The parties start to set out their general election stall
Posted: May 4, 2023 Filed under: Help to Buy, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If this week was a preview of what the main parties will be offering on housing at the next general election then it is probably best to look away now.
Perhaps the best that can be said is that, just as Thursday’s local elections only offer clues as to the outcome of next year’s big event, so the policies announced in the run-up to them may only be a taster of what’s still to come.
But that is being optimistic: otherwise we got some standard tropes from Labour about
home ownership and signals that the Conservatives could be about to reach back into their collection of greatest misses.
In a series of interviews on Sunday, Keir Starmer set out his ambition for Labour to be ‘the party of home ownership’:
This standard appeal to aspirational voters begs some obvious questions about how and what else.
Restoring targets for housebuilding recently scrapped by the Conservatives would be a good start and would come alongside existing Labour policies of ‘first dibs’ for local first-time buyers and a block on overseas buyers.
But whether that will be enough to generate 300,000 new homes a year (the targets hadn’t done that before they were scrapped) and whether even that will make homes more affordable must both be doubtful.
The following day (coincidence?) The Times reported that Rishi Sunak is putting Help to Buy ‘back on the table’ as a key plank in the campaign for a potential Conservative fifth term.
Government sources told the paper that the move could come in the Autumn Statement or the Spring Budget. ‘We cannot go into the next election without an offer for first-time buyers,’ said a minister. ‘We all know that homeowners are more likely to vote Conservative and we cannot cede this ground to Labour.’
Read the rest of this entry »Building a better future or surrendering to the past?
Posted: January 10, 2023 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
So now we know what the ‘people’s priorities’ are – and housing is not one of them.
The fact that housing did not feature in the speech from Rishi Sunak setting out his agenda for the new year is not a surprise in itself – his five pledges all covered issues with far greater political saliency.
But it is still surprising that in a speech on ‘building a better future’ he did not mention housing at all and that, apart from a boast about stabilising mortgage rates, the speech steered clear of traditional Tory territory on home ownership.
He did talk about community (‘a better future also means reinforcing people’s pride in the places they call home’) and making places better (‘I love my local community and it’s not right that too many for far too long have not felt that same sense of meaning and belonging’).
But he is talking here about people who already have places they can call home and avoids any mention of those who do not have a home or need a new or more affordable one.
And that is no coincidence because he was speaking in the wake of the government’s surrender late last year to its own backbenchers on planning and housebuilding.
Read the rest of this entry »The levelling up of housing targets
Posted: December 6, 2022 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: Michael Gove, Theresa Villiers Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
There is no chance of the government achieving its target of 300,000 new homes by the mid-2020s so why has the drama ramped up within the Conservative Party?
The answer is, of course, politics but it is coming from two different directions and there is a long history that lies behind it.
The inclusion of the target in the 2019 manifesto was all about having something to say to younger voters excluded from homeownership.
Note that the commitment is actually to a more weasly ‘progress towards’ 300,000, alongside a promise of ‘at least a million homes’ in this parliament, although both are important in focusing minds within government.
The latter target – effectively 200,000 a year – should be comfortably achieved, not least because it already happened in the last parliament.
Figures published last month showed that 232,820 net additional homes were delivered in 2021-22, a 10% increase on COVID-affected 2020-21 and not far off the pre-pandemic peak.
House builder after house builder has reported falling sales recently, so the total should fall this year regardless of anything MPs decide about planning.
Which is where the other direction comes in: the politics of appealing to well-housed, mostly older voters in affluent Conservative constituencies in the South East from MPs who fear a multiple repeat of the Tory defeat in the Chesham and Amersham by-election at the next general election.
Read the rest of this entry »A tale of two Conservative parties
Posted: October 10, 2022 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: Conservatives Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
If the Liz Truss government is serious about delivering growth and getting Britain moving then it has to be serious about housebuilding and planning reform.
The superficial signs are that it is: the promised programme of investment zones; promises of further reforms to boost housebuilding and home ownership in the Autumn; prime ministerial support for growth, growth and growth.
The underlying ideology shouts that it is: take a quick look at this briefing paper on housing from the Free Market Forum, an offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs whose parliamentary backers include Truss, chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, housing secretary Simon Clarke and housing and planning minister Lee Rowley.
