An open letter to the Rt Hon Simon Clarke MP, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities etc
Hey Simon,
Congratulations on your new role as Housing Head Honcho. You are the seventh such Cabinet Minister to hold the post since 2010 and so eighth time lucky, one hopes.
It seems that your job is one of multi-tasking though as you also have the levelling up and community briefs – albeit that no-one really knows what levelling up is and as such you can probably ignore that particular responsibility, just as your predecessors did. How is Michael by the way? I’m somewhat surprised that he’s not been given the ‘Ministry of Sound’ job what with all the dancing and ‘party’ stuff he’s so good at. He’s an expert at sniffing out a good time apparently.
Anyhow, my concern is housing and essentially the fact that there isn’t any – certainly not enough of the right tenure in the right places.
Housing Secretaries and their ministers have long promised to ‘fix the broken housing market’ yet it seems that counting all those donations from all those housebuilders may have distracted the Conservative Party from the job at hand a little? But the party has had time to spend a decade or so punishing landlords in the PRS with repeated assaults on tax relief, pandemic arrears, so called increased standards, security of tenure and so on; and has managed to hike stamp duty to the masses by a few hundred percent. Your successive governments have typically announced a lot but actually delivered very little of substance.
Well, I’m here to help and so I’ve cobbled together an entire Housing Manifesto for you. It took a few short minutes, probably more time than you and your department will otherwise spend on the subject.
Here it is in just 15 easy to absorb bullet points. Please adopt it immediately and by all means take the credit for it in the media (I generally shun publicity anyway):
- Appoint a Housing Tsar – Five-year tenure. Role: To deliver on the strategies below
- Form a national, Govt owned House Building Corporation – to identify and build mixed tenure (social and resale) homes on public owned land in competition with the big 10 housebuilders. Create a social housing boom accordingly. Rather handy for the 2 million households on the social housing waiting list
- Stamp Duty – If it really must be kept (it’s regressive and a tax on the South) it should now be paid by the seller at a flat 5% on all sales. All sellers have equity in their homes now and passing the levy to sellers rather than buyers would immediately help FTBs. Oh, and it would raise an extra £5 billion for the Treasury to waste on something.
- Return high-rate tax relief allowances to PRS landlords and remove the 3% SDLT penalty – If you don’t keep the sector healthy, attractive and stock high you will have a crisis on your hands (or rather the next guy or the one or other after that will).
- Legislate for ASTs of any length of time, not just 12 months and with a built in annual, agreed rent increase formula. This will allow tenants to feel secure and to put down roots. Can we remove the stigma of ‘renting’ please?
- Abolition of ground rent and of onerous lease renewal premium costs – Instead, a flat rate admin fee of £2000 to renew, thereby abolishing the wild-west approach we currently have.
- Right to Buy – reinvigorate it and allow housing association tenants to buy at a simple 10% discount but with the money earned guaranteed to go back into providing social housing
- Abolish Housing Associations – return to local council house building (see above for funding)
- New home builders – Give them tax relief on landbank plots that are built on quickly and penalties on plots retained for more 5 years.
- Planning reform – Appeals process to be run by county council democratically elected members and with mandate to build. Councils to be given 12 weeks from validation but only 2 weeks from submission to then validate.
PS: Don’t let NIMBYS within ten miles of anything planning related.
- Scrap Gove’s intended ‘Neighbourhood Veto’ madness. Actually, make this one the first thing you do
- Redesignate the green belt – SOME not all. In other words, categorise the genuinely green bits vs the grey bits. And build on the grey (not the green).
- Empty Govt/Local Govt homes. 12 months empty? Then they must be sold
- Home moving – A root and branch reform of the conveyancing process. Introduce centralised, live, digital information access for searches, title, management company data and so on. Better still abolish pointless searches and introduce a title insurance approach
Introduce reservation agreements with 21-day pre-contract contingency only – after which all parties are contracted. HIPS – bring them back, all is forgiven. Include a proper level of meaningful content: Contract, PIQ, enquiry replies, and Stat Decs, survey/condition report. Drop EPCs.
- Mandatory licensing of estate agents – bring it in properly and by way of a mechanism that has teeth and ‘proves knowledge as well as integrity’ on a regularly assessed basis. Higher standards equal better service (for agents this justifies higher fees too).
