Single Londoners face 56-year wait to buy a home
Being single adds 49 years to the time needed to save a deposit to buy a home in London compared with being in a couple, according to our latest analysis. […]
Six things renters need from the Chancellor tomorrow
Rachel Reeves has an opportunity to announce measures around tax, benefits and investment that would make renting more affordable
Beyond the bubble
I’m very pleased to be delivering the MSc Sustainable Urban Development public lecture for Oxford University and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors on 7th November.
I’ll be exploring the failure of the housing market, the threat it poses to the economy and how a secondary, cost price housing market can fix the problem.
Not only is everyone welcome but it’s also free to attend. I hoe you will come along and heckle wittily. But please do rsvp to David Howard at [email protected]
Many thanks,
Alex
Shared ownership – affordable housing for those who don’t need it?
Shared ownership is touted in some quarters as the answer to the housing crisis, but, as Harriet Meyer’s piece in yesterday’s Observer finds, existing schemes don’t seem to help anyone who needs it.
The idea is that people who can’t afford the full price of a house can buy, say, a quarter of it and rent the rest, which is typically cheaper than renting 100% and also lets them build up an asset. It was designed with “key workers” in mind – those public servants like nurses or teachers who have to spend their careers in areas that are not affordable on a modest salary.
Is Onward’s policy Right to Buy for private renters?
Right to Buy was electoral gold dust to the Conservatives back in the 1980s, but since council homes were sold off unreplaced, and the social housing sector dwindled, it has lost its lustre. With housing policy the key to winning over today’s 18 to, er, 45 year olds, it’s no wonder some in the party have taken up alchemy.
Onward, a think tank peopled by former government advisers, thinks it has the answer, which is about as close to Right to Buy for private tenants as we’re likely to get. Because the property is not the state’s to sell, it’s merely Chance to Buy.
First-time buyers taking out longer loans to escape the rental sector
The latest English Housing Survey report is out today with the highlights of their findings for 2016-17.
The private rented sector has continued to grow. The population now stands at 4.7m households, with 27% of families renting from a private landlord.
It is once again the largest tenure in London (if you separate outright and mortgaged ownership), and its doubling outside the capital in the past decade illustrates the national impact the housing crisis has had.
Autumn Budget – an anticlimax for renters
The big news in today’s Budget was the abolition of stamp duty for most first-time buyers.
From today if you buy your first home you’ll pay nothing to the government on the first £300,000 (unless it costs more than £500,000 and you need to be super-rich before you’re in that territory).
The Redfern Review: A grown-up take on the housing crisis
Earlier this year, Labour commissioned the chief executive of the country’s biggest house builder to lead a study of the decline in home ownership – the main reason politicians are worried about housing these days.
The Redfern Review has been published today. It shouldn’t be a great surprise that its conclusions don’t fit completely with our views – there’s very little comment on the needs of private renters – but it does make an important contribution to the debate, and there’s a lot we can agree on. Indeed, it takes a more objective approach than parties and industry players have done when they’ve tackled the same subject – there’s refreshingly little dogma or evidence of Taylor Wimpey’s commercial interests at play (though it plays down builders’ profit-driven reluctance to build enough homes).
Don’t be fooled: Help to Buy is still dangerous
Yesterday, the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, confirmed that the Help to Buy Mortgage Guarantee scheme would wind up at the end of the year. This was arguably the more controversial of the two Help to Buy schemes announced in the 2013 Budget, but it was originally meant to last only 3 years. And with it gone, we’re still left with a Help to Buy loan scheme that is highly counterproductive to any efforts to fix the housing crisis.
Starter homes: a £27bn raffle
The government wants to eliminate Generation Rent. I think they’re talking about the demographic group, rather than our organisation. They want to replace us with Generation Buy. How cute.
Sadly, their plans so far will do nothing to reverse the growth of renting and will exacerbate the rising level of inequality between people who own their homes and those who don’t.
The government’s flagship policy is Starter Homes. The scheme will help 200,000 private renter households into home ownership with a 20% discount on the market price of a new home. The trouble is, if you’re not in one of the lucky 200,000 – that’s 4 million – you won’t get a discount. You also won’t get to share £26.8bn of profits when you sell your starter home – read our analysis here.
