Curb on shared housing: government allows councils to push out the young and less well off
Housing minister John Healy has announced that councils will soon be able to limit the number of shared houses in their localities. Landlords who wish to rent out homes to 3 or more unrelated people face having to seek planning permission. Allegedly such measures are being put in place to curb anti-social behaviour. I would imagine that Tory councillors accross the country are already salivating over the opportunity to gentrify their localities by simple bureaucratic fiat.
Alot f media reports have equated shared housing with students. Yet as many of you will recognize, shared housing is pretty much the norm for many people in their twenties and beyond. For one thing, living with peers or friends can be great fun. Perhaps more importantly, a great many people are simply not in a position to spend 12,000k a year on single-handedly renting a home in places like London. This move will limit the supply of housing to the young, and the less well off. At the very least this is likely to land these groups with higher rent bills, as they bid against each other for a dwindling stock of shared housing. Equally it will limit choice. It will be those of us who now need to save up bigger amounts than ever before to get on the housing ladder whose incomes will be hit.
These new local authority powers, of course, come at a time when the Tories are dominating local government. It is incredibly naive to imagine that such councils will not simply take the opportunity to discourage new immigrants and those on lower incomes from settling in their areas. Yet I also predict that these measures will damage areas in ways that people do not initially imagine. Bars, pubs, cafes, and other places of entertainment are great to have around. Limiting shared housing an area is highly likely to damage their viability – after all shared housing appeals not only to the young and childless, but also, almost by definition, to the sociable.
Finally, aside from the economic impact of this move, it also strikes me as deeply intrusive. As I said before, the rules will apply to shared housing being rented to unrelated people. When the Tories proposed marriage tax breaks, virtually everybody from Nick Clegg leftwards attacked it. For the same reason we should angrily oppose a measure that effectively makes something as basic as access to housing dependent on one’s marital or familial arrangements.
Reader Comments
bravo, reuben. any move that irrationally limits our freedom of choice is one that needs decrying.
Hi Reuben,
Interestingly my boss Alan Whitehead was one of the main protagonists (along with Unite and several other Labour MPs including Andrew Smith and Roberta Blackman-Woods) in the campaign for the new secondary legislation on HMOs, which started around 2005.
The intentions behind the legislation are quite different from those you’ve described. From our point of view the legislation was largely brought in to protect students and migrant workers (as you state, the primary occupants of HMOs – Houses in Multiple Occupation) who currently bear the brunt of the community’s anger about dilapidated housing and overcrowded neighbourhoods, when that anger should be directed at irresponsible and unscrupulous landlords. Such individuals fail to maintain their properties, take advantage of their tennants wherever possible (often helped by the fact that their tennants are very young or have a poor grasp of English) and up til now have faced very little plausible legal opposition.
Furthermore students such as my sister -who is at University in Sheffield- are expected to live in damp, uninsulated accomodation with unreliable heating and poorly maintained exteriors, driving their energy bills as well as their carbon footprint up, all because landlords are not forced to provide minimum standards of property maintenance. The young and the poor in this country generally live in apalling housing and this new legislation will make it much easier for councils to force landlords to make properties suitable for multiple occupyer use before renting them out.
Councils have had these powers to designate areas of “high stress” in heavily built up cities – meaning that all HMO landlords must be licensed in order to rent accomodation there – for some time. The difference is previously they had to apply to the Secretary of State for this designation and now they can do it of their own accord. Of course many Tory councils will still refuse to take up these powers, just as they have been refusing to do so for many years – with one Southampton Tory councillor refering to all landlord licensing as “regulatory blackmail” against entrepreneurs.
It is also worth adding that these are measures that Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, have been calling for since 2004.
As regards the affordable housing shortage – this is not to be solved by simply cramming more migrants into one room, as many unscrupulous landlords are willing to do. I make the point again that just because people are poor or young doesn’t mean they should have to put up with substandard overcrowded living arrangements. (This is not to mention that given the vast revenues from the private rented sector my suspicion is that private landlords will just cough up for the license).
