Housing

Those images from the early hours of Wednesday – fire shooting up the side of a tower block, with desperate people trapped inside it – were what I have been fearing for seven years. In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks. In their original form, tower blocks are stacks

As we ready ourselves for what has become an annual pilgrimage to the polling booths, in terms of finance there is little doubt that housing is taking centre stage in this election. This was not always the case. It’s true that if you look back to newspaper coverage of the housing crisis in the late 1940s and 1950s, post-World War Two, some of the articles could be reproduced word for word in tomorrow’s nationals. But in the 1980s and 90s, back when the structural undersupply of new homes was just getting truly entrenched, housing didn’t seem quite so important. This is one of the reasons why it is escalating back

‘It feels like 2010,’ was the verdict last week of one seasoned operator in the prime London property market. What they meant is that after a period of uncertainty and restraint, the smart money is beginning to take a longer, harder look at the top-end of the London market. In 2010, the market was coming to terms with impact from the global financial crisis. In recent years, pricing has been adjusting to higher taxation, a political by-product of the downturn designed to address wider affordability concerns. However the stamp duty increase of December 2014 for £1 million-plus properties, which had the single biggest dampening effect on demand, is nearly two

It brings a whole new meaning to ‘working from home’. New research has revealed that homeowners in one in three UK local authorities ‘earn’ more from their properties than going to work. I don’t know whether to be thrilled or depressed by this news. Although given I live north of Manchester and (not surprisingly) more than nine out of ten areas where house prices are outpacing earnings are in London, the South East, South West and the East of England, I’m veering towards the ‘crying on the inside’ option. A closer look at the data from Halifax also shows that London boroughs dominate the top ten list of locations. The biggest

Dinner table conversations these days prove that you don’t have to be an estate agent or work in the property industry to have a view on the UK housing market. Just a look at the headlines and stories on housing which appear in the media every week is further proof of the country’s interest in all things bricks and mortar. But in the media it’s more likely to be agents or industry specialists giving their view, rather than homeowners or renters in specific parts of the country. Yet the sentiment of homeowners and renters plays an important role when it comes to the housing market – not least in determining

You’ve traded in your beat-up turkey of a car. You’ve forked out on insurance, finance, the MOT, and what you think are tasteful new rims. Next thing you know, you’re being summoned to court. The tricked-out wheels were a step too far. The car-maker is suing you for messing with their product. The fluffy dice in the rear view are also a problem. If you lose in court, it’s goodbye to your gleaming saloon – dice and all. ‘Get off it mate. It’s your car. You paid for it. We don’t live in some preposterous ownership dystopia,’ I hear you say. After all, if this were true, there would be

Young people, their faces pressed against an estate agent’s window, gaze at all the lovely homes they’ll never, ever be able to buy. That’s the image the communities minister Sajid Javid conjured up while unveiling the government’s long-awaited housing white paper week. This snapshot of young housebuyers’ despair was meant to symbolise a broken housing market where, on average, house prices are nearly eight times average salaries. ‘If we don’t act now,’ the communities minister said, ‘a whole generation could be left behind’. So what did the government propose in its white paper for England, initially intended for publication late last year and then in January 2017? More importantly, will this housing finance reform

Just before Christmas, Sajid Javid performed a ritual he has observed twice a year throughout his adult life: he read the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead. To Ayn Rand fans, it’s famous: the hero declares his principles and his willingness to be imprisoned for them if need be. As a student, Javid read the passage to his now-wife, but only once — she told him she’d have nothing more to do with him if he tried it again. ‘It’s about the power of the individual,’ he says. ‘About sticking up for your beliefs, against popular opinion. Being that individual that really believes in something and goes for it.’ As Communities

If a home was built for every new initiative, speech or newspaper article about “fixing the housing crisis”, our housing stock would be in much better shape than it is as a result of the past few decades of political failure on the matter. This week, there’s another attempt – the first from Theresa May’s government.  The Prime Minister made housing one of her key social justice issues when she came into Downing Street, which means that she and her advisers have taken a very close interest in the policies in the White Paper that is due this week. Those involved in the policy are insistent that unlike so many

Away from frosty Britain, lecturing my way across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, life has been dominated more by Donald Trump than by Dickie Johnson with passengers seeking refuge in jokes about the new president. ‘Why does Donald Trump keep marrying foreign women?’ ‘Because there are some jobs Americans just won’t do.’ ‘What can Melania possibly see in him?’ ‘Five billion dollars and high cholesterol’ and ‘How does Donald Trump hope to get six million Mexicans back home?’ ‘Juan by Juan.’ Well, it’s either humour or take to drink. When I heard that the Jockey Club plans to sell off Kempton Park, home of the King George VI Steeplechase,

At some point a few years ago, after the financial crisis had passed but the economic stats still showed the effects, while wandering down the posh bit of my local high street where all the top-end furniture retailers, Italian delis and estate agents reside, I suddenly got it. I noticed that the ones carrying the White Company, Fenwicks and Russell & Bromley shopping bags were all roughly between 50 and 60. Despite the country apparently being in the doldrums, this well-dressed, insouciant and slightly aimless tribe had money to spend. All the economic indicators were telling us GDP was still pretty flat, unemployment and wages were still struggling, food bank