Housing for young people
A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has called for urgent action to help young people who cannot afford local house prices.
Stakeholder Response:The Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Lord Richard Best, director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: "The government has acknowledged the gap between home ownership and eligibility for subsidy and social housing.
"It has consulted on plans for ‘Homebuy’, to enable house buyers to use equity loans to increase their buying power. But Professor Wilcox’s report reveals the sheer scale of the problem.
"If large numbers of households are not to miss out on the benefits of home ownership, then much greater efforts – and probably much more public money – will be needed to give them a break"
Stakeholder Response: Council of Mortgage Lenders
A spokesperson for the CML told ePolitix.com: "We believe there is scope to create a much more flexible housing market, and have been working with the government to try to extend low-cost home-ownership.
"Within the right framework, private funding can stretch the resources available through public assistance to help bridge the gap between what people can afford and the costs of full home-ownership.
"The expansion of an intermediate tenure would allow people to increase or decrease their level of ownership as their circumstances changed.
"The proposed new public/private share equity scheme would be a positive step for the market, and would help around 20,000 first-time buyers get onto the property ladder who would not otherwise be able to afford to do so. However, we recognise that this is still a modest contribution in the context of over a million housing transactions a year.
"It is also crucially important that the shared equity scheme goes hand-in-hand with a real increase in housing supply. The government will need to ensure there is sufficient housing stock available to prevent driving up housing prices in areas where there may be increased demand amongst first-time buyers on modest incomes.
"More broadly still, the government needs to take a more integrated view of its various policy initiatives.
"We support its stated objective of expanding home-ownership but this is being undermined by the increased costs and resulting restricted range of products available to consumers because of the range of complexity of regulatory initiatives being pursued by government at different levels."
Stakeholder Response: British Property Federation
Chris Carter, director of public affairs at the British Property Federation, said: "The latest figures from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reinforce the fact that we must support policies that encourage the growth of a professionally managed and owned intermediate private rented sector housing market following the US model where a majority of '20-somethings' chose to rent high quality apartments over owner-occupation for a variety of reasons, including: inability to afford or lack of desire to take on the obligations of a mortgage, better quality of rented accommodation over owner/occupation, and the freedom of mobility that renting provides.
"Similar to the growth of high density housing being developed for universities for which every student block with 400 beds frees up 80 Victorian family terraced house for families, the introduction of a strong intermediate private rented sector for the intermediate market would help to reduce pressures on housing supply and reduce the need for 'house sharing' in favour of high density living in blocks of flats – thus freeing up family homes for families.
"Ken Livingstone recently stated that 35 per cent of
"The existing system which former planning minister Keith Hill termed a 'cottage industry' needs to come of age and with the introduction of Real Estate Investment Trusts in 2006, institutional investment and professional management could make private renting a much more attractive option for housing tenure – helping to shore up housing opportunities for the intermediate market."
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