Housing

Housing

Affordable Social Rental

 
• New Department of Housing. 


SAVE GREENBELT 

• Build on brownfield sites in towns or former industrial estates and protect green belt. 


END LOSS OF AFFORDABLE
PRIVATE RENTAL 

• End mortgage tax relief for private rental for holiday lets / holiday homes. 


HOMELESS 

  • Immediately house all homeless upon being elected, using church and charities to utilise buildings not in use for years, incorporating voluntary foodbanks within them. Temporary measure til social homes built.
     
  • Build 3-storey block of 1-bedroomed
    social flats for single homeless.  

  • If law still in place, repeal Vagrancy Αct 1824, or any law that replaces that law that does the same criminalising of rough sleepers / beggars. 


• Build homeless hostels for people needing support, with en suite bedrooms for each person (no shared bathrooms).  

  • Put solar panels / vertical helix type or other small non-propellor wind turbines on roof of new build and current hostels (FIT scheme so not maintained by council or housing association running the homeless hostel). 


DOMESTIC ABUSE REFUGES 

• Fully fund and direct employ domestic abuse refuge staff. 

• Repurpose current buildings or new build domestic abuse refuges. 


SOCIAL BUNGALOWS
DISABLED PEOPLES' ACCESSIBILITY 

  • Social houses front and internal doors to be wheelchair accessible.

  • Social houses to have wheelchair accessible showers / wet rooms / full length walk-in baths. 

  • Build social housing bungalows for all ages disabled people. Range from 1-bedroomed to 2 bedroomed. 

INCREASE DISABLED FACILITIES GRANT FOR HOME-OWNERS

  • The Disabled Facilities Grant is used to fund alterations aimed at easing living at home, such as installing wet-rooms or stairlifts. The maximum amount a person is entitled to claim has been capped at £30,000 since 2008.
  • The grant does not affect people’s benefits entitlements.
  • Update the means testing.
  • The amount being capped at £30,000 since 2008, despite rising costs and inflation, has already forced many disabled people to sell their homes and go on the social housing register, where there is already a lack of accessible homes for disabled people.


SOCIAL HOUSING 

• End Bedroom Tax. 

  • Social housing rent capped at 30 per cent of full-time rate of £16 per hour minimum wage from age 16.

  • Properly maintain social homes fit for human habitation. 


  • Build properly affordable fully furnished
    2-storey social homes, with minimum space standards, to prevent ‘rabbit hutch’ sized homes, all detached, with double glazed windows and make new built property
    ‘zero carbon’. 

• Deals with long housing waiting lists. 

• All with 3 bedrooms as minimum. 

  • Build all new 2-storey social housing and pensioner and all ages disabled peoples' social bungalows to national standard of  Passivhaus system.
    Passivhaus accreditation is generally considered to be an ‘ultra-low’ energy performance standard. The houses are designed and constructed to be compact, air tight and rely on heat recovery for temperature regulation. As a result, they can result in energy savings of up to 90% compared to traditional housing stock.


  • Build all new social houses with air-source heat pumps, not gas boilers.
 
  • Retrofit current social houses with air-source heat pumps, not gas boilers. 

  • Use green steel and cement to build new social housing and other public buildings. 

  • Look into including Hempcrete in building social housing.

  • End right to buy policy of social houses for
    5 years and / or til all the homes sold off in the past have been replaced with properly affordable social housing for rent.  

  • Each social house sold must be replaced by a new built social family / pensioner home, when the sales resume.

  • Give social tenants, right to live for life in council homes. 


REQUIREMENTS OF DEVELOPERS OF PRIVATE NEW HOMES 

  • Build all new homes for sale, with solar power panels on roofs. Owned and maintained by FIT schemes from National Grid. 

  • Build all new homes for sale, with vertical helix or non-propellor type wind turbines up on the roof, blended into landscape with natural green colours. Owned and maintained by the FIT schemes of nationalised National Grid. 

• Self-generation of electric power helps people prevent being in fuel poverty. 



