Since its launch, the SHOUT campaign for social housing, in association with the National Federation of ALMOs, have been working to demonstrate that there are long term economic benefits of investing for the future through building homes at social rents.

This research has been conducted, and now completed by the leading independent macroeconomic research company, Capital Economics. The SHOUT campaign is very happy to announce that the research will be presented at a launch event on the 17^th of June.

Location: The Abbey Centre
Parker Morris Hall
34 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU

The event will run from 3pm until 5pm on Wednesday June 17^th and will include a presentation of the report, contributions from an expert panel, and an opportunity for questions and discussion from the floor.

Please get in touch if you would like to come along – either via email [email protected] or Twitter @4socialhousing

(This article by Colin Wiles first appeared in Inside Housing)

I’ll tell you what #ukhousing needs. It needs a dedicated team of people with high-powered binoculars who can scan the horizon for danger.

Looking back, did any one seriously anticipate RTB2, affordable rents, the bedroom tax? It’s not good enough that these proposals take us by surprise: we should have sound counter arguments in place the minute they appear, or better still head them off at the pass so they don’t see the light of day.

Being caught by surprise suggests a profession that is not in control of its own destiny.

Except the high-powered binoculars don’t need to look forwards they need to look backwards, because all the evidence about what could happen in the future can be found in past reports from right-leaning think tanks and buried in sites like Conservative Home.

Almost two years ago I wrote a blog about a walk from King’s Cross to the NHF office in Red Lion Square, describing how 50 percent of the homes en-route were valuable social housing properties that had helped to create lively and mixed neighbourhoods. This was written in response to a Policy Exchange report proposing that such homes should be sold off in order to fund new ones in poorer areas. Now, with a few variations on the theme, it is about to appear in a new Housing Bill as a way of funding Right to Buy 2. Virtually every property on my walk would be sold off as soon as it becomes empty under these proposals.

Policy Exchange is one of the most influential of the right-leaning think tanks. Some of their ideas such as brownfield regeneration and office to residential are already in the pipeline. Going back through some of their past reports, here, in no particular order, are a few more housing and planning policies that could be coming over the horizon in the next year or so. I have linked to the relevant report in each case.

1. Further cuts in affordable housing investment and a continuing emphasis upon home ownership. Cuts are not explicit in PE reports, but their whole tenor is that social housing is part of the problem and creates dependency. “Why Social Housing is Failing” is a typical chapter heading. What’s more, the fact that so many housing providers are going down a more commercial route, and becoming less reliant upon grant, would suggest that this trend is set to continue. The example of L & Q is case in point. The arguments about the rising housing benefit bill appear to have little impact.

2. More support and funding for self builders. A Right to Build, in areas where councils fail to meet their housing targets with land sold in an auction process.

3. An emphasis upon building bungalows in order to encourage downsizing.

4. Pressure to demolish “monolithic” high-rise social housing estates and replace them with lower rise, but higher density mixed communities. This was set out in a joint report with Create Streets, but has also been pushed by Lord Adonis and the IPPR.

5. Encouragement of garden villages, as well as garden cities and new towns. “Over one million new homes could be built over the next decade if each of the 353 councils in England built just one garden village of 3,000 new houses”. Each local authority would be encouraged to set up a development corporation to plan for a new village within their area. In return, if targets were met, other developments opposed by local people would not be allowed to go to appeal.

6. “Freedom” for housing associations. An idea floated just last year in a report by Chris Walker that was sponsored by Genesis. Apparently, housing associations are being stifled by red tape and setting them free from most regulation, so that they set their own rents and choose their own tenants, would allow them to build 100,000 homes a year. I’m going to be debating this proposal at Manchester with Chris if you can make it. I wrote about it here.

7. A boost to house building to 300,000 homes a year in order to bring down house prices and rents by promoting garden cities and self build. This would be achieved by buying land at 150% of its existing use value and using land value uplifts to fund development. (This is something I would strongly support, obviously).

8. A watering down of housing targets for local planning authorities and a greater emphasis upon neighbourhood plans and localism. How this can be reconciled with the last item is not clear! The Big Society might make a comeback too.

So those are my predictions for the next 12 months. Whether they will all materialise we shall see, but let’s not forget that Alex Morton, who wrote many of these reports, is now an advisor on housing and planning in Number Ten. Whatever is coming over the horizon the challenges will be immense and there will need to be some serious soul searching and thought about the best way to respond.

Today’s election hot topic is the Conservatives' proposal to extend right to buy to housing association tenants.

SHOUT was set up because we believed that someone needed to make the particular case for building more homes for social rent. That’s not because we think social rent is the only tenure which matters. We said in our Manifesto last year:

“Our vision is of a country that is at ease with its housing self, where each of the three main tenures stands on an equal footing and no tenure is seen as inferior or superior to others. Our vision is a country where the three main tenures are the tenure of choice for those who live in them.”

