The home of the endless ministerial merry-go-round
WHEN Theresa May announced last week that Kit Malthouse was to become the new housing minister, the groans were almost audible.
Previous incumbent Dominic Raab had been parachuted in to become Theresa May’s new Brexit Secretary, making Malthouse the eighth housing minister in just over eight years – and the seventeenth since 2000. No other ministerial position has seen such churn of personnel.
In a country facing a housing crisis, it’s understandable why some are upset with the job’s revolving door.
“It is simply not possible to have a coherent policy when a merry-goround of ministers must routinely pick up the pieces of their predecessor and start afresh,” complains Greg Hill, deputy chief executive of Hill, one of the country’s largest private housebuilders.
He points out that Malthouse has no background in the property sector (he was previously a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions, and before that worked in local government), and simply getting his head around the issues at hand will take some time. Raab had been in the position for a little over six months; his predecessor Alok Sharma had held the role for seven months. No one has held the position for more than two years since Conservative Grant Shapps, who was housing minister between May 2010 and September 2012.
“If we are to truly stimulate housebuilding then it is vital that the Government takes a longer term approach to the sector’s leadership,” Hill says.
Many share his frustration: the Prime Minister said at the Tory Party conference last September that she planned to make housebuilding part of her “personal mission”.
But Raab’s transfer to the Brexit department suggests that is where the priorities currently lie. Johnny Caddick, managing director at Moda, which builds homes for rent, calls the situation an “extraordinary circus”.
“The Government needs to prove that it’s not focusing on Brexit at the expense of everything else. It’s vital we have continuity in the role,” he says.
The principal concern around yet another new face in the job is that managing the brief is no small task. The Government has promised to build 300,000 homes a year but despite its best efforts is still falling short. Official statistics show that 166,100 homes were built in the year to September 2017, although things have improved since 2008, when just 80,000 homes were constructed as the country struggled in the grip of the recession.
A survey of 100 of the UK’S major housebuilders by property agency Knight Frank released last week found that 86pc think that 250,000 homes is the maximum that could be built annually over the next four years. Just 1pc thought that 300,000 homes would be achievable. Malthouse is going to have to galvanise the sector.
Safe housing has been even more in the spotlight since the Grenfell Tower fire last year, with Gavin Barwell, who was housing minister at the time, facing criticism over his handling of the crisis. But things are improving. The statistics show that net additional dwellings – which count existing houses carved up into smaller flats and offices converted into homes as well as brand new houses – added to the mix the number of extra homes in the UK grew by 217,350 in 2016/17, bringing that 300,000 target into view.
This is in part due to a greater realisation that the country needs different sorts of homes.
Barwell was responsible for a shift away from the focus on home ownership peddled by David Cameron’s government to a more nuanced approach to housebuilding which took into account different types of homes, including a greater focus on renting and affordable housing. He also presided over a White Paper, published at the beginning of last year, which was intended to set out the Government’s plans to improve the rate of homebuilding and the housing market. Last month, Sir Oliver Letwin published his review on the gap between homes receiving planning permission and the actual rate of building. He had been tasked to work out why the number of homes being approved was rising, but the number of homes being completed was not increasing at the same pace.
He found that where builders were willing to develop different types of homes – for sale, for rent, affordable and so on – sites came to the market more quickly.
But he also found that developers were slowing the system by limiting the number of homes which come to the market at the same time, while a shortage of skilled construction workers was also limiting progress. Finding a balance between supply and demand is an ongoing issue.
David Thomas, chief executive of Barratt, suggests that these reports show the Government is trying to improve things. “I wouldn’t correlate changes in housing minister with signs that the Government isn’t taking housing seriously,” he says.
He adds that the changes in planning policy, which has been endlessly tweaked through successive administrations, have helped housebuilders. “I think there’s a lot of momentum at present,” he says, although he admits that having a housing minister “for a long period” would be his preference.
Malthouse’s priorities are likely to be implementing what his predecessors have already started in order to undo the damage caused by decades of building fewer homes than needed. The minister may keep changing, the problem does not.