The limits of consensus

Originally posted on February 21 on my blog for Inside Housing.

Two weeks on from the Housing White Paper and a consensus is developing around many of its recommendations – but how long will it survive contact with the real world?

A big test for Gavin Barwell came on Monday at the annual lecture for the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE). While it would be unfair to characterise the organisation as England’s nimbys-in-chief, its members are not shy in holding politicians and developers to account, especially when it comes to the green belt.

The housing minister was joined on a panel by Shaun Spiers of the CPRE, Kate Henderson of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and Toby Lloyd of Shelter. If that did not quite represent all sides of the debate – a house builder would surely have proved too much for the blood pressure of many in the audience – it certainly brought many of them together in one place. Full marks to the CPRE for opening the event up to a wider audience via Facebook (housing organisations, please take note).

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Decline and fall

Coalition ministers rarely fail to taunt Labour with the fact that the number of affordable homes fell under the last government.

Conservative housing minister Mark Prisk and Lib Dem junior communities minister Don Foster deployed it yet again at DCLG questions yesterday.

Labour’s Jack Dromey attacked the government’s record on housebuilding and called for a rejection of the ‘economic illiteracy of austerity, which is pushing up the costs of failure through additional borrowing and soaring housing benefit bills’. He asked: ‘Does the housing minister agree that the time has come to invest in badly needed social and affordable homes to rent or buy, creating jobs and apprenticeships, bringing down the costs of failure and getting our economy moving?’

In response Foster was quick to deploy the favourite stat:

‘I think that the whole House will have been somewhat amused by the cheek of the hon. Gentleman, given that under his party’s administration we saw a reduction of 421,000 in the number of affordable homes. This government have introduced measures to reverse that trend, and we hope to announce further measures in the near future.’

Second half

The coalition’s Mid-Term Review is as coy about what was billed as ‘the most radical reform of social housing in a generation’ as it is about what else will be done to tackle the biggest shortage of new homes in four generations.

The section of The Coalition: together in the national interest on Communities and Local Government is one of the shortest in the whole document. The five claims on what’s been done in the first half of the coalition may be many things but none of them involve housing.

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

Most popular posts 2012 Q4

These were the five most viewed posts on my blog in the fourth quarter of 2012. Best wishes to everyone for 2013.

1) Strivers and scroungers – David Cameron used housing as the divide line between Britain’s two nations

2) 10 things you may not know about the Beveridge report – Why Beveridge hated the term ‘welfare state’ despite writing the blueprint for it plus more to mark the 70th anniversary

3) End of her tether – more than just revenge for her sacking as former Lib Dem minister Sarah Teather attacks the government over the benefit cap

4) Caps, cuts and moving home – the toxic combination of welfare reform and the weakening of the homelessness legislation

5) Joining the dots on unemployment and welfare reform – why are we succeeding in getting people into work who don’t want to be and failing with people who do?

London mayor: 2

The London mayoral race is throwing up some interesting new ideas on how to tackle the housing crisis in the capital – but will they make any difference?

Thanks to the voting system (the supplementary vote, which gives people two votes in order of preference), the race is not just about Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone, even if one of them will eventually become the mayor (see part one of my blog here). And, thanks to the mayor’s new powers over investment and land, housing policy features heavily in the manifestos of many of the other candidates too.

Read the rest of this post on my blog for Inside Housing here.