a house-building boom in Northern Ireland. Completions…
“We are not talking about a ‘back of an envelope’ calculation – there is no envelope at all.” Thus spoke Meg Hillier MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), in introducing the recent report on the financing of the new Right to Buy. As a former journalist with Inside Housing, Ms Hillier knows her stuff,…
Patrick Kingsley is the Guardian’s migration correspondent, who as well as telling the story of recent migration to Europe in the newspaper has now produced an enthralling book, The New Odyssey, which is also bang up to date. Anyone who wants to know why people leave Syria, or Eritrea, or risk the crossing of the…
Forty years ago, there were five million council houses in England, lived in by three out of ten families. Since then the number has declined by two-thirds. The Housing and Planning Bill, which returns to the Commons this week, will make it even more difficult for anyone either to get a council home or to…
The government wants higher-earning council tenants to pay more rent because it’s concerned that hard-working people are “subsidising the lifestyles of those on higher than average incomes”. But have they looked carefully at whose housing is taxpayer-subsidised? And is the answer what they say it is? The UK Housing Review 2016, published this week (see…