Housing

There is grim news on the housing front this morning: the National Housing Federation (NHF) reports that the housing market will descend into “crisis” unless the supply of houses is dramatically increased. It points out that only 105,000 new homes were built last year, the smallest amount since the 1920s. This is a long-term trend, as demand has consistently outstripped supply.  The NHF thinks that those facts will not change and predicts homeownership will fall to the level of the mid-1980s, when Margaret Thatcher announced that her goal was to help “more and more people to own property.” The conclusion is obvious if those are the premises: average property prices will

And what about the other sort of debt? We spend so much time harrumphing about the national debt that an important point is obscured: personal debt, the amount owed by individuals, is even higher. I wrote an article on the subject for a recent issue of The Spectator, as well as the Thunderer column (£) for last Saturday’s Times. But, really, a piece in the latest Spectator (subscribers here) by Helen Wood — the former prostitute who transacted with Wayne Rooney, as well as with a “married actor” who has slapped her with a superinjunction — puts voice to the problem in blunter fashion. “My mistake,” she writes, “was to

The ruckus over sending a high-speed railway roaring through some of Southern England’s most prized back gardens might be dominating the headlines. But another, separate row over planning is brewing. Behind closed doors, ministers are straining to develop a coherent plan to build the new houses that Britain – especially the South East needs – in a way that is politically feasible. Whitehall is wrestling with how to reform a planning system that has led to more expensive housing and offices, developments that are often ugly and cramped, and soaring costs for everyone – the government included. Housing benefit costs more than the Home Office and Ministry of Justice combined.

What is ‘poverty’? It might sound a basic question but, when we hear about x percent of people ‘living in poverty’, what does that actually mean? The policy review conducted by Frank Field last year offered a number of insights into the issues of life chances and their determinants. But it failed to address that fundamental question: what is poverty? Until we know what we are measuring, it is impossible to attempt to tackle it. Poverty continues to preoccupy us. According to the British Social Attitude Survey, the majority view is that there is “quite a lot” of poverty in Britain today, and many expect it to increase over the

The good news is that most people in Britain think that people in their local area mix pretty well  regardless of differences in race, religion and the rest of it. According to the latest Citizenship Survey from the Department for Communities and Local Government for April-September last year, about 85 percent of people think that their neighbourhood is cohesive, community-speak for the absence of overt ethnic and religious tension. But when it comes to attitudes to immigration a slightly different view emerges. About 78 percent of Brits would like to see immigration reduced; well over half, or 54 percent, want to see it reduced a lot. That’s roughly the same

There is nothing like being wise after the event. The Public Accounts Committee has turned on the private finance initiative, saying there is ‘no clear evidence’ that PFI delivers more value for money and no evidence that taxpayers have shared the profits. The committee reported: ‘There were instances where PFI may have been used where there was no evidence that it was the best procurement route. Local authorities and health trusts used PFI because there was no realistic alternative, not because it represented best value for money. The use of PFI and its alternatives should now be robustly evaluated. Looking back at PFI procurements, the government should also do more to

Grant Shapps has impressed in the housing brief, arguing that house prices rising faster than wages is not a good thing (with which Policy Exchange’s report, Making Housing Affordable, agreed). He has probably been encouraged by the fact that some recent polls have shown even a majority of owners want prices to stop rising. Perhaps having your kids live with you until they are 40 just isn’t a popular option? More so, rising house prices only benefit those who downsize (now rare) or own multiple properties; and in the wider economy it mostly discourages productive investment and encourages borrowing – hardly good things.   But while Shapps’s aim is laudable,

After a summer of sporadic announcements, IDS’ welfare reforms will be published in a white paper next week. As in 1997, when Tony Blair urged Frank Field to think the unthinkable, there is consensus on the need for radical welfare change. IDS has earned respect as a moral and pragmatic reformer, and he attracts goodwill from across the House. The Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg and Steve Webb particularly, were ‘vital’ in securing a spending concession from George Osborne, whilst Douglas Alexander has described IDS’ plans and ‘noble’ and pledges to support principle that welfare should be a safety net, not a vocation. He warms to the theme in today’s Guardian.

Most sensible taxpayers think Britain’s current housing benefit costs to be a terrific scam. In the last five years the bill has risen by 25 percent. We now pay £21billion each year, a good chunk of which flows private landlords turning a healthy profit from the state’s responsibility to the poor. We all know by now that a slew of reforms designed to cut the bill by at least £2bn will stop the indefensible abuses of taxpayers’ money like this and this. That’s why Danny Alexander, among others, claims that the coalition must be ‘brave’ on housing benefit. But cast aside the most extreme exploiters of the system and ask

Depending on who you read, the planned £400 a week cap on housing benefit is either comparable to Nazi concentration camps, death squads in Brazil, or ethnic cleansing in the Balkans Critics have ranged from the Mayor of London to the ultra Left. So it is worth taking a moment to get some perspective. Firstly, the general caps on housing benefit don’t even impact on social tenants because they pay lower, subsidised rents, (though the £26,000 cap on the total amount of benefits per household might hit them). But for housing benefit claimants in the private sector outside London, less than 1% are affected by the cap. And even in