The government’s new legislation on housing and planning will have profound implications for the future of housing in this country and should be of serious concern to everybody. Unless amended, it risks bringing about the end of social housing as we have known it since the second world war and embarking on a huge new sales programme when the financial numbers to deliver it patently don’t add up.

This article from th Guardian, written by Sir Bob kerslake shed some light on what needs to still change in later drafts of the bill, befroe it becomes law:

“During the election there was a cross party consensus on the urgent need to build more housing. Completions last year, at 125,000, were half the numbers needed to keep pace with what the country needs. In London, the situation has reached crisis proportions, with prices to buy or rent moving out of reach for ordinary Londoners.

The housing and planning bill, which receives its second reading in the House of Lords on Tuesday, was the perfect opportunity for the new government to tackle this issue head on.

While there are some welcome measures to tackle rogue landlords and speed up compulsory purchase, the overall effect of the bill will be to promote one form of tenure, home ownership at the expense of another, affordable rented housing. Desperately needed new social housing for rent seems to be being written out of the script.
Following the voluntary deal between the communities secretary Greg Clark and the National Housing Federation, housing associations will now have greater flexibility to decide which homes they offer to their tenants under right to buy. Local authorities however will still be picking up the bill for the right-to-buy discounts, forcing them to sell off their higher value properties as they become vacant in order to fund this. Shelter has calculated that this will cost them £1.2bn a year (pdf) and require the sale of some 113,000 council homes.

The government’s intent is that these sales will be replaced one for one but this will be very difficult if not impossible to achieve. High value council homes are invariably in high value areas: the very areas where land for new build is hardest to find. In places such as Camden and Westminster, this is likely to require the sale of more than half of their stock, making genuinely mixed communities a thing of the past.

Even with the forced sale of these properties, independent research commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Housing has found that the receipts generated will not come near to covering the cost of the discounts and replacement. London sales are calculated to provide more than half the funding, so this problem will be even more acute if the capital, as currently proposed, retains more of its receipts in order to deliver two new houses for every one sold. We will therefore start the new policy knowing that the sums do not add up.

To further boost home ownership the government plans to introduce starter homes that will enable first time buyers to purchase at 20% below market price. This was originally proposed as a welcome additional source of new supply on land not currently identified for housing. It will now be deemed “affordable”, although you would need an income of £77,000 in London to buy one, and largely replace social rented housing in new schemes. The communities secretary will be given extensive powers to direct local authorities to build starter homes whether or not they believe it is right for their areas.

If local authorities are big losers from the bill, then so are social tenants. There will be fewer transfer opportunities to move into bigger properties as they become vacant these are also typically the higher value properties ­and grant funding for new social rented housing will largely end in three years time. If household income exceeds £40,000 in London or £30,000 outside the capital, social tenants will be expected to pay at or near market rents providing little or no incentive to advance their career. If they are new council tenants, the local authority will be required to be give them a fixed term tenancy of between two and five years instead of a permanent one.

The message all this gives about the future of social housing couldn’t be clearer.
There are wider economic consequences of the government’s approach. To have any chance of delivering the level of housing this country needs we need to build more housing of all types ­ sale, market rent, social rent ­and get all parties ­housebuilders, developers, housing associations and local authorities ­to raise their game. A reliance solely on building for sale will leave us much more vulnerable to another market downturn, just when the economic forecasts are beginning to look less favourable.

Much of the vital detail for how this bill will work in practice will be in regulations that have still to be published, despite the bill having completed its passage through the House of Commons. To make the government’s proposals anywhere near fit for purpose, peers from all sides of the Lords are going to have their work cut out scrutinising the detail and seeking to amend and improve the bill in the weeks and months ahead.”

Did you know – You can subscribe freely to the Guardian on line newspaper and link updates to its housing pages to oyour own e mail

“England and Wales’s prison system could do better at reducing crime and rehabilitating offenders: it is currently a hugely expensive and highly inefficient arm of the public sector. As the number of prisoners continues to rise, and as the Ministry of Justice budget is faces further cuts, this is clearly unsustainable.

This paper argues that reform is needed to address the inherent flaw in our criminal justice system: that the bodies that could take action to reduce offending have neither the financial power nor the incentive to do so. This is because many of the services and agencies that could act to reduce offending are organised and controlled at the local level, whereas the budget for prison places is held by central government.

