Gove enters the multiverse
Posted: February 16, 2024 Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: Michael Gove Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Everything everywhere all at once’ is how Michael Gove describes the welter of proposals on housing announced this week and under consideration for the Budget next month.
In one of the alternative realities that make up in the multiverse in the 2022 film, this is his Long-Term Plan for Housing producing results at last. In another, the Conservatives end their in-fighting and build on their victories in Thursday’s two by-elections.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the housing secretary makes clear what he believes is at stake if young people feel they are excluded from home ownership: ‘If people think that markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get — and this is the worrying thing to me — an increasing number of young people saying, ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I don’t believe in markets.’
And he says he remains committed to a ban no-fault evictions via the Renters Reform Bill and determined to face down opposition from ‘vested interests’ to the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill.
Read the rest of this entry »The long wait for meaningful reform of leasehold
Posted: May 29, 2023 Filed under: Leasehold, Legal | Tags: Michael Gove Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Churchill was in no doubt that leasehold needs fundamental reform.
‘Who was more likely to be a contented citizen, the man who was a freeholder and who was in his property, or the man who was at the mercy of a colossal landowner?’ he asked in a Commons debate.
It says everything about the snail’s pace of progress on leasehold reform that the speaker was not Winston Churchill, the wartime leader and Conservative prime minister in the 1950s, nor even the more youthful Winston Churchill who was a radical land reformer as a Liberal MP in the 1910s.
Instead it was his father, Randolph Churchill, backing one of the first meaningful attempts at leasehold reform way back in 1884. Needless to say, the leasehold enfranchisement bill was blocked by a Conservative government full of property owners.
Flash forward 139 years and the same argument applies to almost five million leaseholders in England and Wales, the only two countries in the world that have still not abolished or radically reformed an archaic system that dates back to the Domesday Book.
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 »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 »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 »The long history of levelling up
Posted: February 3, 2022 Filed under: Levelling up, Regeneration | Tags: Michael Gove Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Whether you put it down to coincidence, cock-up or an acute sense of history the decision to launch the Levelling Up white paper on Groundhog Day looks singularly appropriate.
My day began with the Today programme’s report from Wakefield rather than Sonny & Cher on the radio but the effect was similar. It took me straight back to the late 1980s when I was reporting on regeneration plans for the same city.
That was after Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘walk in the wilderness’ and promise on night she won the 1987 election that: ‘Tomorrow morning we must do something about those inner cities, because we want them too next time.’
Her government had spent the previous eight years destroying the traditional industries that provided the well-paid jobs in those same areas but now she would put things right. Regeneration programmes like City Challenge, Development Corporations and Estate Action duly followed.
Flash forward 35 years and, after winning many of the seats that eluded Mrs Thatcher, another Tory government is promising to ‘level up’ exactly the same areas. This after spending nine years slashing their local authority budgets.
And these are only two moments in a long history of attempts to rebalance the regional economies of the UK that date back to the 1920s.
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Jules Birch 