Recently at my surgery I met a distressed young woman who came to see me with her mother. Repairs are outstanding on their rented property. The landlord is refusing to sort them out while at the same time putting pressure on them to leave their flat. She didn’t know where to go or what to do.
This is a familiar story and it is no exaggeration to say that we have a national emergency in housing. There are vast numbers of people living in fear and uncertainty and in 2016 that is simply unacceptable.
We clearly have a rental sector which is broken. Many people are spending over half their disposable income on rent and yet a third of homes fail to meet the Government’s decent homes standard, with over 60% of renters having experienced either damp, mould, leaking roofs or windows, electrical hazards, animal infestation or gas leaks, according to a recent survey commissioned by Shelter.
This week the Housing Bill has continued in its long worn out path through the Lords. The Liberal Democrats have been battling to make changes to a Bill which will currently only worsen the housing crisis, reducing the availability of housing and moving the first rung of the housing ladder even further out of reach.
Across the past fortnight, facing the threat of multiple humiliating defeats at the hands of opposing peers, the Government have been forced to back pedal on a number of measures. This week they made a significant concession on protections for tenants at the hands of rogue letting agents. An amendment with my name on it had been put forward which ensured that money belonging to tenants for use as holding fees, deposits, rent, or service charges by letting agents, was protected.
In January, the Prime Minister announced in The Sunday Timesthat he wanted to see 100 of Britain’s most run-down estates transformed. His ambition is apparently ‘nothing short of social turnaround…with massive estate regeneration, tenants protected and land unlocked for new housing all over Britain.’
‘Together,’ he said, ‘we can tear down anything that stands in our way.’ What fighting talk! Yet what stands in the way is usually the fact that people actually live on these estates. Several generations of the same family may have done so. People cannot and should not just be swept aside in these waves of prime ministerial purple prose.
The housing crisis is going from bad to worse in many parts of the country. Action is desperately needed to make housing more affordable for people. We need to ensure we have enough homes in the right places, and that homes are sustainable and decent quality for people to live in.
I am leading a large team of Lib Dem peers who are fighting hard to amend the Housing and Planning Bill. We have serious concerns that the Bill will make things worse for people in need of affordable housing, will lead to an increase in homelessness, and will drive up the housing benefit bill.
It’s never easy doing politics in the Local Government Association. Some commentators carelessly say that it is ‘Conservative-controlled’ because the Chairman, elected under carefully balanced internal horse-trading rules, is at the moment a Conservative.
But in reality it is a perpetual coalition, with each of the four political groups having a veto on the association’s public stance. This applies to any issue and to any press release.
So it is good to see that the LGA has now published a statement on the Housing and Planning Bill, even if the …
We have planning permission for around 8000 units granted and unstarted in Sheffield, and numerous brownfield sites which are considered unviable for development. The authority is in danger of not meeting its housing land supply, and a green belt review is looming. This is a northern perspective, and I daresay the issues are different in the south.
Now a common feature of the planning system as it operates in practice seems to be the negotiation between planners and developers to add conditions and extract gains from developments to serve public interest goals, such as:
I made it clear over the summer and in my conference speech that housing and homelessness would be a top priority for me as leader. I said we would oppose the Right to Buy extension to Housing Associations and fight the Government tooth and nail in the Lords.
The fight is now well underway. I have been speaking in Parliament and will continue to lead our campaign in the House of Commons. After Christmas the legislation will be debated in the Lords, where our Lib Dem team will aim to cause the Government serious problems – which they have shown us in the last few weeks that they can do!
Peter Thornton is the Liberal Democrat leader of South Lakeland Council. Their area includes Tim Farron’s Westmorland and Lonsdale constituency. Housing has long been one of the priorities of the Liberal Democrat administration. Peter writes for the Huffington Post comparing the current Conservative thinking on housing to that of their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s. Harold Macmillan built his family home, he said, on the instructions of Winston Churchill:
This was a generation who knew that setting targets and making speeches was not enough to make things happen. Production, supply lines, labour forces, these were also needed to win wars and also to build the homes that we needed.