The challenge, therefore, is to ‘unfreeze’ the resources that are locked up in the prison system, and ensure that local services and agencies are enabled and incentivised to use those resources to both prevent crime and develop alternatives to custody. At the moment, incentives work in precisely the wrong direction: if a local authority invests in high-quality services that keep people out of prison, the financial benefits accrue to the Ministry of Justice (as it spends less on prisons as a result) rather than the local authority, which ends up meeting the costs of ever more people using their community services

The recent drive to devolve power and resources to groups of local authorities and city mayors could hold the answer to this problem. The government has already successfully experimented with devolving elements of the youth justice system to local authorities, as well as granting greater powers over transport, skills and health services to some of England’s major cities and counties. In this report We propose that this approach be extended to the management of low-level adult offenders, who make up the bulk of ‘churn’ within the prison system. This would involve giving city mayors or combined authorities a budget to cover the costs of these offenders, but charging them for each night that an offender from their area is held in prison. This would give local authorities resources to invest in preventative services and alternatives to custody, and give them a strong financial incentive to ensure that these investments deliver results, while also ensuring that money and responsibility for the reduction of reoffending is located where it can best be exercised.

This report presents case studies of a number of youth justice programmes in the US and England that have proven effective at reducing pressure on prisons and reoffending, drawing from them eight principles that should underpin the reform and devolution of the adult offenders budget. Bearing these principles in mind, it sets out detailed recommendations for the timings and mechanisms by which the government should pursue these reforms – which bodies should be allowed to bid for control of the custody budget, how targets should be set and oversight and accountability ensured, how funding and savings should be managed and how, in time, funding for probation services for low-level offenders should also be devolved.”

Small and medium-sized charities are a vital part of civil society in Britain today, and with an income of around £7 billion in England and Wales alone they account for one-fifth of the sector’s income.

According to a new report from IPPR:

too-small-to-fail_Feb-2015

IPPR say:

“This report, the first in our programme of research on ‘The Future of Civil Society in the North’, reviews the available evidence on the value of small and medium-sized charities (those with annual incomes of between £25,000 and £1 million), and on how recent changes to public policy have impacted upon them. It draws upon evidence published by academics, thinktanks and third-sector organisations, as well as material gathered through a wider call for evidence issued as part of this project.

Smaller charities have considerable strengths: many are rooted or embedded in their local areas, and play a key role in building and nurturing social networks. They also boost local social capital by building local capacity and developing links both within particular communities and between them and other networks and bodies, and are considered uniquely well-placed to engage directly with those who are hardest to reach.

However, despite its valuable work, successive reviews have found little evidence of a distinctive ‘offer’ from the voluntary sector as a whole, or from small charities in particular, and there is a lack of rigorous evidence to support many of the claims that are made for it. Furthermore, while smaller charities can develop their own frameworks of evidence to help attract funding, their often limited capacity makes this a challenge, and there are limits to how some aspects of their work can be usefully quantified in any case. Those that are able to produce the most reliable and comprehensive evidence base are not necessarily those that are most embedded in their communities.

Against a backdrop of rising demand and the long-term reduction in grants in favour of contracts, the income that the voluntary sector as a whole receives from government has fallen, and smaller organisations have been hit particularly hard. At the same time, the nature of public service delivery has changed significantly since 2010, with a shift towards the use of competitive commissioning models in which all types of provider compete to deliver public services. There is compelling evidence to suggest that large organisations, including some large charities, are increasingly dominating the market for public service provision, to the detriment of small and medium-sized organisations.

Given these findings, this report presents the following recommendations.

1. Small and medium-sized charities should be offered more and better support from umbrella organisations to help them evidence their impact, and develop their capacity for monitoring and evaluation.
2. Commissioning and procurement teams within local authorities, clinical commissioning groups and other public agencies should be made more accountable for delivering social value.
3. In-keeping with its commitment to prioritising diversity of scale in its general procurement agenda, the government should pledge to increase the proportion of central government spending that goes to small and medium-sized charities, as it has done already for smaller private companies. Local authorities could also benefit from setting their own similar targets for contracting with smaller organisations in both the private and voluntary sectors.
4. Those organisations that have moved or are moving away from grant-giving in favour of commissioning or more complex forms of social finance should review the impact that this has on small and medium-sized charities that might not be able or willing to engage with such forms of funding, but may still provide greater social value-for-money than those that are more adept at bidding for funding and providing formal evidence of outcome improvements.”

Employers are not prohibited from reading personal messages sent by employees

In Barbulescu v Romania, the European Court of Human Rights has held that there was no violation of an employee’s right under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to respect for private and family life, the home and correspondence), where an employee had been dismissed for using the company’s internet for personal purposes during working hours

Click here to read the full story.

I am about to give myself a good talking to! 😉

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NCVO governance round-up for February

Myles has details on; the continuing Kids Company fallout, new guidance on finance from the Charity Commission, a data protection toolkit for trustees, three useful new publications, and some upcoming events.

The last budget brought some horrid surprises on rent reductions and benefits – so what is it that the sector thinks should happen in the next budget?

