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Countdown to the Spending Review: taking a sledgehammer to housing

The day of the spending review looms. In the fourth of a daily series in the run-up to 20 October we brief you on the outlook for further cuts to housing.  

Countdown to the Spending Review: taking a sledgehammer to housing

The day of the spending review looms. In the fourth of a daily series in the run-up to 20 October - see our other articles on defence, welfare and education - we brief you on the outlook for further cuts to housing.

What must go? £450 million in housing development programmes and at least £1.8 billion in housing benefits.

What is at stake? New housing developments, social housing, affordability of housing and jobs. 

Housing development schemes

As part of plans to save £780 million this year the department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) has cut funding for the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), which oversees social housing schemes across the country, by £450 million.

The initial reduction of £230 million, which was announced in the emergency budget, included cuts of £100 million to the National Affordable Housing programme, £50 million to the Kickstart housing programme, £50 million to the Housing Market Renewal programme and £30 million to a programme funding sites for gypsies and travellers.

A further £220 million reduction in funding for the affordable housing pledge was then later announced in July. This means only £560 million out of Labour’s original £780 million pledge is now secure, which the HCA said it will prioritise towards new affordable housing as well as meeting existing commitments on Decent Homes and Mortgage Rescue.

John Healey, shadow housing minister, however claimed the cuts mean 6,000 homes will now not be built and thousands of construction jobs will be lost.  

Housing benefits

Housing benefit costs the government £20.8 billion a year, up 50% in 10 years from £11.1 billion when Labour came into power in 1997.

According to chancellor George Osborne, some families were receiving more than £100,000 a year in housing benefit payments. Through a series of changes to the housing benefit system, Osborne hopes to save £1.8 billion by 2014/15.

In May the chancellor said that from April 2011 the Local Housing Allowance will be restricted to £250 for a one bedroom property, £290 for a two bedroom, £340 for a three bedroom and £400 for a four bedroom or large. This is expected to save £1.8 billion a year, and there could be more cuts to come.

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8 comments so far. Why not have your say?

Dislexic Landlord

Oct 15, 2010 at 07:55

Well this looks good for North East Landlords

Cuts in social houseing

Cuts in LHA (not a Bad Thing )

It looks to me as if Buy to let for proffesional Landlords will get better and better

Provideing good houses for good teanats (NOT LHA)

Intrest rates staying low will help too

This is a golden oppertunity to make money

ITS NOT ALL BAD

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MC

Oct 15, 2010 at 15:55

This is a good thing, all public funded housing projects lead to in the North are deserted ghettos of perfectly good victorian housing as the councils spend decades assembling sites. These houses then go to ruin as they are neglected allowing the council to claim to be doing everyone a favour when they CP the remaining homes (kicking people out at undervalued prices) to build cheap legoland housing which 10 years later looks like a worse ghetto than the boarded up streets!

Leave housing to the private sector, if the public employees were any good at it they wouldn't be working for the council.

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DEAD RINGER

Oct 15, 2010 at 16:24

it's a tough world and at long last all those people who live beyond their true income will get shafted , out on the street GOOD. all the lucky rag heads who have never earned a toss will find it a little tougher but when you lived in shit on the streets £100 a week for scribbling for the queen is bugger all. At long last a tiny bit of reality is seeping into a few greedy peoples lives .. GOOD.

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William Phillips

Oct 15, 2010 at 17:25

Housing pressures and the lack of means to relieve them are integrally associated with uncontrolled immigration. It has left us as the second most overcrowded European nation after Malta. Now the cuts Ms Bischoff highlights threaten more immediate dangers.

These immigrants are mostly not the talented, energetic, educated, self-reliant contributors to British wellbeing that the globalist traitors and liars in high places and their media acolytes tell us to welcome. Most 'vibrant, colourful, diverse' incomers are economic chancers who stand a high chance of becoming criminals, parasites and baby machines, if not religious fanatics and bombers. Most will always remain hewers of wood and drawers of water whose modest abilities are superfluous in a modern post-industrial country, and whose unemployment rates will continue to climb.

They live in social housing which could have been allotted to native-born British people. Their birth rates are stubbornly higher, so that the problem of unassimilability intensifes down the years, as in the USA. Our welfare benefits haul them in like a magnet from thousands of miles away. They trek across the continent to solidify in close communities, following their own folkways and receiving the tax bounty of Britons whose customs and values they often openly despise. The Asians among them find less and less need to mingle with their hosts. They seek their brides from 'back home' and shuttle to and fro between the lands of their divided loyalties.

The coming cuts will enormously and disproportionately hit these also-rans. Some will react angrily as the goose stops laying its golden eggs. How much more ill will and tension the cuts will breed between hosts and unwelcome guests we cannot say. British tolerance is legendary, but our patience with ungrateful cuckoos in the nest is not limitless.

Needless to say, the liberal with his cant of colour-blindness cannot stand such talk and does his best to keep it out of the public spending debate. The last big race riots were during the last big postwar recession and squeeze, in Mrs Thatcher's early days at Number Ten. Will the much soppier, more evasive and guilt-ridden Dave 'n' Nick have to tackle petrol bombers and looters not far from Chateau Cameron in Notting Hill?

What fools, what utter fools our liberal internationalist elites were to shun the warnings of patriotic visionaries such as Cyril Osborne and (until he bottled out) Enoch Powell. Now we are being milked, bred out and squeezed out of the land that our parents and grandparents fought to defend. In 1945 we won. In 1948 we began to be beaten.

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fredr

Oct 16, 2010 at 11:19

Well said William Phillips. The word is out. There are three occupations in this country that guarantees a secure future. Politician, Banker or producing loads of children.

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LANDLORD X

Oct 16, 2010 at 11:50

I hope that this means that my horrible, anti-social neighbour from Eastern Europe who has never worked, lives on benefits for her and her 2 kids courtesy of the taxpayer, has a violent and dysfunctional live-in boyfriend yet claims benefits fraudulently, will no longer be able to afford to live in the £300K luxury flat in one of the most expensive areas on the South Coast paid for by the British taxpayer? I do hope so - I will be the first to call the removals firm if she is forced to relocate - preferably to Doncaster or even outside the UK ideally...bring on those cuts in housing benefit and LHA...NOW

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Anonymous 1 needed this 'off the record'

Oct 16, 2010 at 12:44

people who have immigrated here do the menial jobs, the indigeneous population are too busy with beer sex and other things- we need to give workers houses-oh- and crowd an already crowded land..

hey but all most British youth has to go to go uni-never lay a brick or wash a dish-

lets get the truth- cuts will mean reality check- only its hard to accept, not all can be spend easy and be houseowners with BSc..in ridiculous subjects which are simply trades with a degree.

Build some factories and put the Production back into Britain-before you go to Uni -3 years in a factory- or in the Armed forces- earn it as well as study-

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Anonymous 2 needed this 'off the record'

Oct 18, 2010 at 09:28

lha will this include ex-offenders just released from prison drug addict who admit to want rehabilate alcholic;'s who all recieved lha while non reciever's i.e working people who paid there way never had rental agreements renewed as landlord was granted charity status and is currently recieve far in excess of proposaled limit's

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