Roof Over Your Head

For context, I have a particular professional and personal interest in housing policy. Previous missives include:

What's Wrong with Private Rental

What's Wrong with Owner Occupation

What's Wrong with Social Housing

Why I Won't to be Able to Buy a Home in the next Decade

The Coalition Don't Get it and the Coalition really don't get it.

A lot of rumours swirled around prior to the spending review about massive cuts to the housing budget. How bad was it? Worse than that.

It remains unclear exactly how much funding for affordable housing has been cut, as it's funded by a confusing patchwork of programmes. Here are the numbers provided in the spending review.

From 2008-11 the government's National Affordable Housing programme had £8.4 billion of funding, with a target of 180,000 new affordable homes a year. (As a result of the credit crunch, I'm pretty sure this target will be missed.) The CSR allocates £4.5 billion to affordable housing over the next three years, with a target of delivering up to 150,000 over the spending review period. This includes existing commitments, and is therefore effectively a four year target. Consequently, the annual target for new affordable homes has gone from 60,000 to 37,500. Of course, high targets are meaningless if you can't meet them. But despite this, CLG's token Liberal Democrat minister Andrew Stunnell is claiming that the current government will provide more affordable housing than Labour did. Given that the budget for affordable housing has been halved and the target cut by more than a third, this claim looks nothing short of delusional. It's based on increasing rents for social housing, which provides homes for the disabled, retired, and vulnerable, whilst reducing housing benefit.

Whilst Mr. Stunell is being mentioned, I should comment on what appears to be his pet project: affordable housing in abandoned farm buildings. Sounds like a bad joke? Here is the 'Homes on the Farm' press release.

Presumably this policy is based on some idea of bucolic country life, or perhaps nostalgia for the feudal system. What it would amount to is isolating those unable to afford market housing from jobs, services, and transport networks. I find it particularly absurd that the press release emphasises young people. Speaking as a genuine young person, most of us live in cities because that's where we can find jobs. Moreover, urban areas offer actual services and leisure activities, as well as not requiring utter dependence on a car. I grew up in the countryside and, frankly, after going to university in a city returning to quiet rural life isn't very attractive. I'm sure some young people do want to live where they grew up, but treating barn conversions as some sort of panacea for rural housing problems is misguided. Quite apart from the fact that this policy isn't supported by any funding or legislation, being merely an exortation to farmers and local authorities.

Once again, this demonstrates the government's failure to look in any way systematically at housing, employment and poverty. I know I say this a lot, but these issues are highly interconnected.

Two brighter notes, though. Firstly, the shadow housing minister Alison Seabeck is horrified by the hatchet taken to spending on housing. Secondly, the cuts to welfare, including housing benefit, will need to go through parliament. There is still time for MPs to wake up and smell the unfairness.