Housing

Under the last Labour Government, house building fell to its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s. Labour’s top-down Regional Strategies and eco-towns built nothing but resentment. Advised by Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown engineered an economic bubble that resulted in a speculative bust and the biggest budget deficit in our peacetime history. This Government is clearing up the mess left by Labour. We are working with – not against  – local communities to help build more homes, scrapping Regional Strategies and rewarding development via decentralising local government finance – from the New Homes Bonus, to the local retention of business rates to a localised Housing Revenue Account. We

Regardless of your views on social housing, you’d have to admit there are far more obvious, and natural, targets for people to choose to protest against rising rent levels in London and elsewhere. So it’s with a strong sense of irony that I find myself defending the sector against accusations that have been levelled at us during the course of the last week. As mentioned in this blog, Genesis is part of a group of housing associations known collectively as the G15. Between us we’re responsible for around a quarter of all the new homes that are being built in the capital. Yes, that’s right: social landlords are stepping up

Last weekend a group of young professionals, forced by a spiralling housing market to rent rooms in shared houses at exorbitant prices, moved into a new development in London’s Stratford East — an area booming in the wake of the 2012 Olympics. To mark their arrival, they held a housewarming party. But these youngsters had not rented their own home in Stratford. Instead, the group of housing campaigners had entered the development to hold a party in protest at the government’s failure to tackle the rising cost of rent — and role of social landlords in that failure. The development in question was an apartment block designed for private rent

From this week’s Spectator, our cartoon editor Michael Heath offers his take on George Osborne’s Help to Buy scheme. Subscribe from just £1 a week here.

Few images are more seared in the Tory consciousness than that of Margaret Thatcher handing over the keys to people who had brought their council house under ‘right to buy’. The image seemed to sum up the aspirational appeal of Thatcherism. I suspect that there’ll be a slight homage to these images when Cameron meets some of those that the government’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is helping onto the housing ladder tomorrow. Number 10 wants to show that the full scheme, which has only been running for a month, is already being used by a large number of people. The economics behind ‘Help to Buy’ might make many on the

What a combative interviewee Mike Penning made on the Today programme. The new work and pensions minister clearly felt that given the benefit cap is the most popular policy pollsters have touched in a long while (73% support the cap in principle), he could take the presenters and the Chartered Institute of Housing, which criticises the policy in a report today, to task in the most direct way possible. ‘I’m really disappointed,’ he said, adding that the work was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and scolding the BBC for even reporting it: ‘I’m really disappointed with the work that’s been done there because it’s fundamentally flawed, and actually disappointed again with the BBC’s

Now that the middle class squeeze has become my sujet du bore at the fancy north London dinner parties I attend, I was interested in Saturday’s New York Times piece about what foreign billionaires are doing to our insane property prices. One statistic really stuck out: ‘An astonishing £83 billion worth of properties were purchased in 2012 with no financing — all cash purchases. That’s $133 billion.’ Crikey. Author Michael Goldfarb argues: ‘And as for services, the minimal tax paid by those who have made property into money means that a city whose population has increased by 14 percent in the last decade can’t afford to build new schools. There

People who support removing housing benefit for young people always focus on two arguments: finance and fairness. The former concerns the amount of money the government could save by not paying out to those who haven’t paid much in yet, while the latter points out that those who have jobs must often live at home and save before they can move out, unlike housing benefit claimants. But both these arguments are wrongheaded. The main reason we should support this policy has nothing to do with any desire to economise or to equalise – it is because it stops families from being driven apart. Certainly there are times when there is no

The mega-rich are best housed behind high fences, on wooded estates patrolled by dogs; that way, they don’t have to annoy the rest of us. But I can see how irritating it must be, if you live in the crowded Ladbroke Grove area of west London, to have a neighbour like Reade Griffith, an American hedge-fund manager who has received planning permission for a vast basement extension to his house that will take many months to excavate. Fellow residents of Kensington and Chelsea, other than those wealthy enough to have similar schemes in mind, will probably think it serves him right that he has been charged an £825,000 ‘Section 106’

65 per cent of the people buying a home in London in 2012-13 paid the 3 per cent rate of Stamp Duty or more. You can pay that rate on a one or two bedroom flat in the capital now. But it would be a mistake to think that Stamp Duty is only an issue in London and its leafier suburbs. Just 200,000 of the 500,000 transactions subject to Stamp Duty in 2012-13 were in London and the South East. Family homes around the country are subject to punitive rates. Imagine you bought a house in the West Midlands for £300,000 at the start of 2007. Not a mansion but

Are the baby boomers propping up the lazy ‘jilted generation’ while driving Britain’s economic recovery? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Daily Mail columnist Melanie Philips debates The Guardian’s Shiv Malik on the latest round of generational warfare, including on whether there is any need to blame one group for the country’s economic woes. How big a factor is culture and immigration in the differing employment levels between generations? Are the younger generations simply dragging their heels, or do they genuinely face more difficult circumstances than Britain’s post-war generation? Maurice Mcleod discusses with Fraser Nelson the Chancellor’s generous offer for council tenants to purchase their properties at knock-down rates.

Is there anyone left who thinks the Government’s Help to Buy scheme is a good idea? This week’s Spectator splashes on the risks of this property bubble wheeze. Merryn Somerset Webb warns that the scheme, which underwrites mortgages, will lead to rising house prices. She argues that ‘if anyone other than the government manipulated a market to this extent, it would be illegal’: The latest is the one that worries even the king of stimulus himself, Sir Mervyn King. It’s called Help To Buy, Osborne’s latest market-distorting scheme that effectively forces the already overcommitted taxpayer to underwrite £12 billion of mortgage lending to people who haven’t got an adequate deposit

Nick Clegg is frustrated. He told callers on LBC this morning that ‘one of the most frustrating dilemmas that we have face in government is that we have thrown a barrage of initiatives at this problem to get the construction sector and house-building sector moving, it just takes longer than, I think, you or I would probably like.’ He did suggest that ‘we will, over the coming years, see a real step change, but where I share frustration with you is it takes so long to translate these new devices for getting house-building going into shovels and spades being put into the ground’. But what might be even more frustrating