ROOF Blog

90% of couples under 40 with children in London can’t afford to get on the housing ladder. Analysis by the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit found that as an average figure across the capital only 10% of young families could afford to buy a suitable home. The figure drops to 5% in some areas including Camden, Hammersmith and Islington. Only in the wealthier boroughs of Richmond, Redbridge, Merton and Bromley can more than 20% of young families afford to buy a home. The figure of 10% in London compares with 21.4% in the South West and 23.8% for the South East.

Private sector landlords are urging support from MPs to ‘save the future of renting’ to students and young professionals. Nurses, teachers and a generation of young workers could be hit by a government plan to prohibit areas of shared housing for groups of unrelated tenants. The legislation comes into force on 6 April when new powers will allow planning legislation to be used to control the renting of shared properties to people who are not families or related tenants. Alan Ward, chairman of the Residential Landlords Association, said: The government’s change to planning Use Classes Orders is bad not only for landlords but for the whole private rented sector, not to mention the local economies that have traditionally grown around existing areas of shared housing’.

Around 300,000 people who had hoped to pay off their mortgage this year face shortfalls. They are all victims of missselling of 25 year with-profits endowment policies. Almost three million more people will suffer a similar fate in the next few years, according to the Association of British Insurers. At the peak of the 80s housing boom, homebuyers were encouraged to take interest-only mortgages and rely on investment returns from an endowment to repay the loan at the end of the term, usually 25 years. In the 90s, £50 a month policies regularly turned a £15,000 investment into a £100,000 return.  Today, they commonly pay out less than £30,000 for the same 25-year investment.

The Salvation Army is to rebrand its hostels for the homeless as LifeHouses. Maff Potts, Salvation Army’s director of homelessness services said: ‘This is a defining moment for the Salvation Army. The word ‘hostel’ was linked with old-style warehousing of people and didn’t convey that there’s more to our support services than simply housing. LifeHouse clearly demonstrates that we are about providing purpose and relationships - two words which are at the heart of our delivery of support services.’ Around 3,500 people stay at the organisation’s 83 UK and Ireland centres each night. The charity will also expand activities run in the centres, and the training offered to improve the self-esteem, mental health and employment prospects of the people using the centres.

Higher unemployment is forcing more young people into further education, increasing demand for short-term flats and providing a boost for Unite, the student accommodation developer. Demand is expected to accelerate at such a rate that Unite yesterday told investors it would continue to buy properties in student hotspots such as London and would not be reinstating the dividend — last paid in the middle of 2008 — until it had returned to ‘meaningful’ profit, even though the group announced a profit of £600,000 after a loss of £5.8 million in 2008. A lack of job opportunities was partly behind a 23% rise in the number of university applications between February 2009 and the same month this year, Mark Allan, chief executive of Unite, said yesterday.

The lack of mobile phone reception and broadband coverage in rural areas has become the number one issue in dissuading young people from staying on in the countryside, according to the chair of the Commission for Rural Communities. In a report to the prime minister, Stuart Burgess, the government’s rural advocate, said that the long-term future of the countryside is in jeopardy because so many young people are being forced out of rural areas to find homes, jobs and support.

The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) has announced that Saxon Weald and Eastbourne borough council have been successful in a bid for almost £6.2 million grant funding to develop an extra care scheme in Langney. Derry Court and the land adjacent to it, owned by East Sussex county council, will be developed together to achieve the purpose built scheme.  The development is forecast to provide 62 high-quality self-contained apartments for older people who have an assessed care need and require support with daily living.

A homeowner has won a legal victory overturning a council order demanding he tidy up piles of rubbish from his Surrey garden. Mr Wallace was served a notice under Section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act by the council in May, Guildford Crown Court heard. He was ordered to remove the plastic bottles, tins, newspapers and other waste, cut back overgrown vegetation and leave the land clear and tidy at his Westcott homes. But he appealed against the decision, at first unsuccessfully at magistrates’ court, and then at the higher court. In allowing the appeal, Recorder Christopher Purchas said the evidence ‘does not go far enough to show Mr Wallace was interfering with the amenity of other people who live in the locality’.

The Big Issue in the North, together with a number of Premier League and Football League clubs, is holding regional open trials to select the England team that will travel to compete in the Rio 2010 Homeless World Cup. The Homeless World Cup is an annual, international football tournament, uniting teams of people who are homeless and excluded. It has triggered and supports grassroots football projects in over 70 nations working with over 30,000 homeless and excluded people throughout the year.

The British housing market is improving at a faster rate than property prices across most of the rest of Europe, a report by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has found. House prices rose in only five European countries, including Britain, during 2009. But other countries continued to suffer a sharp market correction, with prices diving by up to 53%. RICS warned that countries with vulnerable economies would continue to suffer from price falls and depressed markets during 2010. Norway led the revival, with property prices in the country rising by 12% during 2009, followed by Finland at 8% and Sweden at 7%. Britain was the fourth best performing country, with the average cost of a home ending the year 1% higher than it started it, although house prices had risen by 10% from their lowest point in April.