The government has published the Housing and Planning Bill 2015 setting out its proposals to increase home ownership and boost levels of house building. The Bill has received its first reading, which is the first stage of the legislative process. The contents of the Bill are therefore still potentially subject to change as it completes its passage through both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

This excellent briefing from CIH summarises the main measures currently set out in the Bill:

What you need to know about the Housing and Planning Bill 2015

Inside Housing has completed a survey of 135 chief executives. It reveals the extent to which the 1% annual social housing rent cut will prompt a dramatic change in the sector. 31.9% of association chief executives said as a result of the rent cut, it is likely their organisations will stop entering new agreements for sub-market rent, with 11.1% saying it is ‘extremely likely’.

According to Inside Housing:

“The survey also revealed landlords are likely to build more homes for sale, with nearly 73% saying it is likely low-cost homeownership and market sale will make up a greater proportion of their future pipelines. This suggests landlords were already planning a shift into ownership ahead of the publication on Tuesday of the Housing and Planning Bill, which outlined measures to promote the tenure.

Gavin Smart, deputy chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, said: “Building new homes – especially those at sub-market rents – is resource-hungry and for some landlords it won’t be possible to continue current levels of development.”

David Montague, chair of the G15 group of landlords, said he expects most of the larger landlords inLondon, including his organisation L&Q, to retain an element of sub-market rent in their development plans. However, he said L&Q has concluded it can no longer rely on an assumption of housing benefitsupport, so needs to generate more cross-subsidy.

The survey shows that in addition to stopping entering new agreements, 53.1% of landlords are likely to renegotiate existing agreements to build homes for sub-market rent.

The survey also shows 72.1% of landlords are likely to cut back on non-core activity – work unrelated to housing management or development.

This suggests a likely reduction in activity such as helping people into work, health initiatives and community work. Elaine Bailey, chief executive of Hyde Group, told staff in August that Hyde will “look at reducing the range of services we provide by focusing on our statutory landlord obligations”.

John Giesen, chief executive of B3 Living, said doing community work is not “non-core” for his organisation and it will continue.

Nearly six in 10 respondents (58.9%) said they are likely to consider redundancies, 53.5% are likely to look at sharing costs, 34.9% building more market rent homes and 34.1% mergers.

The government estimates that the rent cut will be leading to a cost to housing associations of £1.6bn a year in rental income by 2020/21.

Click here for the full analysis of the survey results.

Shared ownership homes are increasingly being sold to older and richer tenants.

According to Inside Housing:

Viridian_SharedOwnership_FINAL

“A major research project has revealed the percentage of buyers aged under 30 has declined sharply in recent years, with the average income of a buyer in London rising by almost £10,000 in 10 years.

Shared owners are also giving up on ambitions to staircase up to full ownership – with less than half planning to buy additional shares in their property in the next five years.

The findings, revealed in a report commissioned by housing association Viridian, come as the government considers switching housing funds to low-cost homeownership rather than social or affordable rent.

The report, which analysed core government data and carried out in-depth interviews with 300 shared owners, found in 2003 47% of shared ownership sales were to buyers under 30, while by 2014 this had fallen to 40% – with a corresponding rise in sales to over-50s.

It said this likely reflected social factors such as increasing rates of divorce, as well as the increased lengths of time buyers had to save to afford a shared ownership property.

The report also said the average income of a buyer in London was £35,449 in 2014, compared to £26,718 in 2003.

“The higher income profile of shared ownership buyers is likely to indicate a change in the types of people moving in to shared ownership, in terms of, for example, the kinds of employment background they have,” the report said.”

The Housing and Planning Bill, published last Tuesday (13 October) includes new legislation on the sale of vacant high-value council homes – ministers have previously said that the cash generated would be used to replace both the housing association and council homes sold and also to set up a new £1 billion brownfield regeneration found.

Analysis from CIH shows that local authorities could be left with no money to replace the homes they’re forced to sell in order to fund the policy.
This is what CIH had to say: Selling off the stock – final

Meanwhile, Inside Housing have reported that the social housing regulator would be powerless under the Housing and Planning Bill to penalise housing associations who refuse to adopt the Right to Buy, according to their legal and regulation experts.

According to Inside Housing:

“The legislation in its current form allows ministers to request the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) monitors landlords’ compliance with new “homeownership criteria”, which relates to the sale of housing association properties to tenants.

This has been widely seen as an attempt through regulation to ensure landlords adopt the ‘voluntary’ Right to Buy arrangement agreed by the National Housing Federation and the government.

However, several legal experts said the bill in its current form would not allow the HCA to take any action against landlords beyond naming them.

Catherine Hand, of law firm Trowers & Hamlins, said: “That is not enforcement provision; it is name and shame provision.”

She added the legislation as it currently stands could mean associations being able to decline to adopt the Right to Buy without fear of a regulatory downgrade.

Ms Hand said: “If [the government] were going to make it enforceable through regulatory standard, they would have been specific about it.”

Charlie Proddow, a partner at Winckworth Sherwood, said he doubted whether Clause 58 of the bill – the part relating to monitoring of compliance with Right to Buy – “has real teeth”.

But he added: “If compliance is not happening on a significant level then there is a threat of [the government] saying we’ve tried to make this voluntary deal work, it hasn’t worked, we are now going to bring in legislation to make it compulsory.”

In order for the HCA to be able to downgrade the governance and viability rating of landlords for not meeting homeownership criteria, it would have to introduce new standards or amend existing standards, which would require consultation. A regulation expert told Inside Housing the wording of the bill did not suggest a standard was being planned. It does however say that the “criteria may be expressed by reference to other documents”.”

