By Peter Ambrose
22 April 2009

Thinking Inside and Outside the Box

 Failures in Strategic Thinking

The Chancellor’s statement does not mention, or deals totally inadequately with, the following strategic points first raised in the 2005 Z2K Memorandum to the Prime Minister on Unaffordable Housing:

1. There is no statement of the aims of housing policy
2. There is no recognition that poor housing costs billions of pounds of public funds on a wide range of budgets
3. There are no measures to increase the flow of infrastructured land
4. There are no measures to reduce/eradicate land speculation or measures to promote CLTs
5. There is nothing to stimulate innovation and efficiencies in housebuilding
6. There is no move to rebalance supply/demand support imbalance
7. There is nothing to reduce the effects of the housing benefit poverty trap
8. There is no discussion of the need to regulate the flow of house purchase lending to match housing output
9. There is no proposal to end the ‘daylight robbery’ from local authority Housing Revenue Accounts or to moderate the steep rise in council house rents 
10. The investment proposed in new local authority housebuilding is derisory

Specific Critique by Subject

Please click on the links below to read further.
General Observations

• Proposed measures have no significant impact.
• Those who rent, live alone or homeless are not considered in the budget.

Specific Housing Measures in the Short Term

• Those who can't afford to purchase a home are not helped by the short term measures.

Longer Term Housing Measures

• Insufficient support for council house building.
• Systemic problems in the housebuilding industry are not addressed.

The relationship of housing policy to child poverty

• Rent hike leads to increasing poverty.

Regulation of Financial Institutions

• The cause of the problem not addressed.

The overall public debt situation

• Serious housebuilding programme unlikely in near future

The Summary of the Critique

• The economy will in time recover. But Z2K feel it is imperative that lessons are learned from the present disaster and that the arguments laid out in the 2005 Memorandum, the online film ‘No Place Like Home’  and the Z2K Housing Review  must be seriously considered by government. The 2009 Budget Statement gives little confidence that this will be the case.

You can find more information about the 2009 budget in the parliament website at http://news.parliament.uk/2009/04/debate-on-2009-budget/.