In closing, well, you’re welcome. And if you want to discuss that Housing Tsar gig, just call me. Jacob has my number.
Best wishes for the future.
RQ
Russell Quirk
Property Expert and Industry Guru
Simon Clarke confirmed as new housing secretary – industry reaction
Oh Russ, these are some of the worst ideas ever. I hope you wrote these as a joke?
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I bl00dy love Russell! The opening two paragraphs tell politicians exactly as it is instead of the usual polite sucking up most people do. Brilliant. Just about every idea is spot on too – I might just tweak one or two – but otherwise perfect! Russell for the Housing gig please!
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I checked and find it is not April 1st. So Russell, has the heat got to you? There is one single matter holding back Housing RED TAPE, like everything in this country it is stiffling progress, wasting time and causing stress. Bring back HIPS! Madness Bring in in licesening of estate agents! Madness Cancel Housing Associations and leave to local Cluncils! Madness When I trained as an estate agent in late fifties it took from applcation to a mortgage offer two weeks, another two to completion then between two and four weeks to completion. Total six to eight weeks. For every property sold one went to completion, same underlying simple reason ‘change of mind’. So Vendors and buyers have not chnaged what has is interfearance caused by well meaning politicians producing red tape to fill a small gap that then produces a canyon. Next weekend walk round an atractive village near you, Reflect as you sit in the village pub enjoying a pint. The layout of this preety village and th design of the many differnt styles was produced without any red take, planning officers and commitees, or red tape guidlines to adhere to. Come on Russell, wake up, do you really wish for yet more red tape, or is there an alternative motive? Promotion to MP then Housing Mintser and the rewarding gravy train?
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Don’t agree with it all, but some good points raised. Right to buy still exists but places are not being snapped up as tenants in receipt of any benefit cannot get mortgages. Lowering the discount to 10% will not boost sales. Better to dispense with it altogether. Social and housing association housing is for those who cannot afford to buy (we know that about 40% of right to buy sales end up in the PRS after a few years). Social rents should be means tested to discourage hogging of housing, by people who could afford to pay more or should move on. The planning system we have is open to corruption and cronyism and does need reform. Spare a thought for poor old NIMBYS. We all condemn them until somebody wants to build a housing estate at the bottom of our garden and then suddenly we join their ranks! It’s only natural.
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Something must be done, but… Really???
1. Appoint a Housing Tsar – why a five year tenure? All that does is add yet another level of interference within a broken system and yet another political fiefdom.
2. Form a national, Govt owned House Building Corporation – surely it would be better to force local authorities to do this in a proper framework to deliver the housing that is needed locally by people who understand their area.
3. Stamp Duty – get rid of it and replace the shortfall with what exactly. The south can DEFINITELY afford to pay it. But I agree that perhaps the seller should pay.
4. Return high-rate tax relief allowances to PRS landlords and remove the 3% SDLT penalty – accepted.
5. Legislate for ASTs of any length of time, not just 12 months and with a built in annual, agreed rent increase formula – defintely agree with removing the stigma but I can’t see who a “one size fits all” formula works in all areas across the country.
6. Abolition of ground rent and of onerous lease renewal premium costs – the leasehold system is nearly 100 years old in its current format and designed to keep rich people rich and poor people poor. But those rich people will not take that kind of meddling lying down. You have oversimplified something that involves approximately 50 Acts of Parliament. Put the subject down and walk away!!!
7. Right to Buy – housing associations work by borrowing 100% of their investment in a property. Change the rules at your peril. Why do you think that so many Housing Association shared owners have had such a hard time with the Fire Safety EWS1 issue? The Housing Associations could not afford to accept there was an issue because they would have broken their loan covenants and been absolutely screwed!!
8. Abolish Housing Associations – they have there place but should be forced to compete with the local councils.
9. New home builders – the accounting practice of “mark to market” means that the housebuilders are already in a wining position if they develop a site quickly…
10. Planning reform – dangerous to hand the truly important decisions to biased locals with potential screaming nimby-ism or even worse (“Don’t like that landowner – lets put a sewage works right there…”)
11. Scrap Gove’s intended ‘Neighbourhood Veto’ madness – AGREED!!!
12. Redesignate the green belt – agreed
13. Empty Govt/Local Govt homes. 12 months empty? Then they must be sold – Typically they are empty for a reason. What happens if not only the inside of the property is awful but so is the estate it’s on. It gets sold for tuppence ha’penny to some capitalist swine when it should be refurbished and retained by the local authority.
