Boris Johnson has today pledged to undertake a strategic role on surplus public land to "turbo boost" housing development in London.
The pledge comes as the London mayor publishes his updated housing strategy. Measures include:
About 6% of social housing tenants in Britain affected by changes to benefits partly designed to cut under-occupancy have moved home, BBC research suggests.
Ministers claim the policy - dubbed the bedroom tax by critics - will free up big homes and save taxpayers £1m a day.
The government's huge shake-up of the benefits system is pushing families in social housing into greater levels of debt as they struggle to cope and find work, a major study has revealed.
Tenants have seen the amount they owe increase since October, while almost half report having no money left each week once essential bills have been paid.
A fed up mum is in dispute with Oldham Council after claiming she has wrongly been paying bedroom tax.
Heather Crimes (59) lives in a three-bedroom house in Helvellyn Walk, Higginshaw. Her two children no longer live with her and she has had to pay an extra £21.64 a week for the spare bedrooms.
Housing charity Shelter has launched a new project to help homeless families in Hackney.
With the number of families declared homeless in the London borough soaring by 19% last year, the Hackney Family Service offers intensive support to the families most at risk of losing their home.
More people could be eligible for a refund on the bedroom tax following further clarification about the loophole debacle from the Department for Work and Pensions.
The government initially issued guidance which stated that people who had been in a property prior to 1996 and continuously entitled to housing benefit were exempt from paying the controversial under-occupation penalty, along with those who inherited tenancies from their partner following their death.
The number of homeless families with school-age children being housed outside London by their local authorities has soared dramatically over the last four years.
Figures obtained by London Assembly Green Party member Darren Johnson show that 21 families were shifted outside the capital in 2010/11 but that the number had risen to 222 in the first three quarters of 2013/14 - a 1,000% increase.
George Osborne has today announced a £119 billion cap on welfare spending.
As he laid out his budget in parliament, the chancellor said the £119 billion cap for 2015/16 would rise in line with inflation to £127 billion in 2018/19.
Ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions have been criticised by MPs for using language that "feeds into negative public views about benefit recipients".
In a report today, the DWP select committee said the Department need to "exercise care" in the language used in press releases and ministerial comments.
The Welsh government has been slammed for making little progress with a scheme to bring void houses back into use.
Peter Black, the Welsh Liberal Democrats' housing spokesperson, has expressed concerns after recent statistics showed that the government's 'Houses into Homes' scheme has brought only 313 empty properties back into use during the 18-months between its launch and September 2013.
A NEW £2.3million 24-hour homelessness centre will help eradicate rough sleeping from Southend in just four years, says a charity.
Harp hopes its new 18-bedroom night shelter and day centre, which has opened its doors after a decade of work, will help clear Southend’s streets of homeless people by 2018.
Landlords in the UK are reporting that the incidence of void periods are falling, which is good news for the wider private rented sector.
It isn’t just the incidence of voids that are decreasing, indeed the duration of the average void period is falling too, according to research by BDRC Continental commissioned by Paragon Mortgages.
Some working people are losing 97p of every £1 earned after being hit by a combination of welfare cuts, a committee of MPs has found.
The public accounts committee warned today that cuts to council tax benefit means ‘work does not pay’ for those worse affected by the reforms.
London may routinely win the dubious race to be the most expensive place in the world to buy a home but when it comes to rental property, it comes only fifth.
ECA International, a body that analyses expenses associated with globe-trotting business executives, says high-end rents for an executive's typical apartment - three bedrooms, in a sought-after area of the capital - have risen about two per cent in London in the past year and now stand at £5,000 per month.
The number of empty homes in England fell by the biggest ever annual drop in 2013 to 635,127, research has found.
According to today’s figures compiled by campaigning charity Empty Homes, the amount of empty homes in England decreased by 75,000 to 635,127 in 2013 – the lowest level ever recorded.
Housing Minister Kris Hopkins has welcomed an overall country-wide drop in homelessness figures, despite a rise in London.
The latest statistics from the Department for Communities and Local Government show that 12,890 applicants were accepted as homeless between 1 October and December 31 in England last year - a 5% drop on the same quarter in 2012.
Hundreds of tenants have escaped the impact of welfare reform, but their housing association landlord warns the real problem may be how tenants are paying.
Mark Rogers, chief executive of Circle Housing, said 20 per cent of its tenants who were hit by the bedroom tax, and 40 per cent of those hit by the overall benefit cap, were no longer affected by the changes.
A scheme which helps single homeless people into homes in the private rented sector is to be extended by two years, housing minister Kris Hopkins has announced.
Since its launch in 2010, the Crisis Private Rented Sector Access Development Programme has helped nearly 8,000 vulnerable people into homes.
Local Housing Allowance rates – the allowances paid to people claiming housing benefits - which will take effect from April this year have been published by the Department for Work and Pensions.
And a number of the 16 categories for shared bedroom and one, two and three bedroom properties have gone up - prompting criticism of landlords who "jumped the gun" and banned applicants on housing benefit.
The bedroom tax is helping to reduce child deprivation, ministers have claimed.
A new draft child poverty strategy for 2014 to 2017, which was launched by work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and education minister David Laws yesterday, lists the ‘removal of the spare room subsidy’ as one of the measures that is helping to improve the living standards of low-income families.