What would solve the affordable housing shortage would be if the Tories would commit to the Government’s target of 3 million new affordable homes by 2020. In their most recent Housing White Paper the Conservatives commit to the opposite – repealing the Government’s requirement that all local authorities build a target number of affordable homes in their area every year.
I think suggesting that the Government is trying to force young people and migrants out of shared housing with this legislation provides a smoke-screen for the consummate failure of Conservative councils to tackle the housing shortage, and for their support of the (often) rapacious and unprincipled private rented sector.
I should also add that wanting to be able to park your car within a mile of your house, or not wanting your garden overrun with rats because your neighbour’s rubbish hasn’t been collected is hardly a great example of bourgeois whimsy. Residents complaints are legitimate – it’s not just student-bashing and anti-migrant sentiment.
In fact unrelated adults sharing, especially in older ages may present mental and physical health risks. This is not always done by choice, more by circumstance. Those that grow living with adults who are not family or friends – and share kitchen, bathroom etc actually are considered to be in a state of potential poverty due to lack of true privacy.
See this interesting report
http://www.cieh.org/JEHR/housing_mental_health.html
Hello
I have read the comments, what is to happen to Socially Ex-clude dpeople that are on our streets the only way to get them of the streets and into sustainable accommodation is normally rooms in shared accomodation.
I work with landlords in the private sector some have a more than two houses all HMO Licenced, who take good care of their properties, as a Charity and targeting the private sector for accommodation, then working with our customers regarding Education Training and Employment people that society have let down time and time again 196 off the streets in 3 years thanks to our Landlord who are willing to work with us, a room is heaven to a lot of people currently out there on our street.
The change should be placed in context: it’s primarily a change to planning rules. Council planning committees have the ability to stop the owners of property from changing its use, whether from residential to commercial or from one type of commercial to another.
Changing a standard residential property to an HMO represents a genuine change of use, and up until now councils have had literally no ability to limit the effect of this on a particular street or area. The effects of studentification are genuine and cause a lot of resentment on both sides whilst absentee landlords turn a very quick buck.
You mention that blocking HMOs could have unintended consequences on bars, cafes, shops etc. in the area. This obviously works both ways — the changes encouraged by high levels of HMOs aren’t always attractive! Only by allowing a degree of localism — which does unfortunately mean giving Tory councillors powers as well! — can we have a hope of allowing HMOs where they are needed and would bring benefit, whilst not allowing them to overrun an area with all the negative consequences of that.
Alex and RHona, you boh raise good points. What I would question, however, is whether decisions like this should be devolved from the secretary of state to local government. I ask ths because housing policy so often seems to be characterised by a conflict between local preferences and national interest. It might make sense – within a purely local focus – for a council to keep its area low density. Yet so often this has frustrated the wider rneed for more housing to be built. The councils who keep vast swathes of the country in low density housing are not accountable to those who dwell outside their localities but suffer for their decisions.
Reuben I applaud your post, though I suspect it will win you few friends.
This change was pushed through by Labour just before the election after some very selective consultation in 2009.
Rhona, you are running together HMO licensing under the Housing Act 2004 that Labour (in my view, shamefully) did not require to be mandatory throughout, focusing only on three storey properties (with landlords leaving lofts empty so that they would not have to comply in some cases) supplemented by limited additional licensing.
This is a different policy it relates to planning. Alex, you say that it is a ‘genuine change of use’. You may believe that – personally I don’t. It is a home if three related people live there and a home if three unrelated people live there. What do people do there? Eat, sleep, work, recreate?
Yes there is intensification and greater density and it is well documented that existing residents always oppose increasing densities – even in urban areas (and the tories have just abolished the density requirements in Planning Policy 3 just to underscore this point).
By excluding multiple use you are also excluding multiple use. It is, as the Americans put it, ‘exclusionary zoning’. I find it as regressive as anything I’ve seen but it is hugely popular with owner occupiers – be they labour, tory and lib dem.