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…
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…
Right to Buy was the Thatcher government’s biggest privatisation. But with nearly two million homes already sold, can the next government at least start to replace the houses lost through future sales? The latest UK Housing Review shows that capital receipts from sales in England now total £42bn since Right to Buy began. It sounds like a…
A Whitehall-backed housing review has suggested councils could borrow from general funds if they have reached their Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap. But would such an approach make sense? When Natalie Elphicke and Keith House launched their new report on local authorities’ role in house building last week, they called on councils that have reached…
Two of the government’s highest priority policies related to housing are suffering most from spending cuts: housing welfare support and planning and development. Over the five years of this parliament, spending by local authorities on housing-related services will have fallen in real terms by a third. This doesn’t include council housing, which is now self-financing….