Our Manifesto also recognised that Right to Buy in the council sector has become an established part of the landscape, and is supported, in principle, by many people who share our core beliefs in the importance of social housing and the need to build more. The problem is less Right to Buy itself, than that, since its inception, governments of all parties have failed to ensure that homes sold are replaced by new social homes. Since 1980, just 18 new council homes have been built for every 100 sold. When the current Government made Right to Buy discounts more generous, it made an explicit promise that all homes sold would be replaced. In fact, the replacement rate has dropped, to less than 14 per 100, because of the way the value of a sold property is shared between the buyer, the Treasury and the former council owner. At best, this shows that good intentions about replacement are very difficult to put into practice.

Lots of other people commenting today about how Right to Buy might work for housing associations are making strong points, including critical differences between housing associations and councils – that the former are private sector organisations, often charities, and that most of the cost of building housing association properties does not come from state grants or borrowing, but lending from the private sector or from the reserves they have accumulated. Housing associations aim to ‘operate commercially, but with a social purpose.’ Part of that commercial business model is based on having sound business plans, based on certainty about their assets, in which their bank lenders, as well as they, have an interest. That all starts to go wrong if they end up having to sell properties, not knowing in advance which ones or when.

We’re confining ourselves to two points, one of principle, and one of practice.

First, the main reason why most people who don’t currently own a property, but would like to do so, can’t buy, is that property is too expensive, not that they are renting a property which they are not permitted to buy. They can’t afford to buy, have no choice but to rent in the private sector, but the rents are so high that they can’t afford to save for a deposit. Doubtless some housing association tenants too would like to become home owners. They have every right to do so. But, compared with private renters on similar incomes, they have a better chance of buying a property, since their lower rents should enable them to save more. Many housing associations also offer homes for outright and shared ownership. Gentoo have recently launched their Genie scheme, as another way of helping people become home owners.

Second, it doesn’t seem to us the sums add up. The proposal involves requiring all councils which still own housing to sell properties which are towards the top end of values (in all tenures) in their area. The Conservatives say selling 15,000 council homes a year in this way would yield £4.5bn, which would pay for three things – replacing the council homes sold, replacing housing association Right to Buys, and a fund to help get housing build on brownfield sites. Really? This assumes average sale proceeds of £300,000 per property. Only in London, according to the Halifax, is the average home (of all kinds) worth more than £300,000. In the north, where the average value is around £130,000, how many council properties are there likely to be which would come anywhere near £300,000 in value? In any case, many councils have, over the years, been quietly selling such properties as they have which are unusually valuable, precisely so they can build more social homes elsewhere, as this example from Southwark illustrates.

If you are not a housing geek, it is also easy to miss a crucial point about the replacement proposals, which is that the social rent homes sold by housing associations (to tenants) and councils (on the open market) would be replaced by affordable rent properties, at up to 80% of market rents. So, even if our scepticism about the likely proceeds of selling higher value council homes is misplaced, and the policy washes its face financially in the short term, the taxpayer will face a growing tab over the medium to long term for additional housing benefit.

Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler, and cost the taxpayer far less, just to build more social rent homes? They would provide, in a genuinely affordable way for residents and the taxpayer, both for people whose circumstances and preferences are to rent indefinitely, and for those who have aspirations to buy, but need to progress in their careers and save for a deposit before they can do so. Back in the 1950s, a policy like this, spearheaded by Harold Macmillan, didn’t serve the Conservative Party too badly, as they won three general elections in a row.

Has there ever been a major housing delivery programme as shrouded in secrecy as the “Affordable Homes” scheme?

When I wrote about this on previous occasions I had to make Freedom of Information requests in an effort to obtain meaningful figures. Even the figures that are now being produced are lacking in detail and hard to decipher.

It’s as if those in charge of the scheme are doing it from a dark doorway, like Private Joe Walker, the spiv from Dad’s Army: “Ere Guv, fancy making a few million quid off the back of yer tenants and the taxpayer, just stick the rents up, sign ’ere, don’ tell no one, a’right?”

This has been neatly illustrated by the attempts to decipher the latest figures from the GLA. Like The Guardian I estimated that 25,217 social rented homes had been “converted" to “affordable rent” in London since the scheme began. The Guardian reckoned that this had brought in an extra £70 million for London landlords, much of it funded by the taxpayer through higher housing benefit costs. Not so, said the GLA. The figures in their tables are cumulative and the true figure for conversions is 11,011 with an increase of £50 million in rents. The Guardian has since amended their article, and I have amended this one.