This is what the CIH think:

CIH Budget 2016 submission FINAL

The government could support 420,000 new offsite manufactured homes for market rent or shared ownership in London by investing £3.1bn a year in the compulsory purchasing of land.

The report called The Homes London Needs, published by influential thinktank Policy Exchange is here for your bed time reading pleasure:

Policy-Exchange-report

The paper, written by Jamie Ratcliff, assistant director for housing at the Greater London Authority, in a ‘personal capacity’, sets out a “new way of building homes”. It suggests 21,000 homes could be built a year over 20 years, on top of the 27,000 homes a year currently being built through “conventional” methods.

Reporting in Inside Housing suggests:

“It said the compulsory purchase order (CPO) process should be changed to allow the mayor of London to purchase non-residential land at current use value for housing delivery within a defined period of time. It said it should also allow the mayor to acquire the land quickly where a business premises has been empty or the land disused for two years.

The report suggests the acquisition of land, remediation and provision of infrastructure and build of 420,000 homes would cost £126bn over 20 years.

It suggests the government or mayor of London could contribute £62bn over 20 years to a public-private joint venture backed by institutional investors. The venture would acquire land using new CPO powers and commission an offsite manufacturer to build the homes. Homes would be completed in phases, with the government’s share in the homes sold to the private equity fund in the joint venture.

The report said this would reduce the government’s eventual spend to around £15bn, or to no spend at all over 20 years depending on market conditions.”

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), expressed concerns that the government’s housing programme “does not address the new challenges low-income families face”.

it said the government should fund homes for affordable rent, rather than simply subsidising homeownership, especially in London and high-rent areas.

This follows the Spending Review in November last year, where chancellor moved subsidy for affordable homes for rent to homeownership

Inside housing say:

“The government has indicated that the £700m as yet unallocated from the [AHP] will be redirected towards homeownership products, and no further programmes for  affordable rent homes are expected.

We recommend that the [AHP] should be continued to be used to build homes for affordable rent.”

The government plans to build 200,000 Starter Homes by 2020, and may allow existing council homes to be replaced with the product, which is sold at 80% of market rates.

There is the possibility that council homes sold to fund the RTB will be replaced by products like Starter Homes, which are inaccessible to the poorest.”

It also recommended a range of measures to improve the private rented sector to accommodate those on low incomes.

It called for a £40m fund for the expansion of social lettings agencies, which would act as a socially responsible intermediary between benefit claimants and private landlords.

The report also recommended the government implement measures to cap housing benefit in supported housing at Local Housing Allowance rates, as higher rents provide a disincentive to come off benefits.

It recommended a substantial, ring-fenced budget to pay for the additional supported housing costs to ensure there was is no net-loss of funding for providers.

The move to cap housing benefit in supported housing at LHA rates has been strongly opposed in the housing sector. However, the CSJ said this should only be implemented once UC is rolled out.”

Inside Housing said:

“The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) last year ordered 47 landlords with complex financial instruments to demonstrate they had enough available security to meet calls from banks.

That move was triggered by gilts – the price of government bonds – falling to a historic low, which was surpassed on Thursday last week following turbulence on the financial markets.

Housing associations, like many businesses, swap variable interest rates on loans for fixed rates with banks under derivative deals. The terms of many of these deals mean the bank can demand additional security if long-term gilt rates fall.

The 10-year gilt fell to 1.23% on Thursday last week, as markets reacted to central banks sending interest rates negative. Last year’s fall saw the 10-year gilt reach a low of 1.35%. However, the rate had picked up again at the start of this week and had recovered to 1.88% on Tuesday

Arm’s-length management organisations (ALMOs) are asking for changes to enable them to access tenants’ income data in order to ensure correct rent-setting under Pay to Stay.

The government is planning to introduce Pay to Stay, under which tenants earning a combined income of £30,000 (or £40,000 in London) pay up to market rent. Providers need access to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) data to determine the income of their tenants as their circumstances change, so they can ensure they are charged the correct rent.

Under the Housing and Planning Bill, housing associations, councils and other public bodies will be granted access to the HMRC data, but ALMOs won’t be – how strange – but then are they not council tenants still and they are supporte din their existence by Coucils voting to reatin their ALMO.

Under the current wording of the bill non-registered providers – including most ALMOs – would instead have to request the data through a council, which could slow the process of rent-setting.

The bill states HMRC may disclose information “for the purposes of enabling a private registered provider of social housing to apply any relevant policy about levels of rent for high-income social tenants”.

It lists registered providers, the secretary of state and public bodies as bodies the data can be disclosed to but ALMOs are not mentioned.

Pay to Stay is compulsory for council tenants and voluntary for HAs following a government u-turn in December.