Caps on council borrowing are hindering the building of much-needed affordable homes A government that is desperate to boost house building shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. That’s the argument behind the report Let’s get building, published at the end of last year by the National Federation of Arms-Length Management Organisations. But after…
Local authorities and arms length management organisations (Almos) are quietly gearing up to build about 3,000 homes a year over the next five years – their biggest sustained spell of new housebuilding since 1990 – as councils begin to use the financial freedoms they gained on 1 April after the housing revenue account was reformed.
Policy Exchange, a right-wing think-tank, is calling on councils and housing associations to sell off their most valuable housing stock. Policy Exchange has a variable record. It was an advocate of the government’s austerity programme, predicting in August 2010 that ‘if the Coalition stays the course on cutting spending’, then ‘growth through most of 2011’ should…
A review of The Housing Debate by Stuart Lowe There are plenty of books on the history of housing policy but few are as readable or as short as this one. It has other advantages, too. The author Stuart Lowe makes frequent international comparisons, asking questions like ‘why did Britain and Germany, with massive housing…
As part of the authoritarian crackdown following last week’s riots, David Cameron announced on Friday that rioters should be evicted from their council houses – even though the only thing that we know for sure about the connection between riots and where people live is that some of the disturbances happened in or near social…
Plans to evict council tenants involved in last week’s rioting are based on a number of false arguments. The government is simply looking for a headline-catching ruse to give the impression that it is responding robustly As kneejerk reactions go, David Cameron’s bid to evict rioters from council houses must count as one of the…