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Morning Briefing: nearly 80,000 council jobs lost
A new investigation has revealed that English councils have made 75,891 jobs redundant in the past five years, and the rest of the morning’s housing news
In the news
As part of its ongoing investigation into the impact of austerity on local authorities, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in partnership with HuffPost, revealed the redundancy figures.
It has also revealed that councils paid for many of these redundancies by selling off public land and spaces, such as libraries, parks and community centres.
Meanwhile, Brexit uncertainty has continued to hit the housing market, with the BBC reporting that the UK’s largest estate agent is feeling the pinch.
Countrywide has been hit by widening losses, blaming the uncertainty around Brexit for “affecting both our sector and consumer confidence as a whole”.
Despite this, Reuters has a story on house prices, which says that they showed a surprise spike in February.
According to the news agency, prices leapt up by 5.9% from January, the biggest monthly increase since at least the 1980s.
It is amid this market volatility that chancellor Philip Hammond must deliver next week’s Spring Statement and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is calling for a boost in welfare spending.
It says Mr Hammond ought to end the freeze on benefits and tax credits and increase them in line with inflation.
Elsewhere, The Guardian carries a story on the latest statistics on cladding removal, which, as Inside Housing reported yesterday, show that six more towers were stripped in February.
In local news, The Argus reports that Brighton and Hove Council has rejected claims that it fudged figures on rough sleeping.
Conservative opposition councillors have criticised officials for a change in the method used to count people sleeping on the streets, after recorded numbers fell from 178 in 2017 to 64 in November last year on a snowy night.
Further along the coast, Portsmouth-based The News reports on comments from Labour’s shadow housing secretary John Healey.
Mr Healey said that the city’s waiting list will take 80 years to clear at the current rate of building, criticising the council, which is currently under Liberal Democrat administration, for being “too slow to act”.
In Manchester, the Manchester Evening News says the council is considering offering pensioners £1,000 to allow homeless families to move into their large council homes.
On social media
And now it’s a matter of record in Hansard - MPs want Housing Associations to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Quite right too. t.co/Fj16ARxSv4
— MTV_Tenant (@MtvTenant)And now it's a matter of record in Hansard - MPs want Housing Associations to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Quite right too. https://t.co/Fj16ARxSv4
— MTV_Tenant (@MtvTenant) March 7, 2019
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