ROOF Blog

Ministers are to crack down on excessive housing benefit payments in a series of reforms designed to curb the increasing £17 billion annual rental bill. Yvette Cooper, the work and pensions secretary, plans to cap the highest rates paid to private landlords — as much as £1,800 a week — to stop families on benefit living in palatial homes at the taxpayers’ expense. The reforms are expected to save hundreds of millions of pounds a year, but could result in hundreds of families being evicted from expensive accommodation with six months’ notice. The housing benefit bill, which covers rents in the private and social sector, has jumped from £11 billion in 1998 to £17.4 billion in 2008-09 and goes to 4.5 million claimants. The Treasury has forecast that this will rise to £20 billion by 2011 because of the recession, rising private rents and a critical shortage of social housing. The average rent in social housing is only £72 a week against £108 in the private sector.

The government will struggle to build even half of its target of a million affordable homes by 2020 if the housing budget is not exempted from public spending cuts, a housing campaign group says. If the cuts to the house-building budget suggested by November’s pre-budget report go ahead, the number of affordable homes built by 2020 will be 444,000, says the National Housing Federation. The NHF is calling on Gordon Brown to make the house building budget ‘untouchable’ and give it the same status as hospitals, schooling and policing, areas the government said in November it would ringfence while it cut back spending in other areas.

The National Audit Office (NAO) has expressed concerns over the strength of the information collected on Decent Homes progress. It is estimated that over a million social homes have been improved by CLG’s Decent Homes Programme. The original target was that all social sector homes would be decent by 2010, but by November 2009, CLG was estimating that approximately 92 per cent of social housing would meet the standard by 2010, leaving 305,000 properties ‘non-decent’. 100 per cent decency would not be achieved until 2018-19.

More tenants across the country will have a greater say over where they want to live and what housing options are available to them after John Healey announced over half a million pounds of extra funding to create more choice based lettings schemes across the country and expand several others already in place. The schemes offer tenants greater mobility, choice and flexibility when looking at their housing options enabling them to move across different local authority areas, for example if they were looking to move for a job opportunity. Since the programme began in 2005 more than £6.5m has been given to councils to work with housing associations to provide increased choice and mobility for thousands of new and existing social housing tenants

There is growing evidence and emerging consensus across the political spectrum that mutual ownership solutions not only work, but also should be actively encouraged by government, according to the Commission on Mutual and Co-operative Housing. Their recent report, ‘Bringing Democracy Home’, found that residents in co-operatives are more satisfied than other social housing tenants. They are happier with key services, such as repairs, and crucially tend to feel a strong community spirit, also reflected in high levels of civic engagement in roles such as school governorship.

A £13 million manor house looking out across one of Paris’ most exclusive squares has become France’s most desirable squat. The vast 17th-century property boasts listed rooms with period painted wooden beams and panelling and a spectacular view over the Place des Vosges. It has not been lived in for more than 40 years. The squatters broke into the property to draw attention to the plight of low-paid workers unable to afford housing while countless properties are left vacant. They belong to a group called ‘Black Thursday’, created by four students appalled at the sky-high rents they were required to pay for even the smallest properties. They want more social housing, which has a waiting list of 1.2 million people, and have the support of local Green and Left-wing politicians.

Thirty years ago this month – on 20 December 2023 – the new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher published its housing bill, changing the social face of Britain with one of the most popular political promises in history: the Right to Buy.

Today the repercussions are still being felt. This year the number of council houses sold off passed the two million mark; so too did the numbers of people across Britain on waiting lists for a council house, up almost 10 per cent in a year.

Some inner-city areas would need decades to clear their backlog.

With house building all but stopped in a recession that has seen repossessions and unemployment rise, there is a crisis in Britain’s homes, and the finger of blame is pointed firmly at that ‘social revolution’ of 1979.

The government is expected to announce modest rent reductions for around two million housing association tenants, despite a survey of tenants showing that most are against a rent cut.

The associations – the main providers of social housing – fear that such cuts will lead to a sharp fall in the level of affordable house building because they will be unable to raise the necessary loans for new building.

But ministers are determined to press ahead with the first ever rents cut, despite an opinion poll by the National Housing Federation (NHF), which represents the associations, showing that almost 70 per cent of tenants do not want a reduction.

The NHF says that even a small cut will reduce their income, already well down as a result of the recession, by millions of pounds.

NHF chairman, David Orr, said: ‘Faced with such a shortfall, associations could be forced into cutting back dramatically on the key services tenants really value, such as anti-social behaviour programmes, job training schemes and education initiatives.’

Tenants living in social housing would be able to benefit from a national house-swap scheme planned by the Conservatives, Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, said today.

He told the National Housing Federation conference that the Tories wanted to make it as easy for social tenants to move as it is for people living in private housing.

Under the current arrangements, social tenants are four times less likely to move than people who rent privately.

‘If you are a social tenant, you don’t have the same opportunities as other renters or home-owners. The system means that your aspirations are squeezed, your expectations lowered, and your horizons are limited,’ Mr Shapps said.

‘Today I can announce that a future Conservative government will facilitate a nationwide affordable-house-swap programme.

‘We will introduce an open database connectivity platform to ensure that – for the first time ever – every family in social housing will have the chance to relocate by exchanging their home for another one, anywhere in the country.’

One million homes are expected to be empty in the UK this year, despite 1.8 million Britons being on the waiting list for social housing. In 2008, there were more empty properties in the north-west of England than anywhere else in the country, with 129,073 houses lying vacant, says the charity the Empty Homes Agency. It is not illegal to leave a property empty, but the government has various ways to discourage it. Where the owner ignores calls to put the property to use, a local authority can make a compulsory purchase order under Housing Act powers. This means it will buy the property at the market rate and sell it on again or convert it into social housing. At the same time, however, the law encourages the practice of leaving properties empty by offering a council tax exemption on any dwellings that are vacant for up to six months.