Breaking Property News 20/8/26
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Why Angela Rayner Housing Secretary is in the wrong job – again
A smile, bluster and vague soundbites will not solve the UK housing crisis
Thought Leadership by Andrew Stanton – CEO Proptech-PR
‘I have been involved in the UK property industry since the mid 1980’s and have an extremely well-informed understanding of new home delivery, not least that it takes five years from wanting to build a new property asset to it being built. So, when the Labour government said they would increase the rate of delivery by 50% I was of course sceptical.
After two years Labour has only delivered 62% of the houses promised and needs to deliver 400,000 new homes a year every year over the next 36 months to hit their 1.5M target. Which brings us on to the person driving or not driving the policies that will enable this – the once sacked and now re-engaged Housing secretary Angela Rayner.
Apart from of course having no formal education, Ms Rayner has not exactly covered herself in glory with regard to property matters, her tax evasion of £40,000 of SDLT is well publicised, as is her vagueness with regard to whether she lived at or rented her former council house, which she bought at a discount and then sold. Then as Housing minister closing the loophole so that others living in social housing now have to wait years longer than she and her ex-husband had to, to be able to buy at a discount.
I could dig a little deeper into the still unresolved matter at land registry where the ‘trust’ matter that sits around her appropriation of funds from her son’s fund is still in abeyance as the matter does not seem to be at arm’s length, but I think the real problem with Ms Rayner being the ‘brains’ behind getting 400,000 new homes built every twelve months – is not only is it impossible but a far-left socialist idealogue is the last thing that will help get the problem resolved. A panel of experts just might.
I have seen firsthand being in the audience at Propertymark One earlier this year, that unlike former Housing secretary’s like Michael Gove for example who was all over the brief and knew all the detail ensuring he had overview of all the facts and numbers, Ange relies on a smile and bluster and vague soundbites, usually falling back into telling a tale about her working-class roots, being a young mum with no qualifications and living on a council estate with ‘orange hair.’
Now this type of rhetoric might go down well with a Unison trade union conference, but it was not reading the room when you have an audience of the top property 1,200 property professionals in the UK, who all paid good money to hear the shape of labour’s policy around housing especially new home delivery.
As a point of balance listening to Ange on stage, I did feel a personal warmth and I was impressed by her ability to talk, but there are probably lots of people working on a Tesco checkout who could do the same thing – but I would not want them to be the one pushing through or rather failing to push through the delivery of 400,000 new homes a year. And her is the problem – within the Labour cabinet there is only the tiniest veneer of knowledge and certainly zero strategy.
Whenever Ms Rayner is put in front of a microphone the huge chasm between the job that needs sorting – housing – and her lack of grip on the brief comes into focus, like a huge boulder hurtling towards the unfortunate Coyote cartoon character about to be crushed as he is unable to escape the inevitable impact.
My advice and what do I know? would be to say that as new-home delivery hovers around 200,000 units a year in a stable market, with a downturn in the economy, huge cost rises and interest rates likely to rise and Vistry etc likely to go to the wall, realistically the 1.5M target will be 950,000 new homes over five years. Once that news is digested, I would then take advice, a lot of advice from all of the stakeholders, and then put together a framework that ensures new-home delivery sees an annual uptick of 10% a year, every year moving forward.
This would be sensible and affordable, instead we have the ‘Mayor’ PM from Manchester talking about building social housing like the UK did in the 1970’s – which would cost £100bn, fifty times the NHS annual budget, and a substantial proportion of this ‘new’ cost would fall on the taxpayers (again).
Now politically it might be a great idea to grow the traditional Labour voting base by providing more social housing and on that my thoughts are we are not Spain, and would it not be better to have a thriving economy so more people could buy rather than be renters for life?
On the topic of more social housing, as 18% of all housing stock in this sector is uninhabitable due to its condition, maybe getting this inventory back into use would be a better idea. Also increasing the subsidised rent levels revenue would help.
Most importantly I think that the present system of a person being means tested just once then given social housing needs immediate overhauling. As in 1988 a person may have dire need and get the top of the housing list, but in 2026 that same family may have prospered and that household may now have a combined income of £200,000 a year, and so could rent privately in the same area, or even buy a property locally.
A simple HMRC software integration that cross references earnings of socially housed tenants would control this situation and allow the needy of 2026 to live in property that is earmarked for those most in need, rather than for those who are some of the wealthiest in the UK. I know it would be electoral suicide for Labour, but if we want to sort housing out some tough choices need to be made.’
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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