I defy anyone to look at the GLA tables and conclude that the figures are cumulative. There is not a single note or reference to this effect. It’s only when you have been told this and work through the spreadsheets that you realise the numbers are rising quarter by quarter. As I said at the outset, this programme is not transparent.

Despite this, I still find the figures on conversions quite shocking. Admittedly, 11,011 social rent homes is not as shocking as 25,,217 but it is still a significant figure, more than the number of social rented homes lost to the right to buy over the same period. This has been allowed to happen with almost no public debate, even though social rented homes, in the context of London’s dysfunctional housing market, should be treated like precious gems and preserved at all costs.

56% of the conversions that have taken place since the “Affordable Rent” regime began are in the stock of six major housing providers, as follows:

• London & Quadrant - 1,673
• Circle - 1,381
• Affinity Sutton - 1,182
• Notting Hill - 867
• Guinness - 638
• Peabody - 394

Over the last year the average rents for converted stock in London has been set at 65 percent of market rent (some are at 80 percent and some are much lower). Housing providers argue that they are mitigating the worst impacts of “Affordable Rent” by keeping well below the 80 percent cap, but the impact on tenants is still considerable.

Take an example from two inner London boroughs. Southwark is a mid-table inner London Borough (i.e. not the richest and not the poorest). Average housing association social rents are around £116 per week, whereas the mean market rent, based on VOA figures, is £345 per week.

So a conversion from a social rent to 65% of the market rent means an increase from £116 a week to £207 a week, a 78% increase.

In Camden the average social rent is £127 per week and the mean PRS rent is £472 per week (the median is £399 because there are many more high end properties in Camden). Just taking the median rent, this means an increase from £127 per week to £259 per week, more than double the social rent.

Is it surprising that the average affordable rent in London for a two-bed newbuild has just breached the £1,000 a month mark? However you look at the figures, these new rents are simply unaffordable to anyone on a low wage without recourse to benefits. There is a real risk that this is creating a growing stock of so-called “affordable homes’ where people will be trapped on benefits until they move or die.

There is no doubt that many housing providers are caught in a cleft stick. Commendably, they want to carry on building homes to tackle the housing crisis. Yet the current funding framework means they have to charge rents on existing, as well as new, homes, which are well beyond the means of the “hard-working families” politicians are so fond of talking about.

The regulatory framework requires the Boards of housing associations to act as the “custodians of social housing assets” and you wonder how long they can continue to wander down this path of unaffordability.

Perhaps Boards should be asking themselves searching questions about whether it is right to carry on this way. Perhaps they should instead call policy-makers’ bluff and say: “Current policy is not sustainable, for people who need housing, for us as businesses, or for the taxpayer. We will only build more homes if they are at rents which hard-working families can pay without recourse to benefits.”

This article first appeared on the 24 Dash website

Along with the other SHOUT campaigners I was pleased to attend The Homes For Britain rally on Tuesday 17^th March 2015. It was fascinating to see a great mix of housing group representatives, campaigners, politicians and tenants pouring into the Westminster Central Methodist Hall, and we were proud to add our voice to the diverse chorus calling to end the housing crisis.

It is our intention to make the provision of social rented housing a core element of any offering to solve the housing crisis. We therefore found it really encouraging that the loudest cheers and applause from the audience came when speakers mentioned that it was clear the only way to meet the level of housing supply required to solve the housing crisis would be through reinvigorating government investment in building social housing.

In order to make sense of the present we need to understand the past. The buildings that surround us did not arrive by accident; they are the result of political and policy decisions that often involved months and years of public debate. But the best buildings are often those that were founded on a strong vision about creating a better future.

Tomorrow, the Homes for Britain rally takes place in Westmister. Four miles to the north east is the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch. For those who don’t know, it replaced the slums of the Old Nichol that were graphically portrayed in William Morrison’s novel ‘A Child of the Jago' (there is now a trendy retro shop of that name nearby). It was the first major London County Council estate and was built as a result of the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, which allowed local authorities to clear slums and build new homes. It comprises twenty majestic six-storey blocks radiating from the raised mound of Arnold Circus, (which was created from the rubble of the Jago slums). It is designed in the arts and crafts style and was completed in 1900. The brickwork is beautiful. It’s only a few minutes walk from Liverpool Street station and if you are in the neighbourhood I urge you to go and look at it.

Just three years after it was built Jack London published "The People of the Abyss", his account of the terrble conditions in the East End. The Boundary Street estate showed that municipal action could help to turn the tide against poverty and poor housing.

Thanks to the wonderful people at Municipal Dreams I was referred to W.Thompson’s Housing Handbook of 1903 and have been able to uncover the financial history of the Boundary estate.

