The words "there's no money" are becoming as emblematic of the age in London politics as "there is no alternative" were to the nation in the 1980s. Today, the G15 group of London's largest housing associations make the case that there should be much more public money for affordable housing in the capital, and that refusing it makes no sense for anyone, including the rest of the country. A new study compiled for the G15 by the LSE's Christine Whitehead (with Tony Travers) concludes that the case for investment in accordance with housing need is "overwhelming," because it would help create more housing supply across the board, more employment and a stronger labour market as well as saving public money by alleviating the social costs that poor housing extracts. The study argues that without the capital contributing as it needs to and could, the government's national pledge to create 150,000 affordable homes during this parliament cannot be honoured.
It's a good argument, but will it impress housing minister Grant Shapps - or No-Grant Shapps, as he perhaps should now be known - who recently declared that interest in the government's new "affordable rent" (sic) model had exceeded his "wildest expectations."? We should not, I think, be holding our breath. Red Brick's Tony Clement saw Shapps's colleague in work and pensions, Lord Freud, speak at the Chartered Institute of Housing conference. He writes:
We have constantly heard from Shapps et al that everyone is being ridiculous saying that the poor will be pushed out of expensive parts of London. Lord Freud took a different tack when questioned. London is a city of commuters he told us. It's highly inter-connected. You can get around easily and cheaply. A bus fare is only �1.30 and ? by the way ? he often gets the bus. The average London commute is 68 minutes. Why should people in social housing get special privileges to be able to live next to their jobs?
In making this argument he acknowledges that the government is fully aware that people will stop being able to afford to live in large parts of London. It'll be a price worth paying to get the benefit bill down and what we heard from Lord Freud was their rationalisation for why that was OK...
He told the audience that the reason for reducing people's benefit in the private rented sector is to put people in cheaper homes and keep people out of the benefits trap...What is remarkable about this argument is they are duplicating exactly this problem through the "affordable rent" model. They are raising rents in social housing to near-market levels where workless and low earning families are unlikely to ever earn enough to pay the rents without benefit....
[R]ent that people can afford from their own means supports aspiration and employment. Low rents keep people out of the benefits system and mean they keep any extra money they earn...The fact that the Tories don't recognise this is the giveaway that it's cuts and adherence to the market that drives their approach - regardless of the consequences on employment.
But what should the alternative be? The only answer in the end is supply, supply, supply. And because TNM - There's No Money - imaginative new ideas will be required to secure it. There's also a political need to move the debate about housing up the political agenda. These were big themes of Shelter's break out session on the housing crisis at the Compass conference at the Institute of Education on Saturday.
Shelter's own Roger Harding - he's its head of policy, research and public affairs - argued that as well as campaigning against the government's changes to benefits, homelessness safeguards and social housing tenancies "we need to look at what a positive vision for the future looks like in this area." He pointed out that only a minority of people are unhappy with their homes - even in London, with its continuing housing crisis, this only gets as high as 20 percent. Housing issues have become "residualised," he said, and those who dislike their dwellings tend to blame their mortgage lender, their council, other people or themselves rather than looking to failures in government policy. Moving housing up politicians' agendas meant speaking to the concerns of the (squeezed?) lower middle classes too and changing the language of debate, not least from "housing to "homes," which would fit more closely with what matters to people.
Vidhya Alakeson of the Resolution Foundation provided some support for such a shift in emphasis. Focus groups of the "low and modest earners" whose circumstances she researches now identify housing - I mean "homes" - as priority concerns. Given that mortgage lending and social housing capacity aren't likely to increase, she argued for encouraging "a new style of private rented sector," along the lines of many other European countries - one that offered more security than at present and more "features of ownership," of which allowing blu tac to be used on the walls would be just the beginning.
There was, she said, a need for "a bridge between what home ownership currently offers and what private rented sector offers," perhaps including giving tenants "an equity stake in the entire development." She was looking for more investment from private institutions - pension funds, insurance companies - and recognised that such a model would create difficult choices for local authorities. They'd need to allocate larger proportions of public land to building homes for private rent, otherwise "low-to-middle income people will be left high and dry." This approach might also encourage more house-building in general, as demanding that, say, half of new homes are for social rent can make a development unviable.
The third speaker, Jack Dromey MP, a shadow local government minister. He spoke of his largely losing battle to get housing on to Labour's 2010 electoral battleground, mentioning "colourful exchanges" with Peter Mandelson. Complimenting his fellow panelists on their work and thoughts, he argued for "a new generation of council house building," but also that intermediate affordable homes were "very important," and stressed the need to talk about "the link between housing and health, happiness, employment and so on." This was the way to put housing "at centre stage."
With a mayoral election approaching and housing moving up Londoners' list of concerns, the greatest potential to achieve this is surely in the capital. The G15/LSE study reminds us of the lunatic situation here: Londoners are more overcrowded than the rest of the country; their rents take a higher proportion of their incomes; 55,000 London children are in temporary accommodation; owner-occupation is "out of reach for the majority of younger households." The study also says:
There are no more households than dwellings in the capital as well as increasing numbers of potential households that cannot form because of the extent of housing pressure. This is a situation that has not been seen in over 40 years, when the capital was still recovering from wartime housing shortages.
There's an opportunity there for an enterprising, imaginative London politician. Will it be grasped?
Ralph Nader Saparmurat Niyazov Ehud Olmert Ron Paul Colin Powell
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