Housing

Britain has a long and proud history of opening its doors to the vulnerable and oppressed; of welcoming workers, students and tourists from across the world. I believe that Britain is a tolerant and welcoming country. But, right now, we have a big problem with immigration data. UK migration statistics are worryingly inadequate. Between 2001 and 2011, 'official' records were off by 350,000. Without sound evidence it is difficult – if not impossible – to build a full picture of the scale and nature of inward migration to the UK. Policy suffers as a result. How can we plan for the future of schools and hospitals if we don't know how many people might need to use them?

The press love a bit of Oxbridge competition, but Oxford is embroiled in a far older and more ruthless rivalry: town vs. gown. It was in a dispute between the university and city of Oxford that Cambridge University has its foundations. In 1209, according to Roger of Wendover’s chronicle, an Oxford liberal arts scholar accidentally killed a woman. The Mayor led a group of townspeople to the killer’s house, only to find that he had fled - instead, they seized the three innocent scholars with whom he rented the house and hanged them. Fearing future tyranny and terrified of their fellow citizens, an exodus of Oxonians left the dreaming spires for a provincial backwater on the river Cam.  History repeated itself in 1355. A pub fight escalated into the two-day Battle of St.

Transport It is ruinous travelling by train these days. Have you tried it? My advice: don’t. Aside from re-nationalising the railways, the Budget could make some gesture of goodwill to the countless people whose entire earnings are being sucked up by our trains. One pal, who isn’t earning much, is commuting from Hampshire to London. It’s costing him around £450 a month – not much when you consider he probably takes home about £800 after tax. For him, I’d like National Railcards available to all those earning under £22,000. I’d also like off-peak train tickets to be fixed at 2/3rds of peak train ticket prices. Other countries have lower priced train travel - why can’t we?

Every year the Budget comes and goes, amid a flurry of live blogging and urgent blog posts at The Spectator. And almost every year, the papers are full of the minutiae which make for entertaining headlines. So this year, I say: Please, no more pasty taxes.  They just lead to days and days of stupid headlines, which might be fun (for the first hour), but simply end up detracting from the more serious announcements; or rather, the ones that will actually affect most taxpayers. Anyway, moving on. For selfish reasons, I am entirely in favour of raising the basic income tax threshold. I know that the Tories and the Lib Dems have been squabbling over who it is that we have to thank for this proposal, but either way, thank you, and please continue.

The American economy always feels better when the Super Bowl is on. Ads for trucks and beer fill the airwaves. It’s steak and cigar season for the corporate bigwigs, not a time for the calorie conscious. For a few days, they can forget about foreign labour and cratering emerging markets and wallow in the fantasy that America is still about men in faded jeans and worn baseball caps, doing practical things with their hands. Now the pigskin has been locked away until autumn, however, one can take a colder look at the behemoth. No doubt, it has been a fine few years to be rich in America. The crash of 2008 turned out to be an epic buying opportunity, and you didn’t even have to use your own money.

George Osborne's evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee was dispiriting for a number of reasons. The first was that he told the peers that the chances are that politicians will still be struggling to ensure that housing supply keeps up with demand in 10 years' time. He said: 'I imagine if we were all assembled again in 10 years' time we'd still be talking about the challenge of making sure that our housing supply kept up with housing demand and we're all legislators here and we all have a responsibility to the next generation.' listen to ‘George Osborne: Housing crisis will still be with us in 10 years' time.

Is George Osborne’s recovery a credit-driven illusion? Many of his critics says so, and ask – as this magazine did two weeks ago – why we still have emergency interest rates at a time when the economy seems to be booming. One thing we learned from the crash is that cheap debt and housing bubbles can end in disaster, and with his interventions in the mortgage markets, it looks like Osborne could be blowing a bubble now. But striking research suggesting otherwise was released today by Citi’s Michael Saunders, Coffee House’s favourite economist:- Citi’s research found that the economy's growth has happened while the private sector has been paying down its debt.

Ed Milliband appears to have woken up this week – too late – to a housing crisis. He echoes his predecessors, who promised too little, too late and failed to deliver. Their lack of ambition will continue to fail the generation who couldn’t buy before the boom. As the IFS reports that even those born in the 60s and 70s are going to be worse off than the post-war generation, it’s no wonder that those in their 20s and 30s are angry. At the launch of his housing commission this week, Mr Milliband set out five ideas to meet Labour’s headline pledge of 200,000 homes.  This is not enough and they know it.

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.

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 to do their bit to address the chronic shortage of UK housing.

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 on the open market, but built and managed by Genesis Housing Group, a social housing provider.

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 right nervous; even some Cabinet ministers are worried about it stoking another housing bubble.