A sheepish Conservative manifesto that misses the target
Posted: June 11, 2024 Filed under: Fire safety, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Stamp duty | Tags: Conservatives Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing
Wounded by the D Day furore and badly behind in the polls, the Conservatives have retreated to their home ownership comfort zone in their election manifesto.
Rishi Sunak replayed their greatest hits in a Telegraph op-ed overnight and boasted in his speech at the launch that: ‘From Macmillan to Thatcher to today, it is we Conservatives who are the party of the property-owning democracy in this country.’
But he is well aware that the old tunes will be not be enough to fix the multiple housing crises that have developed over the last 14 years. Especially as his government has fallen badly short of the promises it made at the last election in 2019.
Read the rest of this entry »Housing confined to the fringes at Conservative conference
Posted: October 5, 2023 Filed under: Housebuilding, Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: Conservatives Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of a Conservative conference at which housing was – quite literally – a fringe issue.
The only mention of housing in the prime minister’s speech was a reference to ‘thousands of homes for the next generation of home owners’ that will be built at the new Euston terminus of HS2.
Thousands of homes were already going to be built under the existing plan but that is now set to be ramped up under a Euston Development Corporation that seems all about maximising developer contributions from luxury flats rather than meeting local housing need.
Even levelling up secretary Michael Gove had little fresh to say about the H part of his portfolio from the main stage and made no reference to plans for renter and leasehold reform.
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 »Political chaos leaves big housing questions
Posted: July 8, 2022 Filed under: Fire safety, Levelling up, Mortgages, Private renting, Right to buy | Tags: Conservatives, Michael Gove Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing.
So it’s back to the future and all change at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) as the dust begins to settle from the political chaos of the last two weeks.
It was a scandal involving one ex-housing minister (Chris Pincher) that triggered the revolt against Boris Johnson. Many Tories want another (Dominic Raab) to take over as temporary prime minister. And two more (Grant Shapps and ex-housing secretary Sajid Javid) could run as candidates for the permanent job.
Over at the department that keeps changing its name, Michael Gove has been sacked as ‘a snake’ and most of the more junior ministers have resigned. Stuart Andrew set a new record for a housing minister with just 148 days in the job and no time even for an Inside Housing interview to be published.
Coming in as temporary secretary of state is the familiar figure of Greg Clark, who according to some reports this morning has told civil servants that Gove will be back soon.
Confused? Significant new policy announcements are by convention ruled out until there is a new permanent leader and cabinet – but this did not stop Theresa May enshrining the net zero by 2050 commitment in law before she left office and Boris Johnson is not noted for following convention.
Read the rest of this entry »Housing in the Conservative manifesto
Posted: May 18, 2017 Filed under: Compulsory purchase, Council housing, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing First | Tags: Conservatives 1 CommentOriginally posted on May 18 on my blog for Inside Housing.
This is a Conservative manifesto with only two firm targets on housing but lots of interesting hints about future direction and some intriguing omissions.
The first target is to halve rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminate it completely by 2027 by implementing the Homelessness Reduction Act and piloting a Housing First approach.
The 2022 target may seem bold but it would mean that rough sleeping would still be significantly higher than it was in 2010 when the coalition came to power.
The one for 2027 is incredibly ambitious and would mean matching Finland’s incredible record on homelessness within ten years.
Sajid Javid obviously returned fired up from his visit to Helsinki but you wonder if he took on board just how comprehensive and well-funded the Finnish version of Housing First needed to be to work.
The second target is ‘meet our 2015 commitment to deliver a million homes by the end of 2020 and we will deliver half a million more by the end of 2022’.
The first bit is unambitious and should be achievable, especially as the end point has been shifted from May 2020 (the original end of the parliament) to December 2020.
As the National Audit Office pointed out in January, that would actually mean that fewer new homes will be built over the next three years than were achieved last year. This is on the basis of the net additional supply of homes rather than just housebuilding completions.
The second bit is a different matter. A quick look at the net supply figures shows that there have only been three years in the last 25 when we have exceeded 200,000.
Farewell to the Great Social Reformer
Posted: March 20, 2016 Filed under: Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Conservatives, Iain Duncan Smith 2 CommentsYou go away for the weekend and suddenly everything goes mad: it turns out that Iain Duncan Smith was really a Socialist or a Liberal Democrat all along.
The Great Social Reformer (this is what the many ‘friends of’ IDS speaking to journalists call him) has not just resigned, not just skewered George Osborne, he’s also questioned the fundamentals of the post-2010 Conservatives narrative. We are not ‘all in this together’, the most vulnerable will not be ‘protected’ and the deficit reduction target is ‘more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest’.
Yet this (apparent) modern day heir to Tory Great Social Reformers like Shaftesbury and Wilberforce is also the same Iain Duncan Smith responsible for punitive benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax, the £30 a week ESA cut and all the other salami slices taken out of the social security system in the last six years that were not ‘compromises too far’. The man who took the moral high ground about cuts that benefit the better-off is the same one who stood on a manifesto of cutting inheritance tax and £12 billion from benefits.
Jules Birch 