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Editor’s comment


The Chancellor ignored a gift horse in the mouth!


Patrick Mooney, News Editor


T e Spring budget represented a huge missed opportunity to revitalise the building of about 90,000 homes for social rent and make a massive step towards ending the blight of homelessness in this country. T e housing charity Shelter and the National Housing Federation (NHF) had combined to sponsor and produce a well thought out and considered report. It was a terrible decision by the Chancellor to ignore the proposals and instead to focus his few housing initiatives on very little else. T e Shelter/NHF scheme would have helped at least a third of a million people, probably more, into a secure home and given them a real chance of a productive, healthy and happy life. An initial outlay of capital was required but because of the boost it would create to the construction sector and the reduced spend on health etc, the programme was shown to be cost neutral within just three years. In the time it takes a young person to complete a standard degree course, it would have paid for itself and it would have housed one third of the people on council housing waiting lists. Faced with that logic you would think a sensible Chancellor would have jumped at the chance to invest in it. In fact a


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sensible, wise and empathetic Chancellor would have aimed for an even higher number of homes to be built. It is odd that a politician who speaks so oſt en about the need for investment should choose to ignore one of the best thought out proposals he will ever see. It would have been one of the better legacies he would be involved with. Instead he chose to ignore it and sadly I don’t think he has even explained his thinking to the report’s authors. Instead we got the usual nonsense about how the benefi ts bill will be brought under control by restricting it to those really in need. Mr Hunt really should have changed his advisors as any fool knows that social rent is a lot lower than aff ordable rent, and aff ordable rent is a lot lower than market rent, and market rent is a lot lower than the rents charged to keep people in temporary accommodation like bed & breakfast hotels. What hope is there for us when politicians who are presented with such logic decide to turn their backs on it? I sincerely hope that the details of this scheme have also been sent to Rachel Reeves, as it appears inevitable she will be the next incumbent of Number 11 Downing Street. If there is a change of Government in the next few months, as is widely expected and predicted, then there is a good


chance that there will be a re-introduction of commitments to achieving net zero carbon emissions, with a range of measures to deliver improved home insulation, warmer mould free homes, green energy etc. Labour already has an ambitious programme costing approximately £28 billion, to greatly increase the energy effi ciency of the nation’s homes. For electoral reasons, it has had to put these plans on the shelf, but we can expect them to reappear aſt er the election. It is becoming ever more clear that greatly increasing the supply of and use of heat pumps will be vital if we are to reduce our use of fossil fuels for domestic heating. T us far these have not really made inroads to the social and privately rented sectors. T e cost of heat pump connected heating systems will need to come down and/or bigger subsidies will need to be paid for by taxpayers. But wouldn’t it be great if a cost neutral version of the social housing building scheme could be designed. It is diffi cult to put an exact price on the cost of global warming but we see the eff ects of it all around us from the increased rainfall to the fl ooding of homes, communities and farm land. T e big uncertainty on the legislative front, is over the Housing Reform Bill – and whether Section 21 no fault evictions


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can be outlawed in the very near future. T is was fi rst promised by the Conservative Party in 2019 and here we are some fi ve years later wondering nervously if the Government will get it over the line. It is inconceivable that Labour will not support this legislation, but even if it gets passed in the next few months there are doubts over when it will be implemented from. Housing Secretary Michael Gove has been persuaded to delay the go live date for the banning of Section 21 until some unspecifi ed date in the future, when a series of court reforms have been put in place which guarantee private landlords that they can get their rental properties back just as quickly and easily, as they can now. Now surely this is putting the interests of landlords ahead of those unfortunate tenants who can get turfed out of their home with just two months’ notice, despite not being guilty of any breaches to their tenancy agreement. T e fact that about 80 backbench MPs are also landlords and they threatened to wreck the Bill is surely just coincidental. But we also need to be realistic about the possible impact on private landlords and have incentives so they decide to keep their investment properties rather than sell them off .


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