They say:

“The costs of the government’s low-carbon programme are falling disproportionately on low-income groups. People within the lowest income decile – that is, the poorest 10 per cent of households – are spending 1.7 per cent of their income on energy policies. This is six times greater than those in the highest income decile, who contribute just 0.3 per cent of their income. The greatest jump between deciles is between the lowest income decile and the second lowest, who contribute 1.1 per cent of their income, a difference of 0.6 per cent, or almost one-third less.

It is not surprising that lower-income groups spend a larger proportion of their income on energy bills, and therefore on energy levies. However, the trend is exaggerated because many low-income consumers actually pay a higher rate for their energy, because they are often excluded from the lowest available energy tariffs; because prepay meters, which add £80 to the average annual bill, are prevalent among this group; and because lower-income households are less likely to switch providers, which is a factor in not accessing lower tariffs. Because the cost of government policies are usually applied as a percentage of bills, these price differentials have a disproportionate impact on lower-income households.

As the amount of levy-funded spending for this programme increases in the coming decades, this will have a damaging impact on these groups, and attract controversy, which could threaten existing commitments to decarbonisation. In order to maintain support for the low-carbon transition, costs must be kept as low as possible and funding must be raised in a way that protects vulnerable groups.

We have presented a number of policy ideas that could reduce the burden on billpayers, and rebalance the negative impacts away from the lowest-income households. If the ideas we have outlined were to be adopted, we believe that consumers would need to contribute billions less in the 2020s. Each consumer could be offered levy relief without jeopardising climate targets, and this could be delivered in such a way that it helps to incentivise energy efficiency. Importantly, it could also recast levy-funding in a progressive manner.

We recommend six changes to the policy framework:

1. Introduce a public ownership option for new nuclear capacity: to reduce the risks involved in developing new nuclear capacity, and thus the cost of capital, and to secure some gains for the British billpayer
2. Adopt the Danish model of procurement to cut the cost of offshore wind projects: to make it more straightforward for offshore wind developers to secure suitable sites and consents
3. Lift the moratorium on onshore wind farms: to ensure cheaper onshore wind capacity is not replaced by more expensive offshore wind or other technologies
4. Replace the capacity market with a strategic reserve: to avoid compensating providers for the same kind of high-carbon generation that is simultaneously being penalised by other policies
5. Replace the current energy efficiency policy with a ‘Help to Heat’ strategy: to ensure energy-efficiency initiatives are more effectively targetted at fuel-poor households
6. Offer every consumer a green levy allowance: to help reduce the unfair burden currently placed on lower-income households, and to incentivise energy efficiency.”

“The nature of work, earning and family relationships has changed. The model of a male breadwinner and a female carer as the ‘default’ for European families is long gone. The employment rate among women – and particularly among mothers – has risen, and dual-earner couples have become more common. And while the dual-earner model often means men working full-time and women working part-time, there is also a significant proportion of women who are either the sole or main breadwinner for their family. Across Europe nearly one in three mothers in working families with dependent children are breadwinners – a figure that has risen in recent years across most European countries.

However, behind these numbers lie a great diversity of experiences that reflect increasingly dynamic family lives as well as changing economic pressures. This report explores the trends and patterns in maternal breadwinning across the continent, with a particular focus on Britain and Germany: two countries that offer interesting comparisons and contrasts in terms of demography, culture and economic make-up as well as historic and continuing contrasts in their approaches to family policy.

We here define ‘maternal breadwinners’ as mothers of dependent children who bring in 50 per cent or more of total household earnings – a definition that now applies to over 2 million women in both countries.

While maternal breadwinning has increased across most groups of mothers in both Germany and the UK, through original analysis of the data we demonstrate that it is more common among certain groups, including lower-income families, older mothers and mothers of older children, more educated mothers, and service-sector and public-sector workers.

We also ask what this rise in maternal breadwinning means for public policy. Work and family policies need to adapt in order to keep up with these changing family structures, and ensure that all families are supported to balance work and care. We therefore suggest a number of steps that the UK government could take to better achieve these ends, including:

• closing the gender pay gap by ensuring that organisations perform and publish full equal pay audits
• improving flexible working arrangements by introducing a German-style income-smoothing programme to better enable parents to respond to their family’s needs at crucial times
• ensuring greater availability of affordable, high-quality childcare by extending the current early years entitlement of 15 hours of free childcare 38 weeks to 48 weeks of the year for 2–4-year-olds who fall within the poorest 40 per cent of families
• improving options for parental leave, introducing a dedicated ‘use it or lose it’ paternity leave of at least four weeks at a sufficient replacement wage
• Improving work incentives by introducing a second earner disregard to universal credit.”

Here is an interesting report from CfPS where i have the pleasure of being an Advisory Board Member.

Greater responsibility requires greater scrutiny.

Devolution is a positive opportunity to build governance arrangements which are dynamic, flexible and really add value, rather than perpetuate old assumptions about those arrangements representing a brake on innovation.

CfPS_DEVO_WHY_RGB

This is an interesting artcicle from wales on the challenges of a diverse and free thinking board  v a skilled board

Why cant we have both?

WHQ 99 Board diary

Capital Economics was commissioned by SHOUT and the National Federation of ALMOs to evaluate the fiscal and economic impacts of additional social housing development funded in part through a larger social housing grant programme

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Here is the consumer regulatory review 2015:

• over 800 compliants
• almost 300 hundred investigated

This report is about the 6 downgrades and those cases invetgated which led to the lesser penalty of  regulatory notices to improve.

CRR_2015_full

We will cover this in more detail at Scrutiny.Net for members on 14th October