On the sidelines

I still don’t fully understand the downgrading of the housing portfolio in the reshuffle this week but here’s my attempt to make sense of it.

As Stuart Macdonald points out in Inside Housing this week, the contrast could hardly be starker between new Conservative switch from minister of state Mark Prisk to parliamentary under secretary Kris Hopkins and Labour’s restoration of shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds to ‘attending Cabinet’ status.

Similar points are made by Isabel Hardman and Hannah Fearn in the Telegraph and Guardian and, significantly, by Paul Goodman, the former Conservative MP and editor of the influential Conservative Home website. ‘This isn’t some trivial piece of Whitehall arcana, but a suggestive development with political implications,’ he says.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing