Ministers need time to make progress on housing
Patrick Gower, Associate, Knight Frank Residential Research: During Alok Sharma’s first speech as Housing and Planning Minister in July 2017 he quipped that there had been five planning ministers in five years and, a bit like Doctor Who, he was merely the latest incarnation.
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“I very much hope to be in place for a decent length of time,” he told the RESI conference in September, three months after he took over the brief.
Perhaps seven months in the job was a little shorter than he had in mind.
On 9 January, Dominic Raab replaced Mr Sharma and has inherited on of the most challenging briefs on Whitehall. Though planning appears to have been dropped from the job title – at the time of writing the fate of the planning brief was yet to be decided - the task remains as important as ever.
Government figures state 217,345 net additional homes were added to England’s housing stock during 2016-17 – an increase of 27,700 on the previous year. That’s some way below the 300,000 annual additional homes Chancellor Philip Hammond claims are needed. Helping Sajid Javid implement solutions to the housing crisis will likely take an able communicator and more than seven months in the job.
Mr Javid becomes the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government - a tweak in the name of his department that brings housing to the Cabinet table. It’s a welcome, symbolic change that shows housing is high on this government’s agenda.
The addition will mean little in an operational sense, however. Mr Javid already engages with the property industry, taking the lead on implementing policies in the 2017 Housing White Paper, the government’s renewed interest in the quality of housing stock, addressing leaseholder issues and Help to Buy.
"He is set to have a busy start to 2018, beginning with the scheduled Spring publication of a revised National Planning Policy Framework - a document intended to make the planning system less complex. In the longer term it will be interesting to see how Mr Javid nurtures signs of a renaissance in council housebuilding and a burgeoning modular homebuilding sector."
Mr Raab will likely start by continuing Mr Sharma’s work on a Social Housing Green Paper, announced in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy that took place on Mr Sharma’s second day in his post. Part of the 2010 intake of MPs, Mr Raab was previously a Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice. Over the last seven years, however, he has taken an interest in housing at a local level, and is particularly in favour of retaining current protections of the Green Belt.
His views on local planning may be tested when charged with aiding a huge national increase in homebuilding. One of Mr Javid’s greatest headaches, outlined in the White Paper, is that 40 percent of local planning authorities do not have a plan that meets the projected growth in households in their area, partly due local tensions in approving new development.
We hope Mr Javid and Mr Raab are now given some time to make real progress. As each year passes and each homebuilding target is missed, the backlog of unbuilt homes grows larger.