Landlords are struggling to see the connection between the government’s need to respond to the crisis in Calais and the sudden announcement that it’s going to be made easier to evict ‘illegal’ immigrants from tenancies, and that landlords will face jail sentences if they don’t properly check tenants’ immigration status. As Richard Lambert of the…
Last year right to buy sales grew to over 12,300, producing nearly £1 billion in receipts. Why can’t councils keep all of this money to build new homes? When right to buy started in 1980 councils could reinvest the receipts in upkeep of their stock, but after 1990 they were forced to ‘set aside’ 75%…
The case for more investment in affordable housing is growing. Two reports launched this week looked at the arguments for a massive programme of affordable house building and both concluded that more investment would significantly reduce the welfare bill. Wednesday’s report from social housing campaign group Shout and the National Federation of Almos warns that…
There’s a strong economic argument for building more low-rent homes to address the massive shortage of housing according to a new report by Capital Economics for SHOUT (Social Housing Under Threat) and the National Federation of ALMOs. In fact there are two good arguments – that the capital investment boosts the economy and helps pay…
‘At the centre of UK immigration policy is the family unit.’ This mission statement used to appear on the Home Office website but not long ago it was abandoned, along with any pretence that concern about family life still has a role to play in deciding immigration policy. If you don’t accept that this is…
It’s a formidable task: there’s cross-party commitment to radically reducing child poverty in the next five years. Indeed, the Chancellor said in the March budget that ‘child poverty is down’. But is that true and what is needed to ensure that the number of children in poverty not only stays down but falls to 10%…
London is getting less and less like the rest of the country. Elsewhere houses prices have struggled to reach 2007 levels, but in the capital they’ve already grown by more than a fifth. The price of a one-bedroom home in London would secure a three- or even four-bedroom house almost anywhere else. Because of its…
One of the government’s preferred names for the bedroom tax is the ‘under-occupancy penalty’. Yet the penalty only applies to under-occupation in social housing, while we know that the country needs to make much better use of its limited housing stock overall. Since the bedroom tax was introduced, it’s been clear that it is causing…
John Healey MP and John Perry We face a housing and cost of housing crisis greater than at any point since the aftermath of the second world war. Britain is not building enough new homes, and the accommodation that is available is increasingly unaffordable to millions of people. It is a measure of a nation’s…