CSR special: Housing

The Comprehensive Spending Review spelled some extremely bad news in the housing sector. It's a review that will cause hardship for many and homelessness for thousands. It's not simply that Osbourne scaled back the plans of building new affordable homes by 30%, there has been a general assault on rights and benefits that will lead to misery and homelessness.

The ending of Secure Tenancies for council house tenants is the end of an era. The post-war settlement that created affordable homes for working people was a massive attack upon one of the great divides in society - decent housing. As council houses have been gradually sold off the stock has more and more become a backstop to house the most vulnerable in society rather than ensuring the majority have somewhere decent to live.

Those secure tenancies were there to give the poor stability and reassurance, a firm base upon which to build a life. These moves entrench the shift towards using council housing as emergency, short term accommodation - a shift already well underway with the breakup of council housing stock a the growing use of 'Social Landlords'.

As the Telegraph reports there is also a new rise in rents; "new council house tenants face a steep hike in living costs, offering intermediate rents at around 80 per cent of the market rent."

Housing is the bedrock of any community, and as Eileen Short, chair of Defend Council Housing and sister of a well known former minister, said recently (doc) "Attacks on secure tenancies, cuts in housing benefit and forcing up rents will create more debt, evictions and homelessness."

The attacks on housing benefit have been signalled well in advance and we know they will lead to both a new wave of homelessness and an exodus from high housing areas, like London, which already suffer from a lack of essential workers unable to afford high rents and/or mortgages. Indeed this feeds into the benefit cap of £500 a week per household as a family living in a high rent area will find it very difficult to cope with rising rents.

The Citizens Advice Bureau, in a hard hitting press release condemned the CSR and pointed to the that;

"Housing benefit has already been cut back and the extraordinary decision to raise single room rate to 35 year-olds will lead to an explosion of homelessness, and will hit single working people on low incomes as well as the single unemployed. The measure to restrict contribution-based ESA to 12 months betrays people who have paid contributions all their working lives and become sick or disabled.

"We advise millions of people every year, who are often on very low incomes or rely on welfare benefits and public services. They told us that their top priorities for the spending review were simplification of welfare benefits, free to use government helplines and affordable housing. We welcome the announcement that the welfare benefits system will be simplified to make it easier to understand and navigate. In the meantime we urge the government to maintain and continue to improve service standards and ensure the new system is designed with the needs of service users in mind.“

The single room rate, which I'd not even been aware of until the CSR, will mean that under-35s will only be able to receive housing benefit if they are living in shared accommodation. So if you're currently working for the public sector and living in a small flat a redundancy notice will mean you're out on the street as well as out of work.

The news that the government was to spend less in housing did not just mean that the 30% less new build would mean that the more than a million on the waiting lists for social housing would have to wait that bit longer. We also saw an immediate hit on the shares of Barratt Developments (down 4.4 percent) and Taylor Wimpey (down 5.56 percent). The National Housing Federation warned that 1.7 percent of jobs in the construction industry could be lost.

Federation chief executive David Orr said: "The fact that the housing budget is being cut by 60% is deeply depressing – and shows that providing affordable housing is no longer a government priority. Cuts on this scale will come as a devastating blow to the millions of low income families currently stuck on housing waiting lists.

"The harsh reality is that because of these cuts, the new social homes this country so desperately needs, can now only be built by dramatically increasing rents for some of the most vulnerable and poorest in our society. Most tenants simply won’t be able to cover these extra costs, and as a consequence make it more difficult than ever for people to escape the poverty trap and benefits dependency that the Government has repeatedly said it wants to tackle."

All-in-all extremely bad news for anyone not rolling in money. Remember kids, Nick Clegg says the cuts are fair, and I quote "the review is one that promotes fairness, underpins growth, reduces carbon emissions and localises power."

Defending Council Housing in Cambrdgeshire

Calling all locals;

South Cambs Against Transfer, which combines tenants and a group of councillors (nearly all the Independents plus the one Labour Cllr, and increasing support from LibDems), have begun distributing 6,000 leaflets opposing the housing transfer proposed by the ruling Tory group.

