By Sebastian O’Kelly
The Guardian has described this two part BBC2 documentary as the most “nakedly furious” documentary in years.
Part 1 was broadcast on Tuesday night, and now on iPlayer, looking at the political drive to encourage home ownership, which is now spectacularly failing as home ownership is falling.
The second part broadcast next Tuesday at 9pm looks at other failings in leasehold, the corruption of the housebuilding sector, the appalling build quality, the despair of young people unable to get on to the housing ladder, the outrageous rental market and the failings in social housing.
At the heart of this, as I tell the programme, was the utter disaster of turning housing into an investment asset rather than a social need over the past 25 years. This let rip a generation of baby boomer investors hoovering up housing that would normally have been bought by poorer people and the young, and they in turn were muscled out by richer investors, and overseas punters, who wanted the largest slice of this attractive pie of inflating asset prices.
The worst sector, and the area most attractive to “financial engineers” were leasehold properties: where the landlord with a minimal investment – the freehold may be worth only 1-3% of the collective leases of a block – makes all the decisions, and has a uniquely privileged position in law.
Part 1:
Britain’s Housing Crisis: What Went Wrong? – Series 1: Episode 1
How politicians promised home ownership, but with policies that sent prices out of reach.
Part 2:
Britain’s Housing Crisis: What Went Wrong? – Series 1: Episode 2
How the strain on housing – from new builds to social homes – reached breaking point.
Related posts:
Channel Four documentary on retirement leasehold on September 24
TV documentary on retirement industry needs help
Housing associations furious at government’s 10-year repair-free offer to new shared owners
Why is the Tory party not supporting real home ownership, asks Daily Telegraph
Furious Persimmon leasehold house owners at Harrow View West demand their freeholds
Southwark council meets its leaseholders. Lambeth pays them off (and deploys NDAs)
The primary objective of any Government is to protect its Citizens, food, clothing & shelter area basic human requirement.
I believe that all Governments for at least the past four decades have failed miserably to ensure their is sufficient affordable homes for its Citizens. This failure has driven house and rental prices through the roof. We now have a situation where a majority of the population will never be able to own a property and will struggle to find an affordable rental home.
Our first home was a rental property in Lancashire we paid £ 12.00 a Month, a similar property today will cost £ 600.00 per Month.
The housing market is now completely out of control thanks to various Governments squandering vast amounts of tax payers cash on short term, ill conceived and poorly thought out assumptions that some how some day this squandered money will produce more Affordable Home which it obviously has not.
That money funded Shared Ownership and many other initiatives that only benefitted the Builders, Freeholders and their specially selected managing agents. The rest of us are left to pay through the nose for a property our Grand parents or Great Grand parents could reasonably afford an a pittance of an income.
The current Housing situation is a complete shambles in my opinion, and unless their is some positive radical change announced in the King’s Speech the situation will continue to get much worse.
I am aware of a number of Landlords ( including good Friends ) in the Leasehold sector who are furious with the amount of money they have to cough up to Freeholders, out of their rental income for service charge payment. Some have written to their tenants and have actually encouraged them to go Right to Manage. Many have clearly benefitted from an improved return on investment when letting out property’s in RTM managed buildings.
Thank you again, LKP, for the heads-up.
It’s not shambolic, that implies there was no wish by those in power to get to this state of affairs. No, it’s a choice by those in charge and it’s very ‘cosy’ and a little bit corrupt…. or do we not use the c-word in this country?
As for right to manage. it is a not exactly the structural change the Law Commission report recommends, more a meagre scrap of bread thrown to us from the top table of land-owners.
Unfortunately, in most cases, RTM is an illusion of leaseholder control (that is if residents have the time to manage their often useless managing agents) and doesn’t change the fact that there is ongoing discrimination of those living in flats. What’s the point in reducing service charges if a lease extension costs maybe £3 or 400k (especially in big cities). That’s why freeholders, i.e. the big estates, charity sector (which are also freeholders, of course), , investment groups, oversees landlords et al didn’t whine about the legislation. IT may, in some cases, mean a resident-owner could be worse off than a renter. And it certainly doesn’t help affordability for people trying to buy and who aren’t eligible for social housing.
We are told constantly how complex it would be to abolish leasehold. But why? Almost all houses in England are freehold. Freeholders would just have to get used to the changes the way most subjects have to adjust when changes are brought in by Government.
Those 5 million or so voters could make a huge difference to the party which delivers reform.
No abolition? No solutions? No time in parliament? No this, no that? No votes!
Thank you Sebastian. I hope you, your colleagues and your readers won`t mind a bit of muscling in here on the backs of LKP – but it would be shockingly revealing, if after next Tuesday`s broadcast, there were to be following investigation into the Park Homes market, the latest event being the spectacular collapse of Royale Life with its investor connections to organised crime. Thankfully, due to the LKP, abuses in the leasehold sector are now better known – but the ostriches charged with overseeing the residential mobile home sector need to be burying their heads to locate the golden eggs that have long been secreted by the crooked geese – But iI`ll stop here – otherwise I`ll need to explain all about the fleecing of the lambs.
Biased nonsense. If young people deserved affordable, decent housing then they’d have made the effort to be born with significant genetic advantage in terms of intellect and skills which are extremely well rewarded under this deeply nasty version of capitalism. Or, at the very least, they’d have made sure their parents were multi-millionaires capable of buying houses for them.
The idea that the bottom 95% deserve decent affordable housing is genocidal communism, and I honestly believe that you are all evil for suggesting it.
Well said, Wild Eye.
Young, old and every age in between, if people cannot be bothered to be born to multi-millionaires and billionaires in the first place, then how can they expect a roof over their heads. After all, they are allowed to live somewhere for a few years but that’s never enough for some people!
God forbid, our housing market ends up more…. (I can barely bring myself to say it) egalitarian and European.
its idiots like you that forced people into supporting communist revolutions in the past. You reap what you sow.
I suspect you are just a troll from one of the robber freeholder companies.