Macmillan made sure brickworks were at full production, he organised supplies of softwood from abroad and he divided the country into ten regions, each with it’s own targets. He realised that public housing, Council Houses as we all knew them, was the most efficient way to build homes quickly for the people who needed them.
Nick Clegg has a new regular Evening Standard column and in the latest edition, he talks about housing.
After a look at the history and importance of housing associations, Nick writes about how he and Danny Alexander secured assurances that housing associations would receive support to continue building more houses for rent. These assurances have now been trashed now the Tories have a majority:
Five years ago I dissuaded the Conservatives in Coalition from fiddling with social rents to cut the housing benefit bill because it would have had a disastrous effect on the ability of housing associations to raise the money
Ten Liberal Democrat council leaders, including the party’s local government spokesperson Watford Mayor Dorothy Thornhill, have written to the Guardian to call for the government to allow councils to borrow money to build council houses to deal with the “national emergency” in housing provision:
As Liberal Democrat council leaders we are outraged at the government’s short-sightedness in selling off council homes to pay for the right-to-buy extension to housing associations (PM warns councils over housing provision, 12 October). We have a vast shortage of affordable homes, which constitutes nothing short of a national emergency, and yet the government is seeking to make quick financial gains by disposing of properties that could provide much-needed homes for generations. Forcing right to buy on housing associations was the wrong policy before the election and it remains the wrong policy now. Shifting homes from one tenure to another without addressing our failure to build enough homes overall is like rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship.
Tim Farron has put David Cameron’s new housing policy under the microscope and found it wanting. We should take notice of what he says because he knows a lot about housing, the issue that brought him into politics and has made his number one priority. Writing in the New Statesman, he says:
This is still an economically illiterate and socially divisive policy with devastating consequences, which was flung into the Conservative election campaign in a last minute attempt to grab some votes by invoking memories of Thatcher.
Firstly, selling off housing association homes does nothing to address the national emergency in housing. The huge shortage
The Liberal Democrats need a better housing policy. The proposed policy on building many more houses that was (rightly) debated at Conference is not sufficient. The other policies in the Liberal Democrat manifesto had weaknesses.
The housing situation today is the cause of some of the biggest problems we have in delivering on fundamental Liberal Democrat principles of ‘the freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals’ and on the ‘just distribution of economic rewards’ – let alone getting ‘value for money’ for the state. Jeremy Corbyn has identified affordable housing as his first priority in his early statements and PMQ’s. However the housing situation is not just unsatisfactory for the far left and the poor: it is unsatisfactory for all (except maybe for the rich and the private landlords). We in the Liberal Democrats should be leading the search for agreed centre left policies to do something about it.
By Paul Walter
| Wed 23rd September 2015 - 10:00 am
The right for everyone to have a decent home is emerging as one of the big themes of Tim Farron’s leadership. It is the subject of his first Party Political Broadcast as leader, which you can view below. As well as packing a punch in terms of the theme, it is also a well presented broadcast. Tim is relaxed and seems normal.
I was delighted to see Tim Farron taking on housing as a personal campaigning priority. In order to do this effectively, though, he will sooner or later need to take on a culture of expedient NIMBYism in his own party.
Local campaigns against new development are often highly effective in garnering media attention and engaging people who might join or support the party. At times, they are also the right thing to do for an area. At other times, however, they can be opportunistic and exaggerated: in a recent example I came across, a local party deliberately misinterpreted a proposal in a non-party, think-tank style report on the housing crisis for a concrete, Conservative plan to pave over a large swathe of the district. Local campaigns which proudly ‘see off’ developers may leave a legacy of usable sites remaining derelict for years, and seek to spin this as some sort of victory over vested interests, when in fact it is anything but.
Cllr Jayne McCoy chairs the London Borough of Sutton’s Housing, Economy and Business Committee. She has written for the Local Government Association’s First magazine about how Sutton Council have set up a development company to build the right sorts of houses at the prices key workers can afford:
In Sutton we have seen numerous private developments of one bedroom flats, however what we need are two and three bedroom family homes. We also see both the private for sale and private rented sector out of the price range of most of our residents.
