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The Week in Housing: another new face in the ever-changing line-up of housing ministers
The churn in housing ministers continued apace this week, with the appointment of the sixth minister in the past 12 months. Peter Apps recaps the headlines
Good afternoon.
Happy new housing minister week, which over the past 12 months has become a bi-monthly event.
Lucy Frazer, who had the gig for 91 days, was promoted to culture secretary in the most recent government reshuffle, with Rachel Maclean, MP for Redditch, replacing her in the role.
Ms Maclean is the sixth person to hold the role inside a year since Christopher Pincher was shuffled on in February last year.
Since then we’ve seen Stuart Andrew, Marcus Jones, Lee Rowley and Ms Frazer come and go, leading to some open criticism in the usually desperately bland “we look forward to working with you” press statements that follow a ministerial appointment.
“It’s hugely frustrating to see the rapid departure of yet another housing minister in the middle of both significant policy changes and uncertain market conditions,” said Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation, summing up many similar sentiments.
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Of course, some of the changes in the past year were inevitable. Boris Johnson’s resignation, the interim period that followed and the implosion of Liz Truss’ short-lived reign have forced ministerial churn across the board.
But the instability in the housing minister role has deeper roots. It is four-and-a-half years since the front page of our weekly edition bemoaned the revolving door of ministers, and we’ve had eight since then.
In fact, since 2017, you could fill a football team (albeit, probably not a very good one) with housing ministers. Since 2010 there have been 15 and since 2000 there have been 23 – making the average duration in the role this century slightly below a year.
The important question is probably: does this really matter?
On one level, the response is probably not. The real strategy on housing (such that it ever exists) is set by either the Treasury or Number 10.
And since the secretary of state gained housing as an explicit part of their portfolio in 2018, the housing minister gig has become a noticeably more junior role.
It’s also worth saying that before the extreme churn of the past 12 months was a period of relative stability, with Mr Pincher housing minister for two years from 2020 to 2022. But it’s hard to say that the continuity delivered much progress.
But on a couple of other levels, it plainly does matter. The first is symbolic. Bouncing the role around rising stars with an eye on a bigger job or disposable backbenchers there to simply tick along and claim the boosted salary creates the impression that this isn’t something the government cares a great deal about.
So does the fact that whenever an under-fire prime minister needs to fill a role after the latest attempt to stamp their authority, they whisk away the latest holder of the housing brief. Priorities, priorities.
The second is practical. Even though the role is junior, the portfolio is broad and contains a lot of things that matter greatly. Constantly having someone fresh, who needs to get up to speed every time, who wants to review their predecessors’ decisions and who has different ideas about priorities creates stasis.
This is plainly part of the reason why the promised reform of social housing post-Grenfell took so long, and why we will be almost six years on from the fire before it even starts coming into force.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry provided some warning on the risk of this: in the three years before the fire, the ministerial brief containing building regulations passed quickly between three ministers, all of whom only held the role briefly.
None of them got on to dealing with an issue, which – unforgivably – sat near the bottom of their in-tray and the review of regulations it demanded never moved forward.
Now this isn’t to say that one housing minister in this period would have made a difference (there were other forces at play) – but you stand a better chance of these below-the-radar issues being addressed if there is some continuity in the role. Right now, that isn’t happening and we can only guess what is being missed as a result.
Elsewhere, the long rumbling saga over Swan’s integration into Sanctuary has finally concluded, with Swan’s long-awaited financial statements being published.
They paint a fairly miserable story of over-ambition and the saga is a cautionary tale for housing associations about the perils of taking on too much, too fast.
Finally, in Northern Ireland, an important restructuring of the allocation model has taken place – a move that has deep implications for social housing in the region.
Have a great weekend.
Stat of the week
143%
Rise in bailiff evictions from private rented housing, from 792 households between October and December 2021 to 1,924 between October and December 2022. Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, called on the government to “stop stalling and change the law” on no-fault evictions.
Quote of the week
“Housing is a long-term, structural issue that needs long-term, structural solutions and to deliver that you would hope that we would have housing ministers in place for longer.”
Paul Hackett, chief executive of Southern Housing. He gave the quote in 2018, but sadly it isn’t any less relevant now.
Peter Apps, deputy editor, Inside Housing
Say hello: peter.apps@insidehousing.co.uk
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