The government’s Help to Buy scheme intends to boost homeownership by reducing the down payment required. Analysis by Robbie de Santos and Toby Lloyd of Shelter shows that overall affordability is a bigger problem than the big deposits required by mortgage lenders. Easy finance into a supply constrained market can only push up house prices, pushing them further out of reach for the millions of lower and middle income households already frozen out of the housing market.
When the government launched the Help to Buy scheme in the budget back in March, it was couched in the terms ‘aspiration nation’. A cornerstone of which was about helping people achieve ‘that most human of aspirations’: owning a home. It’s not hard to see why the government are focusing on this. In the last decade, homeownership has declined for the first time since records began. That most human of aspirations has started to look wholly unachievable for most hard working families.
They are mostly renting from a private landlord now – there are now nine million people in the private rented sector, which has grown by 69% in the last decade. Renters have to grapple with a market dominated by short tenancies (in some places 6 months is the norm), high rents and big increases (people paying an extra £300 rent this year compared to last), meaning that more than half of renting families can only save £50 or less a month. For families in particular – 1.3 million of them, a third of the sector – the lack of stability and predictability can be a nightmare. 44% of renting families think their children would have a better childhood if they weren’t renting.
Importantly and as we’ve highlighted, renters are looking ever more like the archetypical swing voter – their incomes cluster round the median, they are more likely than any other group to be in full time work, and they are really, really feeling the squeeze. This is a key living standards issue, which is why influential think tanks like the Resolution Foundation are also looking at solutions for generation rent.
This book seeks to provide a detailed exploration of the relationships between individual architects, educators, artists and designers that laid the foundation and shaped the approach to designing new school buildings in postwar Britain. It explores the life and work of Mary Medd, one of the most important modernist architects of the 20th century. Kerwin Datu finds that this biography falls short in some places but is historically valuable when we compare Medd’s ideas with the current state of British education.
A Life in Education and Architecture: Mary Beaumont Medd. Catherine Burke. Ashgate. December 2012.
The planet is sick and human beings have to pay. Today, that is the orthodoxy throughout the Western world, and our ecological catastrophism is turning us into cowering children, writes Pascal Bruckner. Rather than preaching catastrophe and pessimism, Bruckner argues that we instead need to develop a democratic and generous ecology that addresses specific problems in a practical way. Amelia Sharman finds this philosophical work a frustrating read for the ways it ignores the large body of climate science on the significant detrimental impacts to many areas of the world.
A new survey has been undertaken which looks at the changing practices of academics in the UK.
