The council housing finance settlement is only four years old but it needs the kiss of life
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 […]
Justified criticism
“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, […]
The council housing sell-off disaster
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 […]
Whose housing is subsidised by the taxpayer?
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 […]
The wrong debate about regulation of social landlords
Reclassification of housing associations was an accident waiting to happen, but it’s wrong to let it determine what kind of regulation should apply to the sector. It’s ten years since Steve Wilcox in the UK Housing Review first warned of the possibility that housing associations could be reclassified as public bodies. At that time the […]
Who will pay for the right to buy?
In their general election manifesto, the Conservatives promised to ‘extend the Right to Buy to tenants in Housing Associations’. More than 1500 housing associations, all registered charities and some, like Peabody and Guinness, over a century old, would have to let tenants buy their houses at discounts of up to £103,000 each. The cost would […]
Right to keep
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% […]
Experts encourage more social housing investment as a way to lower welfare bill
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 […]
Five ways low wage-earners are being banished from central London
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 […]
What would a serious attempt to tackle under-occupation look like?
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 Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on