The bill before parliament is ideology at its purest: a full-throttle attack on social tenants everywhere

Fri Jan 8 15:13:08 GMT 2016

Rob the poor and give to the rich  housing policy for 2016

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/rob-poor-give-rich-housing-policy-2016
Aditya Chakrabortty

<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/profile/adityachakrabortty>Aditya 
Chakrabortty

The bill before parliament is ideology at its 
purest: a full-throttle attack on social tenants everywhere
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/rob-poor-give-rich-housing-policy-2016#img-1>
David Cameron lays bricks
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/rob-poor-give-rich-housing-policy-2016#img-1>
  David Camerons big solution is to invent 
starter homes, and encourage developers to 
build them. To do that he is donating public 
land, and nearly £20bn of taxpayer funds. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Tuesday 5 January 2016 07.00 GMTLast modified on 
Tuesday 5 January 201613.05 GMT

This afternoon, MPs will vote on a proposed law. 
As a bit of policy, it is as belligerently 
incoherent as a drunk at 2am. As a piece of 
politics, it will harm millions of people, while 
making one of the gravest crises facing our 
country even worse. Yet Im fairly sure this 
piece will be one of the few across the press and the BBC even to discuss it.
[]

The end of council housing

Read more

Granted, the 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/01/housing-planning-bill-disaster-affordable-homes>housing 
and planning bill can never outdo the excitement 
surrounding the ups and downs of Hilary Benn, the 
new 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Darcy>Mr 
Darcy of every wet-eyed columnist. But the UK 
housing market is a catastrophe so dire that it 
causes even Manhattanites to marvel. 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2015/sep/02/unaffordable-country-where-can-you-afford-to-buy-a-house>A 
recent Guardian interactive makes the point: any 
would-be homebuyer earning the national average 
of £26,500 will now find 91% of England and Wales 
beyond their reach. If you cant buy, you rent  
except in London, the epicentre of the madness 
where rents are so extortionate, newspapers 
compete for horror stories. Consider 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/househunter-stunned-after-room-turns-6367572>the 
£480 a month charged for a mattress in the corner 
of a communal lounge in a shed in the east end.

You dont need me to lather on facts and figures. 
Anyone trying to get a toehold in the housing 
market, or whose children are, already knows how 
badly broken it is  and grasps the implications. 
How it gouges money from those who dont own only 
to put it in the pockets of those who do. How it 
forces anyone from outside London either to 
accept that they wont be able to pursue a 
modestly paying career there  or will have to 
grind out at least a decade of expensive squalor 
to do so. And how that makes the UK both more unjust and economically weaker.

David Cameron knows all this. He even makes 
speeches about how homes in Britain are 
unaffordable to Britons. The bill in front of MPs 
is meant to free up social housing for those most 
in need and to make land and funds available for 
builders to churn out more private homes. In 
reality, it will make private homes even more 
unaffordable while cutting further the stock of 
homes available below market rent.
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/rob-poor-give-rich-housing-policy-2016#img-2>
Council flats in N18
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/rob-poor-give-rich-housing-policy-2016#img-2>
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  The amount a council is meant to net from the 
sale of a publicly owned home will be set not by 
local surveyors but by Treasury officials. 
Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Look at the axe the government is taking to 
social housing. Before the 2010 general election, 
Cameron promised to support social housing 
while his soon-to-be ministers 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/cameron-social-tenants-have-nothing-to-fear/6509618.article>pledged 
to protect social tenants rights and rents. 
Now hes phasing out secure tenancies for those 
same tenants. A couple living in a council home 
who earn a total of £30,000 a year (£40,000 
within London)  that is, just above minimum wage 
 will be moved up to market rents. The Treasury 
will also force local authorities to flog high 
value homes once a family moves out. That spells 
the end for council housing in central London  
specialists estimate that 60% of Camdens housing 
stock and 70% of Islingtons would qualify as high value.
[]

Unaffordable country: where can you afford to buy a house?

Read more

Couple it with whats already happening in the 
private rental market  where poorer families are 
being pushed out to Londons perimeter, and you 
have a charter for turning the centre of the city into a rich-only enclave.

If this sounds like the sort of post-adolescent 
fantasy that would be sketched out in some 
Westminster thinktank, thats because it is. Many 
of these policies have been lifted from the 
rightwing 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/>Policy 
Exchange. Until 2014 its former housing 
specialist, Alex Morton, churned out pamphlets 
such as Ending Expensive Social Tenancies, 
notably mainly for their flush-cheeked 
libertarianism, casual dismissal of the rights of 
those not on stellar incomes, and subheadings 
such as Most people actually support forcing 
people to move from expensive properties.

For such Rolls-Royce thinking, Morton is now paid 
somewhere between £53,000 and £69,999 of 
taxpayers money as a special adviser to the 
prime minister on housing policy  one of 
Camerons fleet of advisers 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/486829/List_of_Special_Advisers_in_post_at_17_December_2015.pdf>whose 
salaries cost the public over £9m a year.

Anyone trying to get a toehold in the housing 
market, or whose children are, already knows how badly broken it is

But what sounds good at a conference fringe 
meeting doesnt always translate into robust law, 
and the housing bill has more holes than all the 
golf courses in suburbia. Try this: the household 
income assessment of council tenants will be 
based on the previous years earnings. So a 
family could go through redundancy, divorce or 
even death and still be forced to cough up 
market rents. Or this: the amount a council is 
meant to net from the sale of a publicly owned 
home will be set not by local surveyors, but by 
Treasury officials. Or this: although the bills 
fixed-term tenancies are aimed at making social 
housing more flexible, it provides no viable 
mechanism for evicting antisocial tenants before the term is up.

These are just some of the howlers in a document 
drafted by the Department 
for<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/http://www.theguardian.com/society/communities>Communities 
and Local Government  the bit of Whitehall that 
will be almost obliterated in the spending cuts. 
As housing lawyer Giles Peaker says: I seriously 
wonder whos left in DCLG who actually understands housing law.

  The new housing and planning bill is a disaster for affordable homes

John Healey

Read more

The contradictions gape wider and wider. The 
government that plans to make more use of limited 
council housing also wants to sell council 
housing. The ministers who want to make work pay 
will also make work cost more for council 
tenants. The administration that think these 
changes are excellent for half the social-rented 
sector now wont apply them to the other half  
housing associations  on anything more than a voluntary basis.

Camerons big solution to the housing shortage is 
to invent a new category, starter homes, and 
encourage developers to build them. To do that, 
he is donating public land and  as of the last 
spending review  
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/05/https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/479749/52229_Blue_Book_PU1865_Web_Accessible.pdf>nearly 
£20bn of taxpayer funds in grants and loans.

Housing masterplan needs a rethink

Letters: Only when it becomes uneconomic to hoard 
land, and more support is given to reuse 
brownfield land, can we hope to start to 
alleviate the shortage, and bring housing within 
the reach of the average earner

Read more

Developers building homes at up to £450,000 in 
London and £250,000 in the rest of England will 
be able to claim them under the rules as 
affordable. As the housing charity Shelter 
points out, to buy a starter home in the capital 
by 2020 will require an annual income of £77,000 
and a deposit of £98,000. That makes them 
unaffordable to all but the richest third of Londoners.

This isnt a serious housing policy. It 
represents nothing less than a death blow to 
council housing in central London, and a 
full-throttle attack on tenants in social housing 
everywhere. It will hand to big developers tens 
of billions in taxpayers money  for building 
affordable housing that most Britons simply 
cannot afford. This is ideology at its purest: 
the thinnest of rhetoric draped around a naked 
transfer of money and resources from the poor to the rich.

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