Antony Atkins
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Comment on: Council to start licensing all HMOs
This petty behaviour by Oxford City Council is wholly typical: why are they picking on landlords to install hard-wired fire alarms, whilst thousands of private houses don't even have smoke alarms, let alone battery-powered ones? What is the point of installing fire doors, when everyone knows that most tenants simply prop them open because they are so irritating and inconvenient? Who is overseeing and controlling Oxford's self-declared and arbitrary notion of what constitutes "decent" living conditions?
And it won't end here: since Oxford CC can define "decent" using any criteria it likes, the standards for HMOs will gradually "improve" to impose compulsory fire doors and an ensuite bathroom in every room, the lining of wooden staircases with fireproof materials, the installation of illuminated fire escape signs everywhere, etc.
And then there will be a change to the Article 4 direction, so that once a house is defined as an HMO, Oxford's planning rules will ban it from reverting to a family house, on the grounds that the council needs to control the local housing mix. Oxford will then have a guaranteed supply of HMO landlords, trapped and unable to sell their properties on the open market, and subject to a never-ending set of "improvements" dreamt up by the council's pettyfrogging bureaucrats.
And the next step after that? Landlords will be told they will only be allowed to renew their HMO license if they charge "affordable" rents and adopt "socially responsible" lettings policies, i.e. because of Oxford's ongoing housing crisis, HMOs must be rented first to LHA benefit claimants selected for them by the Council and at a pre-determined fair rent level. If the landlords refuse to do this, they will lose their HMO license and yet not be able to sell the property to a private buyer because it is still covered by the Article 4 Direction.
If I were renting an HMO in Oxford, I would simply leave the market - get rid of my four or five students or young working people, and rent to couples or families instead - there's plenty of demand, and the reduced rent is amply compensated by getting Oxford City Council off your back. -
Comment on: Losing the plot
The notion that developers and housebuilders are receiving a "subsidy" or "corporate welfare" is simply laughable: all they are getting is some relief from the crippling burden of planning costs, ever-increasing build costs as we move to CSH6, unregulated and arbitrary S106 taxes, and the obligation to give away 33-40% of their sites as so-called affordable homes to housing associations. The building industry didn't make a “bargain”: it had these taxes imposed on it, on top of a savage recession!
Not surprisingly the number of houses being built has fallen away, and thousands of small building firms and developers have been discouraged and driven out of the market because their sites have ceased to be viable. There's no work coming in from outsiders, the banks won't lend unless you can prove a minimum 20% profit margin, so you have to build using your own cash, and even if by some miracle a small developer does get a site for, say, five houses through planning, two of the houses have to be financed, built and given away to a housing association, and the local authority (in my area, Berkshire) wants £26,000 per house in S106 taxes up-front with the planning application. And when you do finally stagger over the finish line and complete your three remaining houses for private sale, mortgage lenders will instruct surveyors to value the houses as if they were second-hand, no higher in price than the clapped-out 1960s houses down the road despite massive improvements in insulation, airtightness, integrated facilities and general build quality.
I'm actually in favour of Jules Birch's final proposals, to encourage small developers and self-builders like me, instead of throwing public land in blocks to the large housebuilders in exchange for all those free affordable homes and infrastructure that council and housing associations love to receive. But you can't have one without the other: you can't help smaller builders and local supply chains, or develop a system of ready-to-build plots for self-builders like they have in Australia, without reducing the amount of S106 and social housing taxes being imposed: those costs are simply killing off small developers, never mind putting the squeeze on big ones, who consequently are forced to focus on low volumes on their most profitable sites. -
Comment on: Margin call
I wouldn't call 6.4%-10% margins "very nice" or representing any kind of profiteering. The stock market would seem to agree: the share prices for the major housebuilders are barely 10% of their rating in 2008.
Also, you complain that the Top 10 housebuilders account for 40% of the market: this isn't exactly market dominance. What about the other 60%? What are their margins like, and are they deliberately restricting volume in order to maximise their profits in the way you suggest the Top 10 are? -
Comment on: Shapps outlines zero carbon standard
Deverlops "must" do this, and developers "must" do that. And who is going to pay for this? Certainly not buyers, who refuse to pay a penny extra for zero-carbon homes, so as usual all the expense falls on developers, on top of affordable homes and S106 and all the other taxes. As a small developer, my profit margins are already below the 15% required by the banks to avance business loans, so I'm trapped unable to build on what would normally be perfectly viable sites because of the ludicrous levels of taxation, building specification, social housing supply and planning procedures now required by government. Government policy, added and abetted by a myriad of special interests who see property developers and builders as a soft touch for all their favourite projects, are killing off small builders in this country, pushing everything into the hands of the huge developers, who in turn can only make a profit by cramming the sites and going for the simplest mono-cultural designs of housing.
Why is so much burden being placed on the building of new homes, when vastly more carbon could be saved by retro-fitting the existing housing stock? Why are policies for social housing and local infrastructure being placed solely on the new homes market, when there are millions of existing houses and taxpayers who have as much stake in the provision of "affordable" homes, improved roads and so as buyers of new homes? -
Comment on: Shapps outlines zero carbon standard
Deverlops "must" do this, and developers "must" do that. And who is going to pay for this? Certainly not buyers, who refuse to pay a penny extra for zero-carbon homes, so as usual all the expense falls on developers, on top of affordable homes and S106 and all the other taxes. As a small developer, my profit margins are already below the 15% required by the banks to avance business loans, so I'm trapped unable to build on what would normally be perfectly viable sites because of the ludicrous levels of taxation, building specification, social housing supply and planning procedures now required by government. Government policy, added and abetted by a myriad of special interests who see property developers and builders as a soft touch for all their favourite projects, are killing off small builders in this country, pushing everything into the hands of the huge developers, who in turn can only make a profit by cramming the sites and going for the simplest mono-cultural designs of housing.
Why is so much burden being placed on the building of new homes, when vastly more carbon could be saved by retro-fitting the existing housing stock? Why are policies for social housing and local infrastructure being placed solely on the new homes market, when there are millions of existing houses and taxpayers who have as much stake in the provision of "affordable" homes, improved roads and so as buyers of new homes?
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