A reshuffle that beggars belief

Posted: November 14, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

I’m not sure what Karl Marx would have made of the sixth housing minister in two years and the 16th in 13 years but it seems safe to say he would have run out of comparisons long ago.

The sacking of Rachel Maclean on Monday beggars belief not so much in itself – after nine months she was a relative veteran in the role – but in its timing.

Because the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has not just one but two important pieces of legislation on its immediate agenda.

As she tweeted herself, she was due to start piloting the first of these, the Renters (Reform) Bill, through its committee stage in the House of Commons today (Tuesday).

The Bill delivers on the 2019 Conservative manifesto pledge of scrapping Section 21 and represents a delicate balancing act between the interests of landlords and tenants.

You might have thought, then, that it would benefit from a minister who knows her brief and is sufficiently across the detail to debate it with the opposition, both on the Labour side and among her own backbenchers. You might – but not Rishi Sunak.

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Housing by numbers

Posted: July 12, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Social housing | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Achievements may be thin on the ground but, six months into her job as housing and planning minister, Rachel Maclean does at least seem to have grasped one of the fundamentals of the role.

The manipulation of numbers by ministers is part of a proud tradition that dates back years but makes me remember fondly the days when Grant Shapps would routinely obfuscate between ‘social’ and ‘affordable’ housing and Iain Duncan Smith would use ‘statrickstics’ to back up his bogus claims about welfare cuts.

In her speech to Housing 2023 earlier this month, Maclean harked back to the glory days of the social/affordable shuffle with a claim that ‘we’ve got record numbers of social rent homes that have been built’.

Asked by Inside Housing how she squared that with the fall in social rent completions from almost 39,562 a year in 2010 to 7,644 last year, she went full Nelson to claim ‘that’s not a figure I recognise’. And she doubled down to boast that ‘we’ve delivered more social rented homes than under the last Labour government’. The actual number is, of course, less than half – and most of them were funded by the investment programme the coalition inherited from Labour.

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