BREAKING PROPERTY NEWS – 09/02/2022
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Stuart Andrew becomes housing minister. Does it matter?
After Boris Johnson’s latest reshuffle, Stuart Andrew joins the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) as Minister of State for Housing. He is the 32nd housing minister in 38 years, meaning that the average length of post is just fourteen months.
Stuart Andrew joins a long line of notable politicians to represent the role, from both sides of the house, starting with the Conservative Graham Page, who held the position in 1974.
Page was then superseded by John Silkin, followed by other prominent ministers like Michael Howard, George Young, Yvette Cooper, Grant Shapps, Alok Sharma, Dominic Raab, Esther McVey and Christopher Pincher, to name but a few.
George Young managed to stay the course for three years and eight months, but that was over thirty years ago. The more modern trend has been that a housing minister does not hang around. Esther McVey lasted only seven months, for instance.
Does this really matter though? Is it not just how politics works?
Well, I think that very much it does matter that something as important as housing, the basic right of every person to have a roof over their head, is serviced in such a way. Of course, we have the housing secretaries, presently Mr Gove is also titled the Leveller also, and their remit is to do the big thinking…or not, depending on which side you sit.
But the housing minister is the lynchpin in many ways between Whitehall and the public and all the bodies that build relationships within the department. Each time a new minister comes in, typically with zero knowledge of the sector, by the time they get up to speed the revolving door opens and a new incumbent appears.
What results is a piecemeal and fragmented housing policy, with many stakeholders gritting their teeth thinking “here we go again, another inexperienced minister.”
What I find extremely sad is that with the cladding crisis, fire safety and even the Grenfell tragedy still all very much unresolved, plus rampant housing inflation, economic and wage inflation, and the Bank of England using the blunt instrument of interest rate rises to slow the ineptness of a giveaway Chancellor and his SDLT holiday, a huge swathe of people in the housing nexus will just not be looked after.
I am sure Stuart Andrew will be a diligent minister like the dozens before him. The fact he is a landlord might temper his boss Michael Gove’s populist view that rogue landlords need sorting, put them on a register and scrap Section 21 as tenants have rights.
Gove might be told by Andrew that landlords in fact like their tenants because they pay rent. Landlords also like to look after their valuable asset, the properties they let out. And the local authorities not in the PRS have an appallingly high level of substandard housing not fit for purpose, so maybe more focus is needed here.
Before you know it, I will be reporting on the next housing minister, so the bigger question is will anything substantive have been done with housing in the interim? I think not. Soundbites, red tape and big visions with no follow-through are the most likely outcome.
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