The bare facts are these: 1,044 flats were built, ranging from one to six bedrooms, plus a laundry, workshops and shops. Rents in 1900 ranged from 3/6 (17.5p) a week for a one-bed flat to 14 shillings (70 pence) a week for a six-bed flat. In today’s money, allowing for inflation, that’s £18.80 to £75 a week. Of course land, labour and materials were cheaper then, and rent and house price inflation have not followed the same trajectory as general inflation.

But it’s when you look at the construction costs and subsequent rent flows that it becomes interesting. The flats cost £280,000 to build and the land cost was £61,760, a total of £341,760 or £36.6 million in today’s money. So each flat cost less than £327 to build, which is £35,000 at today’s prices.

The annual income from rents was £20,343 (£2.183 million today). Since Right to Buy was introduced in 1980 about half of the flats have been sold. Even so, the ratio of capital cost to annual income during its first 80 years was around 17 to 1. So in very crude terms the scheme paid for itself after seventeen years. Of course you need to work out the net income to calculate how soon the scheme would 'wash its face' as development staff would say. But even after deducting management, maintenance, capital refurbishment and other costs the scheme must have paid for itself several times over. Had this been a private estate the surplus (or profit) would have gone into the pockets of shareholders, but this being a municipal scheme the surplus, subject to Treasury intervention, has been re-invested in other council-built homes in Tower Hamlets.

That is the beauty of social rented housing – tenants and taxpayers of the past pay for current schemes, and inflation wipes away historic debts. It is truly a communal enterprise that benefits everyone - the tenant, the taxpayer and wider society. A quick look at the global accounts of housing providers shows that historic debt, including grant, is a fraction of current realisable values. Taken as a whole the entire enterprise is in surplus because of the long historical timeline. There is no more profitable form of public investment than investment in real estate. Above all, the low rents that arise from the absence of siphoned-off profits, allow people to work without being trapped on benefits.

History also shows us that private housebuilders on their own cannot meet the need for new homes. The last time they built more than 200,000 homes a year was in 1968 and only in seven of the forty six years since then have they built more than 150,000 homes a year. Regardless of demand-side stimulii like Help to Buy or Starter Homes they simply will not boost their production to meet either need or demand. This is why direct government investment, preferably in the form of social rented housing, is the missing element that must form a key part of any future housing programme and why the SHOUTcampaign is so important. Fixing the housing crisis within a generation is a noble ambition, but the only way we can build more than 200,000 homes a a year is by including a significant role for social housing.

The history lesson is as clear as it could be. Social rented housing works. It eases pressure on the private rented sector, it helps to reduce the housing benefit bill (even Policy Exchange admits that social housing saves £3 billion a year on HB) and it rescues people from bad housing conditions, providing decent homes at rents people can afford. Most importantly, it pays for itself over time and becomes a valuable public asset that produces "profits" for the public good. It proves the point that the best concepts should never be allowed to die, they just need to be re-discovered and re-made to meet modern requirements. Just because a concept is old doesn’t mean it is old fashioned and irrelevant to present day problems.

(This blog by Colin Wiles also appears on the Inside Housing website.)

The London Assembly has passed a motion in support of SHOUT, calling on the Mayor, Boris Johnson to publicly support our campaign. The full text of the motion, proposed by Darren Johnson AM and seconded by Andrew Dismore AM reads as follows:

I read a lot of blogs, articles and Tweets about SHOUT (Social Housing Under Threat)

I despair at the continuous demand for more social housing when we are selling more and more of our social homes daily. We heard a couple of weeks ago that a possible "giveaway" of our social homes has been mooted too. I know that too much of what we hear from central Government is policy based in and around London and believe that there is an obvious, albeit unspoken, desire to release social homes to the market so they can be purchased and privately rented. The not-so-subtle message seems to be let's get rid of social homes altogether.

Continuing a welcome trend, the SHOUT campaign has been backed by another local authority - this time Lewisham London Borough Council. Their motion seeks to "maximise the supply of social housing" and use "housing suply to stimulate economic growth".

Read more to see the full detail of the Lewisham press release...

Despite some difficulties in getting the message across, and varying opinions on how the funds can be made available, Tom Chance blogs exclusively for SHOUT to explain why the Green Party feels so strongly about building 500,000 social rented homes by 2020.

Here Tom Chance, the Green Party spokesperson for Housing, blogs for SHOUT on the personal factors that went into the formulation of the policy.

The Green Party has pledged to build 500,000 social rented homes during the course of the next Parliament. But our pledge isn't only about numbers, it's also about the value of social housing.

We want to bring housing back as one of the pillars of the welfare state. We should be able to collectively rid every citizen of the fear that they may not be able to feed their family, get an education for their children, receive treatment when sick, or keep a roof over their heads.