If not a home for life, then what?

If you moved into a new home tomorrow, how long would you expect to live there? If you are a private renter, the answer is probably not that long. One third of people who rent privately have been in their current home for less than a year compared with 2.5% of owner occupiers and 8.4% of households who rent from a council or housing association.

But if the government has its way, people in social rented housing will soon be on the move much more. In an attempt to encourage greater mobility, it is encouraging social landlords to offer fixed term tenancies (possibly for as little as two years) to new tenants.

FTTs were originally proposed for 'affordable' renting, where tenants pay up to 80% of market rents rather than social rents, which are generally lower. Since the start of April, they have been available as an option for landlords letting any type of social housing, providing the family or individual was not a tenant on April 1, in which case they are still entitled to a lifetime tenancy.

The early signs are that social landlords are being cautious before rushing into using FTTs. But as pressure on their stock of housing becomes greater, and waiting lists grow longer, more landlords will almost certainly use FTTs, and decide later whether to renew the tenancy on expiry.

At the same time, housing benefit caps brought in as part of the government's welfare changes may mean that families are forced to move because they cannot to afford to make up the difference between their rent and the dwindling sum they receive in benefit or local housing allowance. A classic example is the family whose children move away and are caught by the 'bedroom tax', which penalises them for having a bedroom that nobody sleeps in.

It would be foolish to suggest that social housing should not be allocated on the basis of need, as it has always been. In the same way, it is also fair that people's needs are reassessed from time to time. But turning it into some form of transitory 'stopping off point' while people ponder what they are going to do with the rest of their lives, is hardly likely to help social housing lose the stigma that is frequently associated with living in it.

The argument behind Right to Buy and its discounts is that, by paying rent over a period of time, households have effectively bought a stake in the home and this must be respected. In the same way, while council and housing association properties ultimately belong to the landlord (and to some extent the taxpayer), tenants cannot simply be turfed out onto the street because their circumstances change or their profile is not precisely the same as it was a few years earlier.

Shout about how to help the victims of benefit cuts

As the Welfare Reform Bill weaves its way between the Commons and the Lords, there is little doubt that cuts in housing benefit and other welfare changes that have not already come into effect will do so soon. In other words, a lot of poor people are about to become even poorer.

Ever since welfare changes were first mooted about 18 months ago, the government has pointed to discretionary housing payments (DHPs) as a safety net to help those worst affected. Indeed, it is trebling the sum available for councils to hand out to needy families in the form of DHPs from £20m in 2010/11 to £60m in 2012/13.

But research I recently carried out for The Guardian shows that, not only did many councils not use all the money that had available them to spend on these emergency payments in 2010/11, but awareness of the payments among social landlords in particular leaves a lot to be desired. The article can be read here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/housing-network/2012/feb/01/councils-fail-spend-thousands-housing

Across England, Scotland and Wales, local authorities failed to spend nearly £1m of the £20m available to them for DHPs in 2010/11. Challenged as to why they had not spent the full allocation on offer from the Department Work and Pensions, many said there was insufficient demand from tenants in the private rented sector as, at the time, local housing allowance rates were reasonably generous.

In fairness, they also said demand for DHPs has risen since last April and that they expect it to rise further from April 2012. This is because many more families will face financial hardship due to benefit caps and other government measures, including the new under-occupancy rules in social housing. But it is worrying that many saw DHPs as being aimed primarily at households renting from private landlords, while some housing associations admit they do not publicise the payments as much as they could.

Not only do local authorities need to ensure that the process for claiming a DHP is publicised and understood but, where sufficient claims are received, they should at least spend all they money available to them. It would also appear that housing associations and councils need to raise their awareness of DHPs and work together more closely. If not, the pain felt by those most affected by welfare changes will be even greater than is necessary.

Why there is not necessarily any right to buy

Considering its impact in previous decades, the likely return of the Right to Buy as a major feature of housing policy has attracted surprisingly little attention.

True the government is doing its best to keep what it calls the 'reinvigoration' of RTB as low key as possible after publishing a consultation paper just days before Christmas. But the fact is, once consultations close later this week, ministers are almost certain to go ahead with raising discounts in an attempt to entice more council tenants to join the property ladder.

At present, councils are only selling about 2,600 homes per year through RTB. By offering tenants discounts of up to £50,000, David Cameron hopes to sell about 100,000 homes over the next few years although there is no precise date for meeting this target.

