What the Housing and Planning Act means – and how to fight it

Ruth McTurk writes:

The Housing and Planning Bill passed into law in May, and is now the Housing and Planning Act.  But the campaign against the Act is far from conceding defeat:  previously known as Kill the Housing Bill, it’s now renamed and re-focused as Axe the Housing Act.  There is still alarmingly widespread ignorance about the Act – the Government rushed it through Parliament with minimal debate, and the media have been equally silent.  So the crucial first step in the national campaign is to get the information out across the country that it will only make the Housing crisis worse.

The Act will be felt first by Council tenants through Pay to Stay:  this is one of the few sections of the Bill to have been amended in the passage through Parliament – rents are now unlikely to rise to market level, which was the original intention.   Now if the two highest earners on the Tenancy Agreement, or the tenant and their partner, have a combined income of more than £31,000, or £40,000 in London, they will pay 15 pence extra rent a week for every additional £1 they earn.  So if the combined income is £10,000 a year above the threshold, the extra rent will be £1,500 a year, or £28.85 a week.  Analysis by the Local Government Association indicates that 70,000 households will pay on average more than £1,000 a year in additional rent.  This additional rent is not required to pay for the homes, which are already paid for several times over through existing rents.  Nor is it required to pay for management and maintenance, which is also covered by existing rents.  It won’t even go to the landlords, the Councils, to enable them to fund new homes.   Instead it will have to be paid to the Treasury:  it has therefore rightly been called a second tax on working class people, and is now known as the Tenant Tax.   Councils will also have to pass receipts from selling their ‘high-value’ properties to the Treasury, to fund the discounts for Housing Association tenants exercising the Right to Buy.

The impact of the  Housing Act will be combined with further punishing Housing Benefit cuts: new claims won’t be allowed for most under 21s, under 35s can only claim Housing Benefit for a room in a shared home, and the family premium is being removed for new claims.  The Local Housing Allowance will be frozen for 4 years, so while rents increase Benefit entitlement will be restricted.  But the most severe impact will be that of the reduction in the Benefit Cap, for families to £20,000 a year, and £23,000 in London, [less for single people]:  this means that if Claimants’ annual Benefit income, including Housing Benefit, is above the cap level, the Housing Benefit they get will be cut, to reduce total income to the cap level.  The link between the Benefit Cap and earnings is also being removed.

Some of these cuts were introduced under the Welfare Reform Bill that most Labour MPs abstained on last year.  Housing organizations expect large areas of the country to become unaffordable for Claimants, and the widening gap between expensive private rents and Housing Benefit to tip thousands more families into homelessness:  even government estimates put figures of the number of households affected by the reduction in the cap at over 100,000.  Evictions will surge while available affordable housing diminishes

In the long-term, the most damaging aspect of the Act could be the largely ignored Planning changes.  The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act established the principle of development in the public interest:  this Act overturns that principle, and moves to a system which favours the interest of developers.   It introduces a pilot scheme for privatizing the assessment of planning applications, and obliges Local Authorities to keep a Register of ‘Brownfield Sites’, capable of accommodating five homes or more:  all sites on the Register will have automatic planning ‘Permission in Principle’.  Government statements, like Cameron’s on ‘Sink Estates’, make it clear that Council Estates are being targeted under these provisions, under the guise of being in poor repair, low-density, and preventing ‘mixed communities’.  Instead of enabling planning permission for affordable homes for rent, the Act obliges Local Authorities to permit the building of ‘Starter Homes’ for sale, which will in fact only be affordable by the well-off, and subsidised by the tax-payer.

This Act will affect everyone except the very wealthy:  leaseholders and freeholders on Council Estates targeted for ‘regeneration,’ will be forced to move, probably out of the area, as Compulsory Purchase Orders won’t provide enough compensation to buy locally.  Homeowners will find that their adult children can’t afford to move out, or will have to move long distances to find somewhere affordable to live, separating families and breaking up communities.  As social housing disappears, the homeless [rough sleepers have more than doubled since 2010], and those waiting on Local Authority Housing lists, will stand even less chance of finding a home.  Even the Tory led Local Government Association has opposed the Act, warning that the administrative costs of Pay to Stay will severely limit the amount of money left to hand to the Treasury, and calling for the Housing Crisis to be dealt with instead by building Council Housing.

If this Act is enforced as the Tories want, within a generation Council housing will be virtually non-existent, and Social Housing in general will be so scarce that it will exist only as a temporary refuge for the most marginalized in society, the poorest and most vulnerable.  The Chartered Institute for Housing calculates that over 300,000 social homes would be lost by 2020.  This Act is designed by the Tories to privatize housing, to place it into the hands of private developers and landlords, and at the mercy of the market.  As the number of social homes is reduced, people will be pushed into poor quality private renting, which will become even more expensive and insecure.  Central London and other big cities will become affordable only for the wealthy, changing their political complexion from Labour to Tory.

This is Tory government legislation, but it has to be implemented locally, by Councils and Housing Associations.  As a first step, every Council and Housing Association in the country should write urgently to their tenants to inform them about the Act, and hold public meetings to discuss it.  For Housing Associations, crucial sections of the Act are voluntary: there’s no obligation on them to sell their homes under the Right to Buy, or to increase their tenants’ rent under Pay to Stay, the Tenant Tax.

The Act is due to come into force in April 2017, but this timetable is already looking unrealistic.  The secondary legislation required for it to be implemented has yet to be put before Parliament, and HMRC haven’t been informed of their role in administering the Tenant Tax.  Providing income details has never been part of Council/Housing Association tenancy agreements, so tenants will have to agree to this through a variation in the contract.  If tenants, Councils and housing campaigners work together, this Act can be made unworkable.  Tenants can refuse to provide income details.  Councils can refuse to implement the Tenant Tax, and continue to issue Secure tenancies, not the 2-10 year tenancies the Act stipulates.  They can refuse to sell off homes as they become vacant, and refuse to put Council Estates on Brownfield Registers.   Labour Councils need to work together.   A massive national campaign to render this Act unworkable, to occupy Council Estates due for demolition, and Council houses targeted for sale, combined with demands for universal rent controls and secure tenancies, could unite everyone who believes that decent affordable housing is a human right.


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