In response we have sought to take control and lead the delivery of housing ourselves by setting up a council-owned development company. This will allow us to take advantage of preferential borrowing rates to invest in the housing market across all tenures.
The development company gives the council the flexibility to build homes for private ownership, private rent or to build council houses in the traditional sense. The company will also seek to unlock sites where development has stalled.
It’s not only the Tory crackdown on tax credits for families that will hit the working poor: it’s the Conservatives’ multiple mistakes on social housing that will do the most damage to our society. The problem is, these are less well-understood. Yet added together, they are set to cause a social housing sector crash almost comparable to the banking crash.
This is probably unintended – not least because there’s not one single policy that’s driving this. It’s the combination of a series of separate decisions that are coming together to fatally undermine the finances of many social housing providers, especially housing associations. More cuts in tax credits and benefits of course cause problems to the social housing sector by themselves – because they are certain to lead to greater rent arrears. But it’s only when you add in other changes, like the way benefits will be paid in the future, imposed cuts to housing association rents and the ideologically driven extension of the Right to Buy to Housing Associations, that the full disaster facing us becomes clearer.
Conservatives claim that extending the so-called ‘Right to Buy’ policy to housing association tenants will give the possibility of home ownership to 1.3 million families.
But at what cost? And is this the right policy priority, given our housing crisis?
What isn’t explicit in the name of this policy (‘right to buy’) is that it involves selling off homes at a very large discount to their market value – over £100,000 per home. This amounts to a huge give-away of public assets to the new owner-occupier of the homes in question – who are likely to be amongst the better-off housing association tenants and already benefitting from a secure affordable home. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has estimated that the total cost of the policy is likely to be of the order of £11.6 billion over the next five years. As Boris Johnson correctly warned on the 25th March, the policy “would involve massive subsidies.” His scepticism of the policy has subsequently been revised, but he was of course spot on.
Eastleigh Council leader Keith House has written on the party website about the potential of the new Housing Finance Institute to ensure that we build the houses we need to tackle the housing crisis we face in this country:
The aims of the HFI are to increase housing supply across all tenures; to unlock opportunities for the public sector and to help business to deliver and finance housing.
The HFI was a key recommendation of the Government-commissioned Elphicke-House Report 2015. Over the course of a year-long review, Natalie Elphicke and I listened to more than 400 organisations from across the nation. The organisations came from all parts of the housing and finance industries as well as local and national government. They made the case for a new approach that would bring everyone together. The idea for the HFI was born and made a key recommendation of our report. Councils can do more, working with housing associations and developers, with private and public finance. My own Council, Eastleigh, is building homes for affordable and private rent, and homes for sale.
Housing is Londoners’ top priority according to the polls. Not surprising – with problems ranging from the cost, to shortage and too often to the quality too.
Yet the Conservatives’ lead housing policy – to extend the right to buy to housing association tenants – will solve none of these London housing problems: we should make attacking it a Lib Dem campaign priority for next year’s GLA elections.
Last month, 2,300 people descended on Westminster for the Homes for Britain rally calling for all political parties to end the housing crisis in a generation, and publish a plan within a year of office setting out how they would do this. It was an inspirational moment, and one of the biggest campaign rallies I have ever seen. Many people from took part in the relay leading up to it – walking, running, cycling from all over the country. There was even a bus, Betsy, who journeyed up from Land’s End, visiting towns and cities along the way taking the message about the housing crisis to the people.
So why is it so important? Well we are in the midst of a terrible crisis. For over 30 years no Government of any political party has built anywhere near enough homes. We need 245,000 homes a year now, yet we only built around half that figure last year. As a result for young people in many parts of the country owning a home is something they can only dream of. There are still 1.6 million families on waiting lists for affordable housing. And we lack suitable housing options for older people despite the massive demographic changes coming our way. Of course this crisis looks different in different housing markets, for example in some parts of the country the challenge is about regenerating communities and replacing decrepit homes, but one thing is clear – our housing system is dysfunctional and fails almost everyone.
A Conservative housing policy is likely to exacerbate London’s housing crisis because it proposes to sell more social housing.
