Exit Rayner, enter Reed
Posted: September 8, 2025 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: Angela Rayner, Steve Reed | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Angela Rayner is a huge loss for the Labour government and the country but arguably an even bigger loss for housing.
The housing secretary had to go after the standards advisor ruled that she breached the ministerial code by underpaying the stamp duty on her new flat, even if the breach seems inadvertent and minor by comparison with previous tax errors by ministers.
Keir Starmer has lost someone who, after a difficult start, became a key partner on the left of the Labour Party as deputy leader and deputy prime minister.
Much like John Prescott in the early days of the Tony Blair government, her presence reassured Labour supporters that despite its modernising rhetoric the government had the interests of working people at heart.
Housing has lost a powerful voice at the top of government, someone who was in charge long enough to secure a favourable settlement in the spending review (even if it did not quite live up to her hype).
Would MHCLG have achieved as much without her? Housing might still have been a relative priority but probably not, I’d say.
Supporters of social and council housing – and those who need it – have lost an ally who knew its value from her own experience.
Read the rest of this entry »Reeves raises expectations on investment
Posted: September 26, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Energy efficiency, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: Angela Rayner, Labour, Rachel Reeves | Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For the most part, this was a Labour conference of nudges and winks rather than major announcements.
That is no coincidence because major decisions across government are being left to the Budget and one-year spending review next month and the multi-year spending review to follow in the Spring.
So for all the debate at what looked like an unprecedented number of fringe meetings on housing in Liverpool, for all the promises from the conference podium of brownfield passports and help for homeless veterans and care leavers, there was comparatively little that signalled the direction the new government intends to take.
The one exception was not a surprise: the reinstatement by net zero secretary Ed Miliband of the 2030 target to bring all rented homes up to a minimum level of Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C by 2030.
The announcement reinstates an earlier target for Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards that was scrapped by Rishi Sunak and extends it to social and private rented homes
That will have major implications given that the costs of retrofitting social housing alone far exceed Labour’s scaled-back plans for green grants and loans.
Without a boost, that could accelerate the sell-off of older private rented stock and encourage social landlords to consolidate theirs, at the same time as it focusses their attention even more on improving their existing homes rather than building new ones.
On new homes, the big question for me is the relationship between Labour’s target of 1.5 million new homes in this parliament and its manifesto promise on affordable and social housing.’
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Jules Birch 