ROOF Blog

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’.

The Government has set out new plans to make Britain’s homes ‘greener, warmer and cheaper to run’. The strategy is aimed at cutting emissions from the UK’s homes by 29% by 2020. It will help people make smarter use of energy in homes, making it easier to take action and reduce bills. Installing some technologies, such as solid wall insulation, could see energy bills cut by £380 a year. The strategy will be implemented in a three stage plan: to insulate 6 million homes by the end of 2011; to have insulated all practical lofts and cavity walls by 2015; to have offered up to 7 million eco upgrades by 2020.

John Healey has published the Government’s response to the Mayor of London’s plans for affordable housing in the capital. He warns that the housing strategy will not sufficiently address the capital’s needs, and outlines areas of particular concern, including plans to reduce the number of new social rented homes provided by councils and housing associations by an equivalent 2,755 homes a year compared to current plans.

Local authorities should not adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach when granting planning permission for housing, and should move away from the approach to planning policy that led to large-scale construction of high-density flats on urban brownfield land, according to a report from the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU), a quango set up to advise government on housing policy. The NHPAU looked at the development of housing in a variety of densities and locations and concluded that while high-density housing was sometimes the most valuable, it often was not.

Labour’s record on tackling asylum faces a fresh onslaught today over figures that show a new backlog of 30,000 cases and a warning by the government’s immigration watchdog that its targets are currently ‘unachievable’. John Vine also makes clear that a special five-year exercise which began in 2006 to clear the legacy of 450,000 unresolved asylum cases is now unlikely to meet its July 2011 target completion date. The setbacks mean that despite progress the Labour government will go into the general election campaign unable to claim that the asylum system has been fixed after John Reid famously declared the Home Office’s immigration directorate ‘unfit for purpose’ in May 2006.

Fears of a double-dip recession and a sterling crisis in the run-up to the election were raised last night amid news of collapsing investment in British industry and a warning from one of the world’s leading financiers that the pound could plummet within weeks. The pound fell sharply on the foreign exchange markets after a day of grim economic news which saw an admission from RBS that it had missed government targets for business lending, a downgrading of the UK growth prospects by the European commission and a warning from the CBI that consumer spending was likely to remain weak ahead of polling day.

Gross mortgage lending in January fell to the lowest level in 10 years as buyers were deterred by the end of the stamp duty holiday, figures showed this week – but experts have warned that lending could decline further as banks lose government funding support. According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), gross mortgages totalled just £9.1bn in January, down 32 per cent from the £13.4bn in December. This is the lowest monthly total since February 2000, when gross lending was £7.9bn. While a seasonal fall is usual between December and January, the CML said the drop was ‘larger than average’ due to higher purchase activity in December, as borrowers rushed to take advantage of the stamp duty holiday on properties valued less than £175,000.

John Healey has extended the government’s campaign to help struggling homeowners get a grip on their finances and avoid repossession. Over 330,000 households have had help and advice with their mortgages over the past year. But with the pressure on families likely to remain high throughout 2010, starting this week the government is working with CAB to run a string of local help events in 56 repossession ‘hotspots’, so that struggling homeowners can get impartial face-to-face help and advice to keep their home. New radio and local press advertising in all 56 areas will also promote the free telephone advice line and special website to help homeowners struggling with their mortgage payments.

Applications to build houses across the UK rose in the last quarter of 2009, according to the NHBC. It said applications to build new homes between October and December 2009 rose 64 per cent from 15,879 to 26,078 compared with the same period in 2008. This was driven by the private sector, where applications surged 113 per cent, from 8,646 in the last quarter of 2008, to 18,393 in 2009. Public sector demand saw a six per cent rise, from 7,233 to 7,685. Imtiaz Farookhi, chief executive of the NHBC, said: ‘Our house building colleagues across the industry have shown cautious optimism as they reveal their predictions for 2010. Now the nation’s housebuilders need support from the government as they see their way out of this downturn and try to meet the need for new homes.’

The government will struggle to build even half of its target of a million affordable homes by 2020 if the housing budget is not exempted from public spending cuts, a housing campaign group says. If the cuts to the house-building budget suggested by November’s pre-budget report go ahead, the number of affordable homes built by 2020 will be 444,000, says the National Housing Federation. The NHF is calling on Gordon Brown to make the house building budget ‘untouchable’ and give it the same status as hospitals, schooling and policing, areas the government said in November it would ringfence while it cut back spending in other areas.