If we can sell homes at a discount of 70 – 80% of the ‘market value’, then what does that say about the market? Simply put: London’s housing market is over priced – most likely by similar amounts.
At the University College of London’s seminar: “How Should we Respond to Rising Inequality” last month, political economist Will Hutton, David Goodhart and Sir John Gieve discussed reasons behind rising housing costs.
They talked about the impact of unmanaged markets, lack of supply, cartels in house building, land values underpinned by dysfunctional finance markets etc and unmanaged banking and finance systems. This is compounded by a lack of political will and vision. Essentially, our government lacks the ability to ensure low costs housing remains in an ‘open market economy’. If these opposing forces can come together and agree, it is time housing policies do too.
Yesterday, we moved forward in protecting vulnerable tenants by protecting them from the questionable practice of retaliatory evictions. This is the culmination of a process started by Sarah Teather MP on 28th November when she secured a private Members Bill on Tenancies (Reform) to deal with the problems caused by Retaliatory Evictions. Sadly there were members in the Commons that day who were themselves landlords, did not share the ethos of the Bill and talked it out of time. So it was a great privilege for Lib Dems in the Lords to be able to support the essence of Sarah’s Bill in the amendment we debated yesterday. Sarah Teather deserves a lot of credit for her efforts to end this pointless suffering. And for the work she did in the commons to stand up to right wing Tories all too willing to see this continue.
The amendment is not about penalising conscientious landlords, nor is it about protecting bad tenants who do not respect the property they are renting. It is about protecting the rights of both groups and giving security to tenants, who when reporting a fault which affects their ability to live happily in their home, will not dread an eviction notice landing on the doormat as a result. It gives a clear signal to those landlords who currently ignore the state of their properties, that this is no longer acceptable. If such landlords engage in a regular programme of maintenance, they are likely to have a much better relationship with their tenants, reduce the incidence of costly tenancy turnover and be less likely to face expensive repair bills for major incidents, such as collapsed ceilings due to persistent leaks.
It is probably (I am sticking my neck out here) the belief of most councillors that the power to build council houses was abolished by Margaret Thatcher. This, coupled with right to buy, has led to a crisis in social housing which governments fail to tackle and councils can’t.
But a report commissioned by the Government as part of the Autumn Statement in 2013 has challenged local councils to have more confidence in what they can already do.
The Elphicke-House Report (pdf) published earlier this week, following a review by Natalie Elphicke, chair of Million Homes, Million Lives, and Keith House, Leader of Eastleigh Borough Council, contains 30 recommendations to both Government and Councils.
The introduction of the Benefit Cap and Housing Benefit changes is adding fuel to the gentrification of our urban centers, throwing out many small businesses that can just afford the London Living Wage, and pushing micro urban economies into a transition that will inevitably see the marginalized and low income workers evicted from London’s salubrious centre zones.
Local Authorities (LAs) are already reconfiguring their homeless departments which, if pursued to their natural conclusion, will see changes in their service delivery because officers will have to eventually move out with their service users – starting the same homeless process all over again in the outer areas.
Sarah Teather has been writing for the Guardian about the problems created by so-called revenge eviction and how her Private Members’ Bill will tackle it. First she gave an example of what had happened to her constituent:
Last month, a constituent came to my office in Brent for help after his landlord served him with an eviction notice. His property suffered from severe cold and a cockroach infestation, and following an environmental health inspection the council served notice on the landlord to fix the property. The landlord decided to evict my constituent and re-let the flat instead.
Sarah Teather was one of the five Liberal Democrat MPs who won a spot in the annual ballot (actually a big raffle) for Private Members’ Bills. John Hemming is tackling secrecy in the family courts, Andrew George the Bedroom Tax, Martin Horwood is trying to stop parking on pavements while Mike Moore wants to enshrine the 0.7% aid target into law.
Sarah’s bill is to stop your landlord chucking you out in the street if you complain about poor conditions. So called revenge evictions cause huge problems. She’s written a blog for Shelter explaining what her bill would do and why it is necessary:
In case you weren’t able to make it to Glasgow, here’s some good news from Conference. The hard work that many people in the party have done on housing is being recognised. Jules Birch, housing blogger, sums up our party’s policies on housing: ‘As so often before the Lib Dems look like going into the next election with the best housing policies.’
