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Goldhawk Road in West London, is renowned for its terraced row of independent, family-run fabric shops. "This is where fashion starts on Goldhawk Road," said Aniza Meghani, owner of the Classic Textiles fabric shop, with the Lime Grove campus of the London College of Fashion located a block away.
Residents at Woodland Court UNITE student accommodation have been told they must vacate their rooms during summer despite holding a signed tenancy contract to have the room until September. A petition has been launched in support of students wishing to stay in their rooms.
Unfortunately, this government inspired (and underwritten) subprime mortgage is threatening the economic benefits of house building by injecting an additional dose of risk into the transaction. When did we decide that high loan to value mortgages had become less risky?
What does appear to be clear beyond reasonable doubt is that crime in this country is falling. It's falling in some other countries too, but the decline is particularly marked in Britain. Crime in England and Wales has halved since the 1990s, including an 8% fall in a single year.
Buying a house can be enough of a headache without the constant stress of the possibility of the broken 'chain' phenomenon.
This week I will present a 10 Minute Rule Bill to Parliament calling for stricter rules to impose fines on developers who deliberately exceed planning consents.
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will commit at least £300, 000 of the £16.8m allocated for the Greater London Authority's (GLA) rough sleeping budget for 2013-15, to support London's homeless veterans.
As well as targeting specific funds to get stalled schemes in our most buoyant cities moving, we need to see more autonomy for cities to drive investment in new housing. By removing the restrictions on councils' ability to borrow money against their existing housing assets to invest in new housing, industry experts suggest councils could borrow an additional £2.8bn to invest in new housing.
Nothing the government said in the Budget will aid the housing market. A toothless bunch, the market has recovered through hard work and honest advice from estate agents, not the policies or schemes that the government has introduced in recent years.
George Osborne's budget yesterday rightly focussed on some of the issues vital to improving the economic performance of our cities, including increased access to housing, new infrastructure investment, and empowering our urban areas to take greater direct control of their economies themselves. But many of the policies announced will be implemented from 2015, meaning that this is a budget which more about growth tomorrow than growth today
So now we have a house on a road with trees lining the street and an alarming fascination with vintage furniture. It's almost as exciting as the time I thought Jon Snow winked at me in a guest lecture. He didn't.
The use of local authority borrowing powers should be carefully controlled and leveraged with private sector cash to reduce their exposure to debt risk. Local authorities should, in effect, deploy borrowings on the same basis as grants - by making contributions to projects that are serviced at a lower rate of interest.
Secure and affordable housing is the first building block. By developing intelligently, with a view to long-term support for communities rather than short-term housebuilding targets, housing providers can lay the foundations for well-functioning neighbourhoods.
The revolving door of recidivism, which sees almost half of those released from prison reoffending within 12 months, is an expense society can little afford and any attempt to address the crisis should be welcomed.
The UK is facing an increasing housing shortage, and one which needs to be urgently addressed.
I am a child of the welfare state. It has been with me all of my life and I consider it is one of our society's greatest achievements. But my admiration ended when it became clear that it now stands as a guarantor to the exploitation of the working classes.
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