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1. We need to understand how this huge call on the HB budget (£21bn per year) arose. It arose because of the failures in financial management over the period 1980-2005. The financial deregulations of the early 1980s allowed house purchase lending to spiral out of control thus driving house prices to unprecedented levels and with them rents – which by various mechanisms reflect house price movements and consequentially housing benefit. Simultaneously the Housing Act 1988 allowed landlords to charge a market rent, thus leading rents to spiral after 15th January 1989. This removed rent controls from the Rent Act 1977 scheme yet again inevitably increasing housing benefit. So it remained until the bubble burst. Continue reading →

In January we held an Energy Awareness Conference in association with Consumer Focus. The event brought advice agencies and energy suppliers together to discuss consumer support and protection. The slides and the report is available below. 

We’ve had some great feedback and are beginning to consider how we can continue to develop these relationships, including through the formation of an advice agency group that meets regularly with the industry to discuss issues and how to strengthen processes to help consumers. Please email admin@z2k.org if you are interested in participating in the group. Continue reading →

by Rev Paul Nicolson, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust.

Delivered at the Defend Council House Lobby in Committee Room 7 at the Parliament at 1pm on 11 Oct 2010.

The decision to cap housing benefit is a spectacular example of economic injustice. It continues decades of the disintegration of economically mixed communities, and hits the poorest households below the belt – while protecting the speculators and landlords who profit from high rents and therefore high housing benefit.

I was a Parish priest in a beautiful village in the Chiltern Hills from 1982 to 1999. Most people have seen it on television, where it is called Dibley.  During that time, a combination of the sale of council houses and private speculation ended the mixed community of rich, middle class and poor. The right to buy led to the sale of council houses to sitting tenants for £25,000 they are now being sold on at around £250,000; the villagers’ rented cottages were bought by a speculator in the 1940s and sold off for a fortune every time a tenant died. You have to raise at least ££400,000 to live in Dibleyland now unless you are a servant, a farm labourer or a vicar in tied houses. Continue reading →

Introduction

Z2K is proposing a Royal Commission on Housing, which touches the heart of the UK economy and the well being of our citizens. It provides an opportunity to address the intrinsic inequality in the distribution of wealth and incomes governing the ownership of land and the provision of housing, which produces poor, sometimes even disastrous, social and economic outcomes. We are advised by Peter Ambrose, Visiting Professor of Health and Housing at the University of Brighton.

The Proposal

It is apparent that the UK has a financial crisis of its own making. The deficit, currently expected to be £165 billion in 2011, and the housing benefit cost of £21 billion are the consequences of governmental action and inaction since 1979. It is necessary to understand how we got to where we are. Continue reading →

By Peter Ambrose

“No Place Like Home” – an introduction to Z2K Housing Review

• part 1: Why housing is so important
• part 2: What has gone wrong – the evidence
• part 3: Why has it gone wrong – the reasons
• part 4: The main lessons – and how to do it better

This is the final video of “No Place Like Home”, the four-part film introduction to Z2K Housing Review. Continue reading →

by Peter Ambrose

“No Place Like Home” – an introduction to Z2K Housing Review

• part 1: Why housing is so important
• part 2: What has gone wrong – the evidence
• part 3: Why has it gone wrong – the reasons
• part 4: The main lessons – and how to do it better

We saw in Part 2 that many of the loan and mortgage products developed by financial institutions in recent years have been very complex and have used the mathematics of gambling. Continue reading →

By Peter Ambrose

“No Place Like Home” – an introduction to Z2K Housing Review

• part 1: Why housing is so important
• part 2: What has gone wrong – the evidence
• part 3: Why has it gone wrong – the reasons
• part 4: The main lessons – and how to do it better

Andy explains that the mathematics behind the derivatives and other complex financial products that have helped to fuel the crisis are based on the mathematics of gambling devised centuries ago. So the investment behaviour of major City institutions in recent decades, as they have invested the funds on which the future health and welfare of millions depends, has been in effect one big profit-driven gamble. Continue reading →

The four-part film ‘No Place Like Home’ forms an introduction to the Review. This film grows out of, and adds to, the structural analysis and critique of housing policy contained in the Z2K Memorandum to the Prime Minister on Unaffordable Housing.

The review will be published quarterly with a first edition in April 2009. It will contain up to date information, comment, discussion and proposals from experts, policy makers, academics and professionals in the field of housing. The ambition is to create a dynamic locus for debate that will provide decision makers with informed choices and that will encourage more holistic and strategic thinking about housing policy development than has been evident in recent decades. It will also be a resource for those studying housing issues at FE and HE levels.” Continue reading →