LOCAL FIRST TIME HOME-BUYERS 

• Help first-time local home buyers by building low cost homes reserved for them.


• Again, with minimum space standards and
3-bedroom minimum. Homes to be detached.


• FIT schemes to put up on these low-cost new home builds, solar panels and vertical helix type wind turbines (turbines coloured natural green). Owned and maintained by FIT schemes of nationalised National Grid. This saves people from fuel poverty. 



LEASEHOLD TYPE OF HOME OWNERSHIP 

• End routine use of leasehold houses in new housing developments. 

    • From Twitter - Finance Expert - Paul Lewis@paullewismoney
      6:20 AM · Jul 3, 2022
    • If you can avoid it, never buy leasehold.
      You own nothing but the right to live for a number of years in 100 cubic metres of air surrounded by glass and concrete.
      Of course, its value falls as time passes."... 


• Protect leaseholders from rises in ‘ground rent’ from developers or management companies. 

    • Background
..."The one (temporary) exception to this is where you're buying a retirement property. Here, the ban on ground rent won't take effect until at least April 2023."... 
..."Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act"... in law from 30 June 2022. New ..."Homebuyers who purchase a new leasehold property will no longer have to pay ground rent"... 
..."It applies to all new leases, which'll primarily be of benefit to future homebuyers who purchase a brand new leasehold property. The legislation will also, though to a lesser extent, benefit existing leaseholders who opt to carry out an informal lease extension"...
(CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
 in article for more details). 


PRIVATE RENTERS 

• 3 year tenancies. 

  • Cap rents to average wages nationally. 
  • Freeze rents til back down to affordable with national average wages. 


• Ban letting agency fees for tenants. 

  • Tax buy-to-let private rents of landlords with multiple high rental big houses / flats, who are on top tiers of income tax allowances. Not tax buy-to-let private rental landlords on basic and next tax allowance tier, nor pensioners from age 50.  

• Law that a private rental has to be maintained by the landlord, as fit for human habitation and tenant rights to ensure homes are not below that standard. 


• Full Housing benefit from age 16. This cost will reduce as rent capping progresses. 


• License landlords so can call time on bad landlords. 


• Green Homes Grant voucher of £5,000 for landlords of private rental. 
Around £1.5bn to around 500,000 homes to reach energy performance certificate (EPC) Band C. 

  • Abolish Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 if still in place by general election, to 
    • end No Fault evictions of private renters (where landlords do not need to provide any cause for ordering a tenant out of their property) 
Background:

WHY NOW THERE ARE
LESS HOMES FOR PRIVATE RENTAL
  • Chris Norris, the policy director for the National Residential Landlords Association, said dwindling supply was to blame for rising rents. 
“According to Zoopla, the demand for private rented housing is up 142% so far 2022, compared to the five-year average,” Norris said. “In stark contrast, the supply of such housing has fallen by 46%. 

          • There are 4.4m renting households, 
          • there are only 2m buy-to-let mortgages, suggesting around half are owned outright.

            EVICTIONS 

          • No-fault evictions have increased by 76% in 2022 compared to the previous 12 months.


            HIGHER RENT INCREASES 

          • England, Guardian research showed that:
      • rents on new listings are up by almost a third since 2019, and 
      • some people are facing increases of up to 60%. 

      • Prices in 48 council areas are now classed by the Office for National Statistics as unaffordable when compared with average wages.

      • In Manchester, Bath, Nottingham, Cardiff, Brighton and Exeter, average asking rents now stand at more than 30% of a couple’s median income, the level at which the ONS considers rent “affordable”, Guardian analysis found.

      • One in five households in England rent their home, and costs have increased rapidly in recent months as the Bank of England has increased interest rates. 

      • In June, across the UK, average advertised rents were 5% higher than 12 months earlier, 
      • but by October they were up by 12% from 12 months previously, according to figures supplied to the Guardian by the property data company TwentiCi.

  • English rental - Inside Croydon - London Renters Union research shows:
      • members are facing an average rent increase of £3,378 per year – reckoned to be a 20.5% rent rise.


