The politics of the squeeze

By Tim Montgomerie
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Sky is reporting an Asda supermarket survey this morning and its finding that the average household is worse off by £11-a-week. Discretionary income is down by 6.4% on last year. It's not just supermarkets, of course, that are producing the huge squeeze on living standards. Electricity and gas prices are voters' number one concern. Robert Halfon MP recently blogged that the average motorist in his constituency of Harlow is spending £1,700 a year to fill up the family car. That's equivalent to one tenth of the average household budget.

These pressures are not unique to Britain and they explain the ascendancy of right-wing parties across the world. In tough economic times voters simply can't afford left-wing governments with their expensive schemes and careless attitude to taxpayers' money. Ed Miliband may purport to champion the squeezed middle but he doesn't have a hope of getting into office if he doesn't detoxify Labour's reputation as the party of debt, taxes and waste.

This shouldn't encourage complacency in Tory ranks, however. We must be relentless in finding ways of helping hard-pressed families who are worried about the weekly shopping bill, dreading a visit to the petrol station and cancelling their holiday in the sun.

Continue reading "The politics of the squeeze" »

Three questions about Coalition housing policy

By Tim Montgomerie

(1) Is it right that taxpayers are spending more on housing benefit than on the police and universities?

(2) Is it fair for the government to use the taxes of a family struggling to pay their mortgage in Manchester, to pay for a jobless family to live in a much bigger house in Kensington and Chelsea?

(3) Is it sensible for a government to do nothing about a total budget for housing benefit that has grown by £5 billion in the last five years and was forecast to grow by the same amount again, by 2015?

The questions answer themselves.

The Coalition's housing benefits policy is not only morally right it is a big first test of its determination to bring the deficit under control. It must not flunk the test and I was encouraged by yesterday's PMQs when David Cameron made it clear that he wasn't for turning.

Grant Shapps MP has done a terrific job in defending the policy (watch last night's Newsnight and listen to this morning's Today programme at 07:53). The Housing Minister has been reasonable, on top of his brief and patient with the wild talk of interviewers and antagonists.

Unfortunately one person who has been guilty of wild talk is Boris Johnson. He has somewhat retracted since but comparing the policy to "Kosovo-style social cleansing" was very regrettable. He has since issued a statement saying that he is happy with the broad thrust of the policy and is hopeful of getting the kind of transitional relief that will make the policy work:

"I have become aware that some news outlets are quoting out of context comments I made on BBC London radio this morning about the government's housing benefit reforms. My consistent position has been that the government is absolutely right to reform the housing benefit system which has become completely unsustainable.  I do not agree with the wild accusations from defenders of the current system that reform will lead to social cleansing.  It will not, and if you listened carefully to what I said, no such exodus will take place on my watch.  But the point I was making this morning is that London has specific needs due to the exceptional way in which the housing market works in the capital and it is my job as Mayor to make the Government aware of these. From the very good discussions I have been having with the Department of Work and Pensions and Iain Duncan Smith I am confident that our arguments are being listened to carefully and we are continuing to negotiate a package of measures to ensure the changes are introduced in London with minimal problems."

I've written a piece for Comment is Free based on the three questions at the top of this post. It should be going up shortly. Read it here.

Simon Hughes cements his position as the Lib Dems' Coalition-sceptic-in-chief

By Jonathan Isaby

Saturday am update:

Simon Hughes' latest salvo on social housing comes in an interview with the South London Press, which has been picked up by the Next Left blog. The Lib Dem deputy leader says:

"The local housing authority should be free to say that they are not going to grant the Right to Buy, just as the Welsh have done. I represent a constituency with more council tenants than anywhere else in England. We have lost thousands of homes and we can not afford to lose more.

"Right to Buy was a Tory policy and I accept it would be difficult to agree a national policy. But the Conservatives are signed up, like us, to give more power to local councils and it could give them the right to say no to 'right to buy' when there is a desperate shortage of rented accommodation".

---

We covered this morning the pronouncement by David Cameron in Birmingham yesterday that a council house should not necessarily be for life for new tenancies in the future.

But the Lib Dem deputy leader, Simon Hughes, has been unequivocally critical of the idea.

He has told the BBC:

"It's a prime ministerial idea - it has no more validity yet and I think our party would need a lot of persuading that it has merit or could work."

