The Week in Housing: Gove’s Help to Buy ban comes Rydon time

You only have to go onto their website to see that they are currently advertising Help to Buy homes on some of their South East developments – without Help to Buy, that cuts out a lot of potential first-time buyers from being interested.

And the reputational damage of being blocked from a key government funding programme can’t be something that is welcomed.

But while the impact on Rydon will be big, the greater importance of the intervention was the message that Michael Gove and his new DLUHC wanted to send.

This move is the first direct embargo the government has issued against any firm caught up in the cladding scandal.

While we have often heard het-up housing secretaries saying they “wouldn’t rule anything out” regarding private firms they deemed to be inactive regarding fire safety, this has never really been anything more than strong rhetoric.

And it appears that it might not only be Rydon that could be subject to bans, as Inside Housing revealed earlier this month that Michael Gove is also looking at potential bans for those firms responsible for building safety issues, or not remediating their buildings quickly enough.

It will be interesting to see how far Mr Gove goes with this. Serving up Rydon, which only builds a limited number of homes every year, as a sacrificial lamb is one thing, going after some of the bigger developers and house builders is another.

Help to Buy has been described by some as “crack cocaine for house builders”. It has sustained huge profits for the biggest builders, and in turn huge bonuses for their bosses.

However, like it or loathe it, it is also one of the key reasons for house builders building a significant number of homes in recent years. Take that away and you could see those numbers of homes being built diminish.

Look on Twitter and you will see thousands of leaseholders living in defective buildings built by these companies. It feels right that they should contribute in some way.

However, with the pressures of needing to build new homes and fixing the fire safety crisis, it will be interesting to see what Mr Gove deems more important, and whether there will be more Rydon Homes down the line.

Elsewhere, the last regulatory judgements of the year saw another lease-based provider be deemed non-compliant. This time it was Parasol Homes which was found not to have met the regulator’s standards around governance and financial viability, as well as breaching the Rent Standard.

Also, right at the start of the week, senior reporter Grainne Cuffe interviewed Daniel Hewitt, the ITV news reporter who has been at the forefront of the channel’s work looking into substandard housing conditions across social housing. If you want to hear about the origins of the investigation and how angry what he has discovered has made him feel, read the interview here.

Jack Simpson, news editor
@JSimpsonjourno

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