        LAW NOT TIL LATE 2024 

      • the renters reform bill, which would ban no-fault evictions, would be introduced “during this parliament”, which means tenants may remain unprotected until late 2024.

SCOTLAND 
  • Already a rent freeze in Scotland.
    That means its illegal for landlords in Scotland to raise the rent or evict renters.


Sources:
 The Guardian 
and
The Canary article 


KNOCK DOWN HIGH RISE HOMES WITH FLAMMABLE ‘GRENFELL’ CLADDING and other problems such as combustibility (fire risk) of other cladding materials such as
high-pressure laminate, combustible balconies, lack of firebreaks in the cavities between walls and insulation and non-regulation-compliant fire doors 

• Build new family homes for the flat home owners within the footprint of block of flats. FIT scheme solar panels / vertical helix type wind turbines on roofs. 


• Build new family homes on brownfield sites for home owners, where no room for all home owners of the flats within footprint of the flats.

 
• Build bungalow with drive for car, for pensioners. 


• For families and single young people, build homes on 3 storeys, with ground floor just the front door / hall, and rest is the garage with a drive sufficient to fit another car. 


• Developers to do this, at their cost, but with planning permission for extra family homes for sale. Not flats. 

• Homes to be detached. 

SAVINGS 
After the Grenfell fire on 14 June 2017 ... "Evacuation policies were widely changed such that all inhabitants should evacuate in the event of a fire. A key problem with this change was that buildings' alarm systems were not designed to alert all residents to a fire and facilitate total evacuation. Until such alarm systems could be installed, buildings required
a 24-hour 'waking watch' by fire wardens who patrolled the building checking for fire.
In January 2021, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government found the median waking watch cost in England to be £11,361 per affected building per month, or £137 per dwelling."... 



LAND REGISTRY 

• Keep Land Registry in public hands. 

• Make ownership of land more transparent. 


TREES 

• No longer cut down trees by councils. Maintain them. Where already felled, reinstate them. 

• Make law to have tree-lined streets for all new housing developments. 



BACKGROUND 

To bring back what we enjoyed from the world given us by Clement Attlee's government
(1945-1951) now mostly lost. 

Back in 1950s and 1960s, House prices were reasonable, but even if your parents couldn't afford a house, there was quality council housing. 

The system back then was designed to allow people to provide for their future. 

Now (2022), the system is designed to make the rich richer, with no care for people.

It is not pensioners' fault, but the fault of politicians, that house value speculation was permitted and rents allowed to soar so high.

The young simply did not see the Spirit of '45 and blame pensioners for what politicians did by such beliefs as: 
There's a lot of animosity and bitterness about the fact that you guys paid 17k for a house and they have to pay 300k.
(Man aged 40 in 2022 informed he) owns his own house. He bought it two years ago, and from what he's read, he will probably lose it in the coming years when he has to renew his mortgage under much higher interest rates and a vastly inflated cost of living. Nobody can afford to buy homes, rent prices are crazy, there's no social housing.

Background to Disabled Peoples' Housing 

..."Homelessness is reaching record highs in the UK. The latest statistics on statutory homelessness show that in March 2023, 104,510 households – including over 131,000 children – were living in hotels, hostels, B&Bs and the like. But disabled people are particularly affected by homelessness, as our new report, commissioned by the Centre for Homelessness Impact, explores."... 

..."While disabled people represent 22% of the overall population, a recent survey suggests they may represent up to 39% of the homeless population.

According to government data, the number of people qualifying for homelessness support – such as emergency accommodation –
in England because of a disability rose by 73% from 2018-22.
In Wales, the numbers more than doubled from 2015-19."... 

..."Learning disabilities occur at 2% in the general population but 13% in homeless populations. 
Autism is estimated to occur in the general population at 1-2%, but at 12-18% in homeless populations."... 

..."In England only 7% of homes incorporate the bare minimum of accessibility features."...

..."Disabled people are also more likely than non-disabled people to live in poverty, and are less likely to be in full-time employment."...





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