They're well organised and have several volunteers, but with nearly 100 villages in South Cambs they have their work cut out. Some Cambridge tenants have already offered help, but any more would be welcome. Dave Kelleway, chair of the group, has the leaflets, plus lists of all the council addresses in the district. If anyone would like to combine a stroll around picturesque Cambridgeshire villages and at the same time support council tenants against a typically unpleasant bunch of Shire Tories this is an ideal opportunity!

Please contact Dave and let him know if you wish to help.

With the government's 'council housing finance review' under way, it is disgraceful that the South Cambs' Tories are trying to rush this transfer through. Their only argument is the amount of rent taken away by the government as negative subsidy, but that is precisely what the review is addressing. It's called 'indecent haste', and (cynics might say) may not be entirely unconnected with SCDC being cash-strapped and looking to benefit from the capital receipt from the sale - at tenants' expense, of course.

It's lovely weather - what better than a nice stroll around pleasant country villages, taking a pop at unpleasant Shire Tories as you go..? A whacking 'No' vote would be good for Cambridge city too, because every such vote increases the pressure on the government to sort out what they have acknowledged is the "unsustainable" position for our Housing Revenue Account.

Defend South Cambridgeshire Council Housing

A new campaign group has been launched to fight the plans by South Cambridgeshire District Council to sell off its council housing stock. South Cambs Against Transfer (SCAT) includes councillors, tenants and other supporters, and says its aim is to inform tenants of the disadvantages of transferring to a Housing Association, and to campaign for a “NO” vote when a ballot is held on the Council’s sell-off plans later this year.

Dave Kelleway, a Council tenant from Teversham, was elected Chairman of SCAT, and said after the first meeting: “We have already received a lot of support from tenants, who are fed up with receiving one-sided propaganda in favour of transfer from the council, paid for from our rents, and are outraged that the council has now decided to spend another £600,000 on more of the same, without allowing us a vote.

“SCAT will point out that rents are always higher with Housing Associations, that tenants lose their secure tenancies on transfer, that democratic control will be lost, and that it is a one way street – there is no vote allowed to go back to council control. "

SCAT Press Officer Cllr. Deb Roberts (Independent) said: “The condition of the housing stock in South Cambs is very good compared to other areas, and the situation would be even better if the council had re-invested receipts from the sale of council homes back into the council housing budget, rather than divert £10.5 million to other services, including nearly £6m on the new offices at Cambourne.

“I think that there is a growing unease amongst council members that the council has decided to push ahead with the next, very expensive, phase of trying to privatise the housing stock, without asking tenants if they want us to spend even more of their money. If there is as little tenant support as it appears, it really will be a scandalous waste of money”.

One window closes - another one shuts

Last night's marathon length housing co-op EGM on window replacement has got me to thinking about the best ways to make your home environmentally friendly and the compromises we all have to make in order to fit our ideal with what is actually achievable.

Our choices were simple but perhaps a little expert advice might not be misplaced, if readers are willing to chip in with their thoughts. We are coming up to a time when many of the doors and windows need replacing and, as part of coming up to the decent homes standard the co-op has collectively decided to re-do the whole lot. This will be an invaluable step forward for our energy conservation.

Of course, as we're part of the lunatic fringe the co-op tends to contain people who think climate chaos is something to be averted and want to replace the windows in an ecologically friendly way. Bloody communists. What next? Giving to charity?

But wanting to be good to the environment and doing that effectively with the resources available are two quite distinct things. Last night we heard pitches from a number of companies on the products they can provide and the materials from which they are made. Our choice essentially comes down to this. Eco-friendly timber sourced in a sustainable way or horrid PVC made from oil and dead penguins. Both materials perform pretty much equally in terms of heat retention / energy efficiency so, as windows, although wood looks a bit nicer there doesn't seem much in it.

However, there is a complication. The timber frames cost three times as much and, for a job the size of the co-op, we are talking a difference of £150,000. Which seems like a lot of money. In fact, whilst the co-op can afford timber we would be cutting our finances very tight, perhaps irresponsibly so.