But history still suggests a need for caution: exactly the same thing could have been said in 1983/84, 1988/89, 2010/11 and 2020/21, when Conservative ministers proposing planning liberalisation were thwarted by more cautious colleagues or rebellious backbenchers or both.
Because there are two poles of Conservatism: the libertarian, economic liberal one that is currently in the ascendancy and a social conservative one that sees green belts and planning regulations as a good way to conserve things.
Between those two poles, more pragmatic Tories recognise that they have to take account of both if they are to deliver more homes – and that their political success or failure in future could depend on that delivery.
Read the rest of this entry »Reading the Tory leadership tea leaves
Posted: August 22, 2022 Filed under: Housebuilding, Mortgages, Right to buy | Tags: Conservatives Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
On the surface the two Tory leadership candidates have had little new to say about housing – when they’ve even bothered to discuss it.
Liz Truss would cut red tape for housebuilding at the same time as she would scrap the ‘Stalinist housing targets’ introduced by her own party and boost community rights to object to homes that create the red tape in the first place.
Sunak would put a stop to building on the green belt, highlighting the 60 square miles lost to development since 2014 while ignoring the 60,000 square miles that are left and the fact the green belt has doubled in size since 2014.
Those contradictory ideas reveal next to nothing beyond a need to appeal to well-housed Tory members but neither candidate has said anything so far about social housing, affordable housing or private renting.
Yet there are issues and ideas bubbling away beneath the surface of the leadership contest that could still have a profound impact on housing.
Read the rest of this entry »Mind the gaps on building safety
Posted: March 11, 2022 Filed under: Fire safety, Grenfell Tower, Housebuilding, Housing associations, Leasehold | Tags: Building Safety Bill Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
Who is guilty, who is innocent and who is merely collateral damage? The answers, when it comes to building safety, are not as simple as it first seems.
Guilt in a legal sense remains to be seen but just about everyone involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower seems to bear some responsibility, starting with the governments that set the building regulations and reaching down via organisations involved in product testing and certification and building control to the companies that supplied the cladding and insulation, the contractor, designers, subcontractors and client.
All of the above plus developers are seen as ‘guilty’ when it comes to the wider building safety crisis while leaseholders are the innocent parties that the government has finally accepted should be protected from the costs.
And yet scratch a little deeper in the debates over the Building Safety Bill and the new approach initiated by Michael Gove and the dividing line between innocent and guilty is not remotely as clear cut as that.
Read the rest of this entry »The tide turns on deregulation and the private sector
Posted: February 17, 2022 Filed under: Fire safety, Housebuilding, Legal, Private renting | Tags: Michael Gove Leave a commentThe package of building safety changes announced this week by Michael Gove represents an extraordinary shift on any number of different levels.
Whether it’s effectively banning developers from building anything if they fail to cooperate or rewriting the terms of tens of thousands of leasehold contracts, the amendments to the Building Safety Bill will fundamentally change the way that flats (at least those over 11m) are maintained and managed.
The package inevitably raises a whole series of questions that I’ll return to in a future column but for now I want to concentrate on what it says about the extent of the change in the government’s attitude towards the private sector in housing.
Read the rest of this entry »Johnson, Partygate and manifesto commitments
Posted: January 31, 2022 Filed under: First Homes, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Levelling up | Tags: Boris Johnson Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It’s been just over two years but thanks to Covid-19 it feels like a lifetime ago.
Leaving aside the question of whether he has really delivered on his headline promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ how much of Boris Johnson’s 2019 election manifesto has survived into the post-Coronavirus age?
The question was originally prompted by the outcome of the judicial review over Everyone In. The scheme launched at the start of the pandemic to get rough sleepers off the streets and into hotels within a few days was a great success.
It also signalled that the manifesto promise to ‘end the blight of rough sleeping by the end of the next parliament’ should be well within reach.
Except that, for all that rhetoric, Everyone In morphed from a policy into an initiative with an asterisk attached. From around May 2020, it was no longer a promise but branding for an initiative exhorting local authorities to act without giving them any extra resources.
And then I realised the wider context as we continue the seemingly interminable wait for Sue Gray’s report.
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Jules Birch 