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Category: Housing

Working Families Risk Being Shut Out By Montague Row

Vidhya Alakeson

This post originally appeared on The Spectator

Today’s publication of the Montague Review into institutional investment in build to let addresses an important gap in our housing market. Large numbers of people, and a growing number of families, who would have bought homes in the past are now shut out of ownership for the medium to long term. Dominated by buy to let landlords, the private rented sector currently offers them variable quality and limited security at a high price. These working families represent a new form of housing need but they risk being overlooked if the Review’s recommendations get caught up in a conflict between affordable housing (or social housing as it used to be called) and the private rented sector.

‘Generation rent’ needs a helping hand

Vidhya Alakeson

This blog originally appeared on Public Finance

Yesterday’s report from the National Housing Federation predicted that by 2021 home ownership in Britain will have fallen to its lowest levels since the mid 1980s. 64 per cent of people will own a home compared to a peak of 73 percent ten years ago.

The government’s response to these predictions was half right. The minister for housing, Grant Shapps, talked about the need to build more homes. This would of course help address the chronic undersupply of housing, with the number of new homes being built at a post-war low. But it was also half wrong by continuing to focus exclusively on meeting people’s aspiration to own and ignoring the potential for the private rented sector.

Making a Rented House a Home

Vidhya Alakeson

Published today, the Resolution Foundation’s Making a Rented House a Home outlines the shocking fact that the average low to middle income household buying a home today would have taken 31 years to save for a deposit , compared to 8 years in 1983. Last week a report by the estate agents, Savills, revealed that for the first time in Britain’s post-war history, more people are becoming tenants than home owners. We are witnessing a major transformation in our housing market that will see Britain become more like Germany and Switzerland where more than half the population rent rather than own a home.

On housing, while Ed has got it wrong, Boris has the answer

Vidhya Alakeson

This blog first appeared on Left Foot Forward

In his speech on social responsibility today, Ed Miliband argued that low income working people and those doing voluntary work should be given priority for council housing.

While this might help position his leadership, it is misguided as a piece of housing policy. Shifting ordinary working families into social housing to replace more vulnerable groups does not fix a housing crisis, it simply creates a new one. Local Authorities will find themselves paying higher costs to house vulnerable families and the homeless in the private sector.

Plugging the gap in the rental market

Louisa Darian

We may be out of recession but the housing market story continues to be one of doom and gloom. House prices continue to fall, the mortgage market continues to contract. While even deposit ready first-time buyers are struggling, the situation is exponentially worse for low-to-middle earners. With just 2 per cent of mortgages available at over 90% loan-to-value and no indication that the market will recover anytime soon, many low-to-middle earners are bracing themselves for a lifetime of renting: analysis in our recent audit found that, in today’s mortgage market a low-to-middle earner buying their first home would need to save 5 per cent of their net household income for 45 years to obtain a deposit.

The question, then, is whether the private rental sector (PRS) will expand to meet this need. It did in the mid 90s and 2000s, assisted by the boom of buy-to-let landlords. But the situation we face today is different: demand for private rental is likely to increase at a faster rate than it has, with Savills and the Building and Social Housing Foundation forecasting that the PRS will grow from just 13 to 20 per cent of the stock by 2020. And faced with a constrained credit market, buy-to-let landlords are unlikely to fill the gap in the same way they have in the past.