ROOF Blog

Gross mortgage lending in January fell to the lowest level in 10 years as buyers were deterred by the end of the stamp duty holiday, figures showed this week – but experts have warned that lending could decline further as banks lose government funding support. According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), gross mortgages totalled just £9.1bn in January, down 32 per cent from the £13.4bn in December. This is the lowest monthly total since February 2000, when gross lending was £7.9bn. While a seasonal fall is usual between December and January, the CML said the drop was ‘larger than average’ due to higher purchase activity in December, as borrowers rushed to take advantage of the stamp duty holiday on properties valued less than £175,000.

John Healey has extended the government’s campaign to help struggling homeowners get a grip on their finances and avoid repossession. Over 330,000 households have had help and advice with their mortgages over the past year. But with the pressure on families likely to remain high throughout 2010, starting this week the government is working with CAB to run a string of local help events in 56 repossession ‘hotspots’, so that struggling homeowners can get impartial face-to-face help and advice to keep their home. New radio and local press advertising in all 56 areas will also promote the free telephone advice line and special website to help homeowners struggling with their mortgage payments.

Applications to build houses across the UK rose in the last quarter of 2009, according to the NHBC. It said applications to build new homes between October and December 2009 rose 64 per cent from 15,879 to 26,078 compared with the same period in 2008. This was driven by the private sector, where applications surged 113 per cent, from 8,646 in the last quarter of 2008, to 18,393 in 2009. Public sector demand saw a six per cent rise, from 7,233 to 7,685. Imtiaz Farookhi, chief executive of the NHBC, said: ‘Our house building colleagues across the industry have shown cautious optimism as they reveal their predictions for 2010. Now the nation’s housebuilders need support from the government as they see their way out of this downturn and try to meet the need for new homes.’

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.

Today 96 charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises will receive over £2.27 million in Government grants to improve vital facilities they provide for their communities. The grants, worth up to £30,000 each, are part of the Capital Investment Programme delivered by Capacitybuilders. They support small scale improvements to resource centres which result in improved availability, or quality and accessibility of accommodation or shared facilities for local third sector organisations.

A new website - data.gov.uk - allows people to access 2,500 sets of official data, some of it never released before, from across Government departments. They include everything from crime rates, house prices and tidal predictions, to the numbers of people issued with antisocial behaviour orders living in people’s areas. Its creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with founding the internet 20 years ago, admitted the scale of the information available, which will eventually be searchable by postcode, will mean that social inequalities between different areas will quickly become apparent. There was a risk that some areas would seem like ‘ghettoes’ compared to others, he said, although this was not necessarily a bad thing as it would create pressure on politicians to spend money on improving the worse-off areas.

Tenants, MPs, local councillors and trade unionists from across Britain will come together on March 19 at the Defend Council Housing (DCH) national conference to defend the future of council housing and demand that politicians listen to council tenants in the run up to the general election. DCH campaigns against ‘privatisation’ and for direct investment to provide decent, affordable, secure and accountable housing. The conference will discuss proposals for the future funding of council housing and hear from local campaigns fighting to insist Government meets its commitment to bring all housing up to a decent standard with no strings attached.

Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, says a Conservative government would promote home ownership – without returning to Thatcher-era council house sell-offs. Labour, he claims, is sidelining home ownership and re-emphasising the importance of social housing. ‘Labour has given up on aspiration in their rush to shore up their core voting areas,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t disagree more with them.’

Thousands of people have begun relying on food handouts to free up money to spend on heating during the recent spell of freezing conditions. The Trussell Trust, a Christian charity that runs a network of food banks across the UK said the cold has led to an unprecedented demand for its parcels, which contain enough donated items to keep a family fed for six days. And research by Age Concern has shown that, despite government relief, one in five older people skip meals to save money for heating. The charity has urged ministers to do more to ease pressure forcing elderly people into the ‘cruel choice’ between food or warmth.

The government risks repeating the mistakes of the postwar housing boom by wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on funding ‘grotty’ new homes, say MPs. The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), which has an annual investment budget of more than £5bn, has admitted that 27 of the private-sector projects it has bailed out scored five or less out of 20 on the industry’s Building for Life benchmark, with two scoring just 1.5. Homes failed on a range of basic measures, including poor space standards and over-reliance on single-aspect dwellings; inflexibility; low sustainability standards; and poor compatibility with neighbouring properties.