But is this good news for council tenants now or in the future and what does it mean for the housing sector as a whole? The main criticism of RTB in the 1980s and 1990s, when annual sales sometimes exceeded 100,000, was that councils were not allowed to keep receipts to build new social housing.

This time around, the government is promising that homes sold off will be replaced on a one-for-one basis. But they will not be replaced with new social housing but rather with homes that will be let at up to 80% of local market rents - so-called affordable renting. Thus councils will be expected to join housing associations in borrowing money that can be paid for using future rent receipts. Meanwhile, the overall number of homes available for poorer familes will be further depleted.

The government estimates that about 300,000 households renting from councils or housing associations are eligible for the RTB and can afford to buy their home because the head of the household is in work. Some, it says, will be better off paying a mortgage than rent. But as the past few years have proved, paying off a mortgage can sometimes cause major difficulties, especially for families on limited incomes.

Increased RTB sales will, argues the government, boost economic growth by stimulating house building. It is highly likely that many of the extra sales will come in areas such as London where the discount cap is being raised threefold. But these are also the areas where it generally costs more to build new homes and where the shortage of social rented housing is often most acute.

It is not clear at this stage whether individual councils will keep all or the majority of receipts from RTB sales to invest in new housing, or whether there will be some form of national system for distributing the money raised. Therefore, at the very least, we should be in for a major row over the true meaning of localism, if not over the wisdom of selling off much-needed social housing with no clear policy for replacing it.

So we have a housing strategy, but where is the vision?

In the end, the only surprise was that so many people were surprised by the lack of new ideas in the government's housing strategy.

Coalition ministers have said so little about housing since the general election 18 months ago that any sort of statement was bound to capture media attention. But, in truth, what few solutions the government has to the perennial problem of Britain's dysfunctional housing market had already dribbled out to little acclaim in the sector or elsewhere.

Yes we have so-called 'affordable' renting (where new tenants pay up to 80% of market rents) and the new homes bonus (which tries to induce local authorities to grant planning permission for new homes with the promise of extra council tax).

Now the government has followed its predecessor by attempting to bolster the house building industry with yet another scheme to help first-time buyers acquire mortgages. Alongside the mortgage indemnity scheme, it is providing money to kickstart stalled development schemes. Sorry, but haven't we been here before in the immediate aftermath of the credit crunch?

The strategy tries to score political points by highlighting failures of the last government. But the mortgage scheme and other support for house builders would have sat comfortably in Labour's housing strategy (in as much as it had one), along with tackling empty homes, indentifying public land for development and encouraging institutional investors to fund private rented housing.

Where the coalition government differs greatly from Labour is in its approach to social rented housing. In a nutshell, it doesn't plan to build anymore and wants to sell off some existing homes by reviving the right to buy scheme with more generous discounts.

Not only does the return of RTB threaten the plans of local authorities ahead of next April's dismantling of the housing revenue account system, but it means that, unless the homes sold are replaced, councils and housing associations will have even fewer properties to offer to households on waiting lists.

To some extent, the Tories appear to have learnt from their mistakes in the Thatcher era and, this time, are promising that any homes sold will be replaced on a one-to-one basis. But it is hard to see how the numbers stack up when councils have debts to pay off and the Treasury is demanding 75% of sales receipts.

Furthermore, any new homes built will almost certainly be for affordable, not social, renting. The strategy makes it clear that affordable renting is here to stay with private firms keen to grab a share of the spoils. What is more, landlords are being encouraged to target homes at people looking for work or already in jobs, providing they do not earn too much.

Where this leaves people in need that cannot show they are in a position to work is anyone's guess. A cash-strapped government has made it clear that what little public subsidy there is will be targeted at homeowners with the reformed welfare system left to pick up the bill when people without jobs are required to pay near-market rents because there are no social rented homes remaining.

The strategy, in as much as there is one, seems little more than a series of sticking plaster solutions. Those hoping for a long-term vision must wait a while longer.

Clearly we need to see through housing associations

Ever since MPs were caught claiming money for duck houses, dodgy DVDs and second homes they didn't need, transparency has been the watchword of the day in government. Last month, housing minister Grant Shapps called on housing associations to throw open their books for inspection by residents and the general public - otherwise they might be forced to do so using Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation.

