Council housing | Jules Birch
Posts about Council housing written by julesbirch| Jules Birch
Posts about Housing associations written by julesbirch| Jules Birch
Originally written as a blog for Inside Housing. How long can you keep juggling before it all goes horribly wrong? That’s the question for social landlords posed by a new report from the all-party&…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. If you’re looking for a chink of light ahead of the promised government strategy on homelessness, the number of homeless households living in bed …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. A year into the Labour government how should we assess its record on housing? It’s not hard to find reasons to celebrate, from the spen…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. The spending review may have given us the headlines but a flurry of announcements on Wednesday fills in much of the detail about what the governme…| Jules Birch
Posts about National Audit Office written by julesbirch| Jules Birch
As one MP put it, we welcome the steps forward in ministerial statements on building safety only to find problems in the steps backward that follow. Michael Gove’s plans to ‘make developers pay’ re…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. This spending review represents a good start on housing – but it must only be a start. Highlights of the package delivered by chancellor Rachael Reeves on Wednesday included £39 billion over 10 years for the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) and a 10-year rent settlement of CPI plus 1 […]| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. With a week to go until the most consequential spending review for ten years, the Treasury is facing desperate last-ditch lobbying from department…| Jules Birch
A bit about politics, quite a bit about social policy, a lot about housing| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Within the next few months the government will set out what it intends to do about homelessness and how it will pay for it. A new report argues that the prospect of the homelessness strategy and spending review present it with ‘a vital opportunity to shift away […]| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Housing seems such a natural engine of inequality that it’s easy to forget that the opposite was once true. For most of the 20th centur…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Achievements may be thin on the ground but, six months into her job as housing and planning minister, Rachel Maclean does at least seem to have gr…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. If anyone needs any reminding, two new reports reveal the depth and breadth of the crisis in temporary accommodation in England. On Thursday the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee published the results of its inquiry into the ‘utterly shameful’ situation in a report that spells out […]| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Just for a change, housing looks like one of the winners from the Spring Statement – but is everything quite what it seems? On housebuilding overa…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. What’s not to like about the prospect of ‘the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’? The promise often repeated by Angela Rayner is the best evidence yet that the Labour government’s ambitions for housing are about more than just its headline pledge of […]| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. An intriguing Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHLCG) response to a select committee report on Friday might just provide a g…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. England and Wales have a long history of trying and failing to introduce commonhold and an even longer one of trying and failing to reform leaseho…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. No more sticking plaster politics was the promise from Labour at the general election seven months ago. The 126,000 homeless families and 164,000 …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. After a relentless week of grim international news, it’s good to have something to celebrate on the domestic and housing front. Until the sp…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Think of all the elements of the grim inheritance bequeathed to this government by the last one and perhaps the grimmest is the almost 160,000 chi…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. What’s in a target? Angela Rayner faced questions at the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee this week and gave some ill…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. What would our politics look like if housing really were the most important issue in a general election? After a week that’s seen the Labour gover…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing Few readers of Inside Housing will find the new podcast series The Trapped a comfortable listen but it is a necessary one. You’d hope that politici…| Jules Birch
A forensic examination of the government’s building safety programme lays bare the scale of the task facing ministers when they set out further steps on remediation of unsafe homes shortly. O…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. A final verdict will have to wait for the spending review in the Spring but how should we assess the first Labour Budget for 14 years? The answer …| Jules Birch
Posts about Temporary accommodation written by julesbirch| Jules Birch
What did it for you? The Musk takeover? 240 characters. The ‘For You’ tab? The re-platforming of fascists? The ‘interview’ with Trump? For me it was all of the above plus a more general disengageme…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing The last day of term is traditionally a time when nothing much happens and we get set for the holidays to come. Not so much for Angela Rayner. The …| Jules Birch
Writer and editor, mostly about housing and social policy. Blogger at Inside Housing. Ageing footballer| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Amid the excitement of the first Labour King’s Speech in 15 years, it may seem churlish to inject a note of scepticism. The excitement lies …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. It’s all change for housing at Westminster after a stunning election victory for Labour. More than half of the MPs who will be sworn in this week …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Labour’s huge election victory is undoubtedly good news for housing but will it take this once-in-a-generation chance to prove that ‘change’ is mo…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. The focus of the election finally turned to housing today (Thursday) but blink and you may have missed it. The issue described as ‘the dog that ha…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Given a backdrop of grim economic times and successive election defeats, this was always going to be a cautious Labour manifesto. So the good news…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing Wounded by the D Day furore and badly behind in the polls, the Conservatives have retreated to their home ownership comfort zone in their elec…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Eight weeks after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng shrank the economy with their growth plan, chancellor Jeremy Hunt completed his reversal of almost …| Jules Birch
With all the polls pointing to a Labour victory on July 4, my Substack newsletter this week asks whether Labour can deliver the transformative change that housing needs. You can read it here.| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Following his surprise decision to stand down as MP, Michael Gove leaves Westminster as probably the most important politician for housing in the …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. What should we be aiming for in housing policy? Read just about any government’s green or white paper published over the last 30 years and the ans…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing The economic inheritance of the next government will be so dire that it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prospects for housing investment will be …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Is shared ownership at a crossroads or a dead end? The fact that the question has to be posed at all is an indications of the issues now facing th…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. It was meant to be a ‘housing moment’ that would make a home ownership-based pitch to younger voters. That was the line briefed repeatedly to the …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Everything everywhere all at once’ is how Michael Gove describes the welter of proposals on housing announced this week and under consideration fo…| Jules Birch
Originally published as a column for Inside Housing. There is no chance of the government achieving its target of 300,000 new homes by the mid-2020s so why has the drama ramped up within the Conser…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. Where to start with the government’s new ‘long-term plan for housing’ presented by Rishi Sunak. If the opinion polls and by-election results are a…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. The prospects for housing investment look bleak whoever wins the election – and that is looking on the bright side – but there was an interesting …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. The good news in Jeremy Hunt’s speech is that the government has finally listened to all the arguments about soaring rents, evictions and homeless…| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. I’m not sure what Karl Marx would have made of the sixth housing minister in two years …| Jules Birch
Originally written as a column for Inside Housing. The good news is that the King’s Speech does promise a Leasehold and Freehold Bill. The less good is that this is not yet the end, and maybe not t…| Jules Birch