"I think the Prime Minister is entitled to float any idea he likes but we have to be clear it is not a Liberal Democrat policy, it is not a coalition policy, it is not in the election manifesto of either party, it was not in the coalition agreement.

"The message just has to get out this is now being floated by the Prime Minister - if he wants to pursue it then there are the proper channels to do so. We're very happy to have the discussion."

His suggestion that it was simply the Prime MInister floating an idea is rather tenuous, given that Housing Minister Grant Shapps used interviews this morning to echo the Prime Minister's call when he said:

"It seems crazy that we spend billions of pounds on affordable homes and we carry on doing that whether the person in the home is actually in need or not. That isn't efficient use of the housing we have in this country."

All this goes to underline that Hughes intends being a very vocal and visible sceptic about the Coalition. Moreover, it serves to illustrate, the difficulties ahead for the Government when it comes to making policy outside of that included in the formal Coalition agreement.

6pm update: Hughes' tone was less confrontational when interviewed later in the afternoon by the BBC:

"We need to make sure that people don't continue in housing that is excess to their needs when actually they would be better off, life would be cheaper, and they would be more comfortable somewhere else.

"So we need to work out ways, and many councils have already thought of this, to incentivise people to move from accommodation thats too big, releasing it for other families."

"We are a party open to debates about these issues. We have never said that there isn't an issue we are unhappy to debate and the prime minister is quite entitled to float an idea. But the debate hasn't happened extensively within the coalition."

--

Meanwhile, in his column for The Times (£) today, Daniel Finkelstein emphasises that the Lib Dems had no realistic option but to go into Coalition with the Conservatives:  

"It is true that opinion polls show the Lib Dems being squeezed. The junior partner in a coalition often finds it hard going. But there is only one way that the Lib Dems could have avoided this problem. They could have avoided it by never holding power at all. They could have clung on to their 20 per cent or so then. But what on earth would be the point?"

"The price of joining with Labour might well have been greater. In May Labour lost the election, had an incredibly unpopular and uncooperative leader, and couldn’t have formed a majority government even with the Lib Dems... If Mr Clegg had gone in with Labour in these circumstances, it is hard to see any circumstances in which he would not have gone in with Labour. And if there were to be no circumstances in which the Liberal Democrats would go in with anyone but Labour, what would be the point of them as an independent party? ...What Labour was offering the Lib Dems wasn’t a higher poll rating, it was extinction."

Iain Duncan Smith wants to help council tenants escape jobless cities

The Sunday Telegraph chooses a sensationalist headline for its interview with the Work & Pensions Secretary - and Ed Balls is already in full attack mode - but the suggestions put forward by Iain Duncan Smith are eminently sensible. Mr Duncan Smith is not ordering people to up sticks and move across the country and find work. He is proposing help for those who want to do so.

Through his work at the think tank he founded - the Centre for Social Justice - he has long been concerned at the barriers that discourage able-bodied people from taking paid work. Top of that list of barriers is the benefits system that presents the low-paid with terrible marginal rates of tax plus benefit withdrawal. Then comes the issue of housing. Social tenants are unwilling to move to parts of the country with much better job opportunities because they lose their home. Mr Duncan Smith wants such council tenants to move to the top of the housing list in the hi-employment area as part of what Grant Shapps called a right-to-move.

In her regular column, Janet Daley backs IDS' vision:

"We have large swaths of unemployed people tied like serfs to the land, in workless communities, doomed to a hopeless future in which no one in their everyday acquaintance is in paid employment... Mr Duncan Smith speaks of introducing mechanisms for “portability” and “flexibility” in housing provision, which is another way of saying that we must create routes for people to escape from the monolithic state solution in which they are imprisoned. The council estate is a way of encasing people in a bricks-and-mortar embodiment of government policy, but benefit dependency is a more all-encompassing form of incarceration from which it can be virtually impossible to break free."

Tim Montgomerie

Tories to give "struggling locals the chance to build own rural homes"

Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister is  off to Cornwall today - a Tory/Lib Dem battleground county at the next election where the Lib Dems defend all six seats, most of which are pretty high on the Tory target list.

Mr Shapps will be there to announce a policy seeking to address the problem of local people being priced out of the housing market in rural areas.

According to today's Daily Telegraph:

Under the Tory plans, local authorities will be asked to set up a register of families who want to join a self-build scheme. The council will then assess how much land needs to be put aside for a self-build community to be set up. Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, said he wants to tap into the vast number of people who are now willing to build their own homes.