This is not an easy feat. Housing is a complex issue which spreads its effects throughout society. It runs all the way from the individual tragedies of homelessness, to structure of our economy and the psychology of homeownership. To sort out housing you need action on at least four fronts: land, finance, the home building industry and political leadership. So bringing in my own motion on housing, it was a real privilege to build on the work that the party has already done to address the whole spectrum of issues affected by poor housing policy. I want to thank everybody who contributed to our policy development, spoke in the debate and voted for it.
This Monday in Glasgow, Lib Dem conference will debate motion F21 “Building the Affordable Homes We Need”. The Liberal Democrats have a fantastic opportunity to tackle the greatest social challenge of my generation, the housing crisis.
The economic and social cost of this crisis is huge. England needs around 245,000 new homes a year just to meet demand. Yet we are building half the homes we need. The latest figures show that the average income needed to buy a home is £36,500, higher than the incomes of more than half of the households in the country.
Add to that the largest baby boom since the 1960s, between 2001 and 2012, and we can see that this is a crisis that threatens to engulf the hopes and dreams of a generation, many of whom will never be able to afford a home they can truly call their own. But, for me, this crisis has always been about more than numbers.
As the ‘housing crisis’ debates continue and all political parties table motions to attract voters for the 2015 elections, we in Hackney Downs feel it’s time to raise our campaign which is in support of social housing in London.
Our bold online petition is calling for London Local Authorities and Chief Executives to publicly declare their non-attendance and to actively refrain from selling our public land for housing at the property fair in October 2014 and thereafter. The host boroughs have already done so and it is time the remaining boroughs follow.
Today there are more affordable products than ever. Not only have freer markets driven down prices on almost every consumer good imaginable they have expanded range. You can get more luxury goods than ever before but you can also get more discount/budget goods. Electronics, clothing, food, beauty products, household items, I could go on… And yet we are experiencing a so-called ‘Cost of Living Crisis.’ This is a fundamentally dishonest way of framing the debate about cost of living today. There is no ‘cost of food crisis,’ no ‘cost of washing machines crisis,’ and no ‘cost of clothes’ crisis. The only thing that is more expensive is housing.
Housing outside London is 35% more expensive than its equivalent in wider Europe according to a new study, ‘The impact of the supply constraints on house prices in England,’ set to be published in the Economic Journal. This is certainly not due to a lack of enfranchisement. Like everything else credit and mortgages are cheaper than they have ever been due to interest rates being kept artificially low. So what’s the problem? According to this paper, houses are too expensive because the supply has been needlessly cauterized. The UK has suffered from dysfunctional housing policies since the aftermath of WWII. However, the seeds of this dysfunction were sown even earlier. The Town & Country Planning Act 1947 deepened this dysfunction and houses are meaner in size and shorter in supply than they ought to be directly because of this legislation and its subsequent incarnations. The supply issue was subsequently worsened most notably under Thatcher and Blair.
Nigel Jones @Mick Taylor, I agree we must be concerned about income inequality in current circumstances, though overcoming this is about taxing the rich, better public serv...
Nigel Jones @Mick Taylor, you are right to focus on strategy since we have plenty of policy, but i think we also need a vision and better messaging. It is easy to have stro...
Nigel Jones The New Deal graphic is very helpful but of course not perfect. As to preventing Reform from winning, we need to be an anti-establishment party as Chris Bowers ...
Nigel Jones It is certainly true that community politics is insufficient for long term gain. That was my experience in 13 yrs as a councillor and still active locally; at o...
Katharine Pindar Splendid stuff, well done Yorkists! 'The New Deal' seems a great idea in itself. Your graphic shows, however, how much work will need to be done to assert ourse...
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Raising a flap about letterboxes
Arriving at one of East Finchley's ghost platforms
Restrained
Chase Park fair photos
A swamp of lies and disinformation
Nigel Jones 
Katharine Pindar 