14. Home moving – what and do the lawyers out of their jobs…? Surely not! Oh the horror! Accepted 🙂
15. Introduce reservation agreements with 21-day pre-contract contingency only – after which all parties are contracted. Accepted but I’d keep the EPCs because they are valuable to the government to measure the sustainability of our housing stock and it’s change over time. They are a very quick, dirty and cheap method of doing so.
16. Mandatory licensing of estate agents – accepted.
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Not so easy to redesignate the green belt without creating loopholes and causing more problems. As soon as you create a definition of “grey” etc, you can bet the landowners will change the way they use their land to take advantage of the new loopholes. That might not produce the results you want. Maybe better to just drop the green belt all together in one go.
Mandatory licencing of estate agents is just a way of keeping down agency competition in an attempt to increase fees without improving service. A lot of sales agents didn’t even bother with floor plans until Purple Bricks came along and they kind of had to. Many lazy agents would just rather have found some legislation that would have closed PB down, rather than compete.
Why is it that no one learns from history.
Communism has failed every time it’s been tried, but this time it will be different? I doubt it. Agents hate the free market because competition pushes down their fees and forces up their service. Plus customers are so demanding. so Agents dream of being the only agent allowed to trade in the town, protected by law. They don’t usually say that bit out loud of course, they say they want tighter regulations on “cowboy agents” which sounds good, but we already have that. No, that’s not want they really mean at all. They want monopoly in the name of consumer protection. But the truth is that ONLY competition can force up standards and bring down fees for customers. Only COMPETITION can protect customers, not poorly enforced rules and regulations without customer choice.
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The problem is that the idea of naked competition has been proven time and again to be flawed. The free market has actually caused the Cost of Living Crisis as far as energy bills are concerned.
I have yet to understand why agent’s are so frightened of licensing. Especially if the idea of getting a property really ready for sale with a proper info pack all up front is in place. You will be able to charge more because you have spent more time doing the job. The value you actually add to the process is increased significantly and that in the end is the important point.
The status quo is supported by those in the industry because they know no better, but actually the property sales processes carried out in other countries work in very different ways and still generate the same results – people buying and selling property.
The idea that competition in the estate agency arena is the ONLY way to promote better service to the end user is incorrect. There are many ways to promote better service.
After nearly 30 years in the industry I can state that in my very limited experience, the one thing that competition has really done is to reduce the amount that the average person pays to sell their property. This has quiet a significant effect on the quality of service offered by the agent. Less money paid by each client means less money to the negotiators. Salespeople are attracted by money; it’s the very nature of the beast. If you want the best then you should expect to pay more.
I’ve been generating floorplans since 2004. I came up with a simple idea for video walkthroughs hosted on YouTube in 2011 that could be done by an agent rather than an outside company. They were quite successful but were rarely enough to persuade sellers to pay much above the local area commission rate.
Change can be scary, but sometimes change is very much for the better.
An please be respectful to others. Bandying around words like Communism is very dangerous and you have fallen into the trap of a straw man fallacy. Usage of such terms is there usually to provoke a hostile response so that the person you are disagreeing with looks diminished. Such tactics are very prevalent on internet forums and is somewhat depressing.
It is time for a change in so many things in our lives. The old way of doing things (and I’m not just talking agency here) has been proven time and again to be wrong.
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Agents in the know now know Selective Licensing brings higher rents. It’s just unnecessary admin that’s the burden.
I had to upload my same passport 36 times for each individual house in the Licensing area-Why? And I don’t mean 10 second upload, I mean 2+ mins slow rubbish Nottingham Council Website for a form that took 2 hours each time.
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Brilliant.
Many of us could solve 50% of homeless in 20.seconds and save the taxpayer £10 billion. But Govt and DWP UC and Councils Selective Licensing don’t do Common sense do they
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Not sure wher RQ leaves me ROFL or PMSL.
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