He said: “Whilst house-building in general has been suffering, the self-build community has been growing. Most people will be surprised to learn that last year the second largest home builder wasn’t one of the big household names, but an army of individuals who call themselves self-builders.

“Across the country they’re creating affordable homes in the very places where young families struggle with sky high house prices. Under the next Conservative Government there will be an unprecedented shift in power back into the hands of local people.“

“We want to see a self-build movement spread across the country and particularly come to the rescue in rural areas. Local authorities will use the assessment of interest in self-build to help kick-start this rural housing revolution.”

This comes on a day when the Housing minister, John Healey, has said that he is not worried about the fact that fewer people are now unable to afford to become home owners. Read about his lecture to the Fabian Society in today's Independent.

Jonathan Isaby

Grant Shapps promises incentives to turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs

YIMBYs being Yes, In My Back Yard!

In a speech to the IPPR Shadow Housing Minister Grant Shapps MP said that not-in-my-backyard attitudes to new development were perfectly rational so long as there were no benefits to local communities:

"Extra homes require additional services and councils have to pick up the tab. Now of course, new Council Tax can be collected from each additional household, yet the mind-blowing complexity which is local government finance may mean that an area is actually worse off once the homes have been built. So let's see... More people... a loss of space and amenity... oh, and you may pay more, just for the pleasure. And they wonder why people object!"

Mr Shapps proposes a host of incentives to encourage local communities to accept new builds:

"A future Conservative Government will match pound-for-pound the Council Tax revenue received on all new homes for a period of six years. And in order to help fix Labour's affordable housing crisis, we will guarantee 125 pence for every pound received in Council Tax from new social homes... again in addition to the money already collected."

Using his own experience Mr Shapps calculates that a new development of 10,000 homes would bring new matched funding of £100m.  He proposes reforms to the planning system to ensure that communities will have a transparent say in how that extra funding is used.

Today's Times quotes industry sources who are sceptical about this "incentivised localism". Read Grant Shapps' full speech.

Tim Montgomerie

> 12.45pm Lawrence Kay on CentreRight highlights Policy Exchange's success in moving Tory policy on housing

Immigration and the BNP

How do you beat the Far Right?  (Not that I approve of that term).  It's a question asked by Catherine Mayer within the cover story of the latest issue of Time magazine.  She overviews the strategies...

1. "Deny far-right leaders the oxygen of publicity? Tricky — they have a democratic mandate.
2. Confront them? That risks casting them as martyrs, victims who tell unpalatable truths.
3. Expose the racism that often underlies professions of patriotism? Well, yes, but that assumes voters choose far-right parties in ignorance of their views, rather than because they strike a chord.
4. Steal their nationalist thunder by taking tough lines on issues such as immigration? This smacks of capitulation to the very ideas critics seek to defeat."

I completely disagree with Catherine on strategy (4).  Of course we don't match the BNP etc's policies but they are succeeding - in part - because they are addressing issues ignored by the main parties.

Continue reading "Immigration and the BNP" »

Is Labour seeking to punish London for backing Boris?

(Previously posted in error on the "old" ToryDiary)

A story appears in tonight's Evening Standard - though not currently online - that London is to lose out to the tune of more than £200 million when it comes to the Government's spending on housebuilding:

"Although on paper London benefits from £207 million earmarked for the homes plan, City Hall has now dug down into the figures and unearthed what it says are cuts of £205.5 million. That means a net benefit of just £1.5 million"

London Mayor Boris Johnson has wasted no time in criticising the Government - John Healey, the housing minister in particular - and, according to the paper, has complained that London is "losing out to Labour-voting regions in the North - even though it had greater need."

The report states that the same budget for the North East will double, even though it has just 300 households in temporary accommodation - whilst London - which has 48,000 such households - will see its share of the money fall.

Jonathan Isaby

Grant Shapps exposes the lie of Brown's promise of "local homes for local people"

Grant Shapps, the shadow housing spokesman, is suggesting today that Gordon Brown's announcement yesterday that local people who have been waiting a long time for a council house will be moved to the front of the queue falls foul of the government's own equality legislation.

According to his understanding of the law:

Councils will also still have a duty under existing legislation to give 'reasonable preference' to the homeless, those in overcrowded or unsatisfactory housing, and those with medical or welfare problems.

Jonathan Isaby

Housing

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