The EHRC has released guidance for social housing providers on the relevance of human rights to social housing provision and managment and on how to comply. The guidance can be downloaded here [link to pdf]… Read the full post
Tag Archive for 'social housing'
This is the Strata Tower, less than proud winner of Building Design’s 2010 Carbuncle Cup, awarded to the ugliest new building in the country for its ‘odour of boy musk’, ‘grim stridency’ and for auditioning for a ‘James Bond title sequence in the Elephant and Castle’. (I must note that the nomination was from the Georgian Group, who surely had a hard time focussing their bile on only one contemporary building without pilasters, so congratulations to them for picking a contemporary building that for once actually is ugly.)
The Strata is a thoroughly unavoidable part of my working day and, as a flagship development for the ‘regeneration’ of the … Read the full post
Or the good, the bad and the ugly from the Housing minister and the Communities and Local Government secretary.
Grant Shapps, housing minister has been setting out some plans, or perhaps aspirations. Mostly, these seem to involve encouraging people to buy houses. And encouraging mortgage lenders to lend more to people to buy houses. Via an unspecified “structural change” in how supply meets demand. Sounds like a plan, and one we haven’t seen before…
On rented accommodation, Mr Shapps confirmed that the national landlord register mooted under the last government will be scrapped. The rest of the Rugg review recommendations and being considered – more to come shortly, but … Read the full post
‘Building Britain’s Future’, a broad Government policy direction document, has been put out and must be regarded as an early draft of the Labour election manifesto. As people may well have heard, social housing and the allocation thereof features in the plan.
If you skip to page 82 of the full PDF, the suggestions are laid out in tantalising vagueness. Given the ‘to be announced’ nature of most of the contents (and, one presumes, the election based provisionality of much of it), what is actually in there?
The good -
we will consult on reforming the council housing finance system and allow local authorities to keep all the proceeds
The Tenants Services Authority (the new regulatory body for RSLs and, from April 2010, local authorities) has been holding a “national conversation” with tenants, touring round in a pink campervan amongst other engagement techniques. The outcome from that, and from broader regulatory conversations one suspects, is Building a New Regulatory Framework: A Discussion Paper. This is destined to be an important document when finalised – comments are due by 08 September 2009 and can be addressed to national.conversation@tsa.dsx.gov.uk – in part because of its (ir-)relevance when thinking about a jr (after Weaver) but, most significantly because of the regulatory standards it will lay down for tenants and landlords (now … Read the full post
As we noted here, the Government’s new Equality Bill brings together various bits of anti-discrimination legislation and extends some of them. One area that is extended is protection against age discrimination, which is now covered by Part 3, in respect of goods, facilities and services. It is not however covered by Part 4 which deals with premises, including housing.
A number of people seem to be looking into this; the Conservatives have put down an amendment as part of the Committee stage, which would include age in Part 4. We have been contacted by Age Concern and Help the Aged, who are looking for any evidence of harmful age discrimination … Read the full post
A new Equality Bill was a flagship manifesto commitment and it was finally published at the end of April. The Bill receives its second reading in the House of Commons today. While the Bill is primarily consolidating and tidying up existing law there are four important parts that may affect housing law:
- Disability discrimination in the wake of Malcolm
- Age discrimination
- Socio-economic disadvantage duty
- Extension of Public Sector Equality Duty
Taking them in the order that they appear in the Bill, clause 1 introduces a new duty on specified public authorities who must:
when making decisions of a strategic nature about how to exercise its functions, have due regard to
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