For me the two key priorities are how the product performs in conserving energy and how long the windows actually last. Now the PVC might last forty years, whilst the timber may last eighty - but I do have my doubts about windows that last longer than the walls around them, but that's an aside I suppose.

There is absolutely no question that PVC is an evil material but is it so evil to justify spending a very significant amount of money that could provide decent insulation, solar water heaters and other improvements. Christ, even if we could afford it with £150,000 we could employ half a dozen full time environmental workers for a couple of years who could have a massive impact on reducing the carbon footprint of the local community.

Timber will make us feel like we've chosen the best, but in fact we'll have gone for perfection in one area whilst completely ignoring the glaring environmental deficiencies that lie elsewhere in the co-op. My question to the readers of this blog is this - is it better to go with the best available building material at the expense of other improvements that would increase the sustainability of the co-op as a whole, or compromise on the material, choosing an unsustainable source for our windows, which would leave us enough money to ensure we are coming up to scratch in other areas too?

Communist housing

I attended the Argyle Street Coop's housing conference today - and it was really exciting. Lots to think about, learn and simply get confused by.

The conference had essentially come out of discussions in Argyle St. (which is 25 years old this year) about possibly building a new housing coop from scratch somewhere in Cambridge. Which is bloody ambitious but also extremely inspiring, and the more I think about it the more inspiring it becomes.

We heard how others have done it in Redditch, Brighton and Hove (actually) and Manchester. We also heard from architects, our local MP, David Howarth, and people from other forms of co-housing on how to make new buildings that are environmentally sound, nice to live in and cheap (as these things go).

There were lots of debates throughout the day - far too much to go into in one post - so I'll focus on the thing that really got my spine tingling. Designing your own community. The Redditch people designed the homes they were going to live in themselves, and its difficult to think of a better way of really owning and controlling your environment.

To live in a community without landlords, where you decide, collectively, your own rents, policies, new directions and plans is a demonstration in actual fact of the way that we can live without profit and improve our standard of living at the same time. We don't even have to wait for a revolution to be able to make this small part of our lives our own.

The (faint) possibility of helping to design and build the very place I may live is... well, it appeals to me, and has got me thinking about what a perfect building would look like.

For me I want fresh light, and lots of it. Community spaces, where you naturally meet and hang out with your neighbours. I want buildings with beautiful curves not straight line boxes, placed in the town - part of the wider community. In short somewhere that fosters living together as a community.

It's not like I want something that looks like its made out of twigs and humous just to appear ethical. I want something that looks modern with space, trees and above all with people that I know and I don't want to see any landlords cluttering up the place.

Some people may be surprised at this knowing my naturally misanthropic and solitary inclinations. Well so am I frankly - but whilst I don't want to live in a commune I really do want to live in a community - and that sense of alientation and atomisation that pervades the estates just doesn't cut the mustard for me.

So, whilst I'm thinking about what makes a community, I'd like to ask you to sink yourself down into the warm bath of your imagination, listen to the water ripple and splash against the sides, smell the decadent aroma of candles and close your eyes for a moment to see the perfect home, it's people and how you'd live there.

Hippies ahoy!

I went for an interview to live in a hippy commune today. The questions went something like this:

Question one: Do you love Tofu?
Question two: Are your shakras aligned?
Question three: If the Earth Goddess walked in would you worship and adore her?

Not really.

One of the odd things about going to an interview to Iive somewhere is the prospect of rejection is somehow far more personal than with a job for instance.

With a job interview if you fail at least they can say you don't have enough experience or the wrong qualifications, with a house interview it far more about whether they like you or not and want to live with you - which makes success or failure about how a cool a person you are.

Well I'm stuffed then.

I've been neurotically obsessing about my upcoming rejection all week and I've found it incredibly difficult to concentrate on doing anything else at all. Thankfully I saw my mate Sara just before, which not only distracted me sufficiently to prevent working myself into a tissy just prior, but also put me into the best of anecdote telling moods.

Which means the humiliation will be even worse, cos at least if I'd been a nervous wreck I could have blamed that for getting turned down!