During a press briefing prior to his question-and-answer session at the Chartered Institute of Housing's annual conference, Shapps made it clear that he wasn't only looking to catch out associations that pay their chief executives too much.

He wants residents to keep an eye on all major expenditure, as a way of controlling what is spent. If there was dissent from residents over the sums associations plan to spend on schemes or projects, he argued, then suddenly they not seem quite so important.

It is hard to argue against transparency. Earlier this year, the Home Group became the first association to publish details of all expenditure over £500 and others may well follow suit. But is the government really right to threaten associations with FOI legislation if they refuse to comply?

Yes, associations do receive public money to help fund housing developments, but these sums are dwindling as the government prepares to fund affordable house building through higher rents and increased borrowing (by associations). By agreeing to charge higher rents for new homes and a proportion of re-lets, associations are in some ways moving closer to the position of private landlords.

Basically, the government can't have it both ways. If housing associations are required to pay greater heed to the market when it comes to letting homes and raising money from the money markets, they can't really be expected to comply with FOI rules in the same way as public sector bodies.

On the other hand, they will find it increasingly difficult to avoid greater transparency on a voluntary basis, which is what Grant Shapps probably had in mind when he made his proposal.

Give the mortgage rescuers some credit

On the face of it, it's easy to criticise the mortgage rescue scheme introduced by Labour in 2009. At first, there were a limited number of takers, with local authorities only helping a fraction of the households that came forward with difficulties.

Now the National Audit Office has weighed in by pointing out that only 2,600 households were helped to avoid repossession, instead of an expected 6,000, while the cost to the Exchequer was £240m compared with the forecast £205m.

The main reason for this is that, where households qualified for assistance, most opted for the more expensive option of selling their home to a housing association and becoming tenants rather than the cheaper option of an equity loan from the government. In other words, at the height of the credit crunch and recession, they opted out of home ownership. Hardly a surprise really.

Yes, the mortgage scheme may have been inefficient and, yes, the last government probably got its sums wrong. But let's look at the whole thing in perspective.

In spite of the terrible consequences of banks offering mortgages to people that could not afford them, the number of repossessions was far lower than forecast by the Council for Mortgage Lenders, and lower than during the housing market collapse of the early 1990s.

In November 2008, the CML predicted that repossessions would reach 75,000 the following year (a similar number to 1991). In the event, 47,900 homes were repossessed in 2009 and a further 36,300 in 2010. This was not only due to the mortgage rescue scheme, but other efforts to dissuade lenders from turfing families out of their homes, for which the last government deserves praise.

Strangely enough, nobody from Labour came forward this week to defend the scheme or the previous government's efforts to reduce repossessions. Are they so keen to wash their hands of Gordon Brown and his legacy that they are unwilling to snatch even a little credit when it's due?

Exactly who is going to benefit from these cuts?

Governments of all colours should start to feel uncomfortable when they are accused of neglecting the vulnerable. For Conservatives of a certain age, it is not exactly a new experience but, for most Liberal Democrats, one assumes we have reached a slightly worrying phase that may leave them wondering exactly why they went into politics in the first place.

OK, so welfare reform was never going to be easy. But nearly a year after Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith embarked on his mission to make work pay by punishing those that can't find jobs (or in a few cases don't want to), pressure on ministers to justify their actions is starting to mount.

First there was the flurry of criticism surrounding new caps on housing benefit for tenants in private rented accommodation that even managed to anger London Mayor Boris Johnson. Then came the climbdown over plans to penalise people on job seeker's allowance by cutting their housing benefit if they did not find work after one year.

Now Liberal Democrats are criticising the proposed overall benefits caps that would mean an individual household could not claim more than £26,000 per year from 2013. Finally, the National Housing Federation has joined disability groups in attacking planned under-occupancy rules that may mean people with disabilities who have had adaptations made to their home are forced to move to smaller properties.

During the next few years, housing associations will witness the effects of benefit cuts and other welfare changes first hand. According to the NHF, association tenants will lose an average of £14 per week, or £728 per year. Not only will households struggle to make ends meet on less money but, as landlords, associations will be charged with chasing rent arrears (which are almost certain to increase) and deciding when, as a last resort, families should be evicted.

It is not a pleasant prospect, which makes the lobbying that is going on present during the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill especially vital. For if housing professionals don't join MPs in pressing for changes soon, it may be too late to protect those that are least able to cope with the fallout from an economic crisis for which they, of all people, were not responsible.