A lack of permanent solutions will result in groundhog day for housing
Ritchie Clapson, co-founder of propertyCEO, explores the reasons behind the current housing crisis and highlights each problem leads back to the revolving door of housing ministers.
There are two main reasons that we have a perennial housing crisis. The first is that it’s an impossible problem to solve politically without upsetting people. And when faced with an important issue that’s not easy to fix, politicians often fail to grasp the nettle.
The second reason is that the housing crisis can’t be resolved during a five-year government term. If ministers could make contentious decisions and have those decisions bear fruit before the next election, they’d have a fighting chance of winning it. Doing something unpopular, seeing it bear fruit, and then having an election is way more attractive than if the latter two items are reversed.
To be fair, we did enjoy some early-term exuberance from Robert Jenrick. His ill-fated attempt to fix the planning system a couple of years ago resulted in a lost by-election, a back-bench revolt, and his untimely departure from government. But he’s not alone. Following the PM’s latest reshuffle, we now have a sixteenth housing minister since the Tories came to power in 2010 and a twenty-third since 1997. Lee Rowley, previously housing minister for around seven weeks under Liz Truss, succeeds Rachel Maclean who spent less than a year in the post. Why did Maclean have to go? Her main fault appears to have been to introduce some meaningful debate on substantive housing policies. It’s difficult to find any reports of her doing anything other than a decent job; in fact, many have lavished praise.
Mr Rowley arrives having previously been Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the DLUHC between September 2022 and November 2023, with an earlier stint in BEIS. I’m sure he’s competent, just as I’m sure that his pre-appointment pep-talk would have included the phrase, ‘don’t rock the boat’. After all, the election run-in will be tricky enough to manage without any grenades going off in housing.
However, housing’s ministerial revolving door certainly isn’t helping matters. Since housing doesn’t have its own department – it’s shoehorned into the DLUHC – its minister isn’t in the cabinet. It’s also a role given historically to rising stars, who’d need to move departments to join the cabinet, hence the short tenures. As a result, housing ministers over the last 30 years have had very little housing experience. Imagine doing a job for just ten months – how can anyone hope to become an expert or effect long-term change in such a short timeframe? This is madness for such an important department – you wouldn’t allow it in a business or a football team, so why has it been allowed to happen in housing?
Why is this such a difficult nut to crack?
Ministerial challenges aside, we should ask why is housing such a difficult nut to crack anyway? Let’s consider the scale of the problem. Both main political parties agree we need to build 300,000 new homes each year, which is greater than the number of homes in Oxfordshire. Where will they go? You can’t just plonk 300,000 new homes in the middle of nowhere and expect people to want to live there. After WWII, the New Towns Act of 1946 reflected the need for post-war reconstruction. It saw 27 new towns emerge, including Stevenage, Crawley, Bracknell, Hemel Hempstead, Peterlee, and, of course, Milton Keynes, which became the largest with some 117,000 households today. But England’s biggest new town since Milton Keynes is Northstowe, Cambridgeshire, where, in six years, only 1,200 homes have been built out of a planned 10,000. Northstowe serves to underline the scale of the challenge; it’s on a 20-year journey to reach its 10,000th home, yet we need the equivalent of 30 Northstowes to be built every year.
NIMBYism is not a badge; it’s a sliding scale. Someone who agrees to a modest, tasteful, and unobtrusive group of detached homes being built just outside their village is not a YIMBY. Because if you ask the same person how they feel about a new affordable housing estate at the bottom of their garden, you’ll get a different answer. It would be wonderful if building small unobtrusive enclaves could solve the housing crisis, but it won’t, not by a country mile. The harsh reality is that building 300,000 new homes a year will hack many people off. And the question, ‘Can I build a block of flats next door to you if it would help young people get on the housing ladder’ is only going to have one answer at an anonymous ballot box, however YIMBYish voters might be feeling come polling day.
All this means that we end up in another groundhog day. Once again, we’re hearing pre-election promises being made by politicians offering a glimmer of hope that, for some reason, their party will be able to do what their predecessors have failed to do to solve the housing crisis. And as long as their words don’t become actions, they’re on safe ground. Implementation is when people get twitchy, and the whole sorry cycle repeats itself.
The solution?
What’s the solution? In my view it’s relatively simple, even if it’s not easy. When you need to make difficult decisions, particularly when you risk alienating the voting population, party politics invariably gets in the way, as it is now. Politicians’ first thought is to the polls rather than solving the problem at hand, with predictable outcomes. This is particularly true when the public can’t judge the fruits of their labours until after the current political term has ended.
So, my suggestion for such knotty problems is to establish a cross-party group responsible for recommending and implementing a solution. This removes the housing agenda from the short-term party politicking that sees nothing change. Instead, it becomes a long-term solution that all parties have contributed and signed up to, with a binding agreement that the implementation does not get derailed, irrespective of any change of government. It would also have a leadership team that would stick around for the duration.
Simple? Yes, if you say it quickly. Easy? Definitely not. But we risk a perpetual Groundhog Day for our long-term societal problems if we simply do what we’ve always done and expect to get a different result.
Images: Ritchie Clapson, Christopher Burns, and Kikki Starr
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