Gove’s admission begs more questions
Posted: January 30, 2023 Filed under: Fire safety, Leasehold, Planning, Private renting Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Michael Gove’s admission that ‘faulty and ambiguous’ building regulations set by central government were partly to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken even passing notice of the evidence at the public inquiry.
That a statement so blindingly obvious should be enough to prompt a worried look from one of the levelling up secretary’s media minders speaks volumes about the government’s stance up to now. It also begs significant questions about the administration’s approach to housing going forward.
The admission (and the look) came in an interview with the Sunday Times trailing the announcement on Monday that developers have six weeks to sign legally binding contracts to repair unsafe buildings or, in effect, lose the ability to build anything else.
As the levelling up secretary told Sophy Ridge on Sunday on Sky News: ‘The people who were responsible for erecting buildings which we now know are unsafe have to pay the costs of making sure those buildings are safe.’
Except that making UK-registered developers liable for fixing the blocks they built themselves via the contracts but for paying to fix other buildings via the Building Safety Levy does not really capture all of those responsible.
As the inquiry has revealed, that list includes just about every part of the construction industry, and especially product manufacturers. Mr Gove’s written statement on Monday does say that contractors and manufacturers are among those whose conduct is being investigated by his department’s Recovery Strategy Unit.
The list now also includes a government that Mr Gove says ‘collectively has to take some responsibility’ (meaning current and previous governments).
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 »The decline and fall of Trussonomics
Posted: October 18, 2022 Filed under: Affordable housing, Economics, Levelling up, Planning, Section 21 Leave a commentOriginally written on Tuesday October 18 (before the resignation of Liz Truss) as a column for Inside Housing.
Growth, growth, growth? Little survives of Trussonomics after a series of astonishing u-turns but in housing at least is still seems to be half-steam ahead.
Just two of the tax cuts announced by former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in his statement last month and only because the legislation for them had already gone through parliament.
The scrapping of the health and social care levy obviously begs big questions about funding for both but the increase in stamp duty thresholds now looks even more of a spare part than it did at the time.
While stamp duty is fundamentally a bad tax because it inhibits transactions, cutting it without wider reform of property taxation benefits sellers more than buyers as savings are capitalised into higher prices.
Cutting it permanently now rules out what has always been the first lever the Treasury pulls in a housing market downturn: a stamp duty holiday.
Even on the Treasury’s own figures, it will only generate an extra 29,000 house moves a year. But the limited growth in the wider property sector this generates will come at a cost to the taxpayer of £7 billion over the next five years.
New chancellor Jeremy Hunt has signalled that ‘eye-watering decisions’ about spending cuts and tax rises are on the way, mortgage costs have soared since the not a Budget and the energy price guarantee is now only guaranteed until April.
With even the pensions triple lock not guaranteed, the battle that was already looming over the uprating of benefits next year will now be even more intense.
Further freezes in the benefit cap and – despite rising rents – local housing allowance look more likely with devastating consequences for poverty and homelessness.
All this will be the acid test of Hunt’s promised return to ‘core compassionate Conservative values’.
The implication of the fiscal position for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities must be that any budget that is not already nailed down is up for grabs.
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 »Cutting the Goveian knot
Posted: November 9, 2021 Filed under: Fire safety, Levelling up, Planning, Social housing Leave a commentOriginally published on November 10 as a column for Inside Housing.
In a two-hour appearance before MPs, Michael Gove made most of the right noises but can he really come up with meaningful solutions to the intractable problems that come with his new job?
The man in charge of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) was facing questions from what is still called the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. You can watch it back here.
The reorganisation of his department added responsibilities for levelling up and preserving the union to the tangled threads of building safety, planning, home ownership and homelessness that were already crowding his in-tray. You might almost call it a Goveian Knot.
What was striking was not just Mr Gove’s willingness to engage with committee members but also his multiple hints of bolder answers on the way.
The levelling up secretary signalled pauses and rethinks and resets on several of the most contentious issues he faces. This is reflected in this morning’s press coverage of his hints that housebuilding targets will be scrapped, his pledge that controversial fire safety advice will be withdrawn soon and his criticism of ‘overcautious’ lending by banks to first-time buyers.
It also became clear that he sees a direct link between levelling up and the H side of his brief.
Jules Birch 