24 COMMENT
and forcing up house prices. The Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is looking at whether holiday lets should be registered, or even licenced. It has now launched a call for evidence, promised in its Tourism Recovery Strategy in June 2021, on the impact of short term lets on England but it will be some time before any actions feed through to local markets and in the meantime residents will continue to struggle in their quest for affordable housing.
POPULATION TRENDS eanwhile fi gures from the Census have revealed that the population of ngland and ales has reached . million an increase of . million on years ago but for the fi rst time ever the number of over s in the population (11.1 million) is greater than the number of under s at . million. The number of people aged over 90 has risen above half a million.
to be beset with innumerable practical diffi culties. This is after all an issue that has been looked at before and abandoned because pilot schemes and modelling by the Treasury showed it could not be made to work.
Developers and social landlords have already had to scale back their plans to build new homes due to the impact of (this is not an exhaustive list, just the main issues!) the pandemic, shortages of labour and materials, rising construction costs and epected changes in fi nancial markets and planning policies. Extending the Right to Buy to housing association tenants looks like it could only work if money is diverted away from existing budgets, in order to fund the cost of discounts on the market valuations which are necessary to tempt the tenants into taking the huge step into home ownership. (Maximum discounts available to council tenants currently exceed £100,000 depending on the property valuation and the length of their tenancy.)
Given the parlous state of public
fi nances it is etremely unliely that new money will be found for the scheme, which logically means that less money will be put towards building new affordable homes. In order to achieve a different outcome, The new Housing Secretary Greg Clark will have to come up with a previously unseen piece of fi nancial magic as well as a very large money tree.
WWW.HBDONLINE.CO.UK
ASSOCIATED PROBLEMS In its 2022 UK Housing Review, the Chartered Institute of Housing found that 40% of council-owned properties sold off under the Right to Buy ended up as homes in the private rented sector. So instead of being lived in long-term by owner-occupiers, they are bought as buy-to-let investments and rented out at rents far higher than those charged by the councils who originally owned them. As a result, the amount of housing
benefi t paid to private landlords has soared over the last decade, and is now estimated to total more than £9bn. Ipsos also found that public support for extending the Right to Buy has markedly grown in the last couple of years, but how likely is it that those who answered the pollsters’ survey questions were aware of the costs associated with it, and what could be achieved if this money was instead used for building more homes of all types and tenures?
The pressures on the housing market, particularly towards the more affordable end were further demonstrated by recent analysis produced by the BBC which found that the number of holiday lets in England has risen by 40% in the past three years. Once a phenomenon of tourist areas on the coast, the second or holiday home trend has now moved inland since the beginning of the Covid pandemic with more areas witnessing properties being bought up by ‘outsiders,’ squeezing the supply for local residents
These and other changes in the population will be pored over by statisticians, planners and politicians for years to come and will inevitably result in changes to policies at a national and local level concerning everything from housing and social care, to education and health services.
One statistic that really caught my eye was that there are 11.1 million more people living in ngland and ales than there were in 1981, when the Right to Buy (RTB) was introduced by argaret Thatcher as one of her fl agship privatisation policies.
REPLACING SOLD HOMES The CIH’s UK Housing Review of 2022 revealed that fewer than of the estimated two million council homes sold off under the RTB have been replaced, which has contributed hugely to a reduction in the availability of social homes. It is no wonder that when he opened the Institute’s annual conference, CI chief eecutive avin mart said e absolutely must build more if we are to shift the dial on this housing crisis before adding ou could say that were at a pressure cooer moment. Local government leaders have been lobbying Ministers for years asking that any houses sold must be replaced quickly, in the same local authority area and on a like for like basis. They also want to keep 100% of the receipts and to set discounts locally. e can be sure that the ousing Secretary has heard the arguments, but whether he is inclined to take action along the lines requested is another matter entirely. The public purse has recently been run dry, and the favoured political solution requires money which he may not have.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
