The chief executive of Family Building Society has called the “revolving door” of UK housing ministers over the last 13 years a “bonkers” situation, which has helped create a failed housing policy.
Mark Bogard complains years of stop-start initiatives have meant the country has been unable to build an integrated housing policy.
He says: “The greatest failure is not giving housing the status it deserves.
“The minister for housing should hold one of the great offices of state, alongside the Treasury, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and the Home Office.
“It is shocking that the revolving ministerial door has witnessed fifteen housing ministers, none of them a secretary of state, come and go since 2010, which is bonkers”.
Bogard was speaking at the launch today of a London School of Economics report commissioned by the mutual, called ‘Achieving a more coherent and consistent approach to housing policy’, at the House of Commons.
The study argues that the failure of the UK to deliver a consistent approach to housing dates back to the mid-1970s.
It says that many housing programmes, and studies, both governmental and non-governmental, since this time “have failed to deliver a coherent, integrated housing policy”.
This approach has produced “a plethora of well-meaning but badly conceived help to buy schemes in various guises have simply stoked demand, and at taxpayers’ expense, inflated house builders’ profits”.
The report identifies three key problems that have led to fractured decision-making.
Too many cooks involved in housing policy
The deregulation of financial markets and Bank of England independence has made monetary policy far more central to housing policy success, the report says.
The Treasury “has always held the purse strings” but now sees housing as more important to its capacity to meet fiscal objectives.
The shift away from supply-side to demand-side housing policies and subsidies has given the Department of Work and Pensions a central role in housing.
While, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ “traditional responsibilities are now in the hands of arms-length bodies” such as Homes England and the Regulator of Social Housing, with local authorities also having a core role.
Housing complex finance
Private finance now “plays a much more central role in implementing housing policy since the 1970s”.
Also, UK institutional investors including pension funds “are now more involved than in the past”.
And since the global financial crisis, “overseas finance has penetrated UK housing including providing funding for housing associations and private landlords”.
Changing attitudes to housebuilding
The study says: “In earlier decades people viewed the provision of additional housing as highly desirable. But now they are more likely to worry about how it will negatively impact local services and their own housing conditions.”
The report, by LSE professors Christine Whitehead and Tony Crook, calls for “coherent and consistent” medium- and long-term strategies involving all parties, as well as the Bank of England, the Treasury and DWP as well as DLUHC and local authorities.
The survey says: “Is any of this likely to happen? It looks impossible in the current, highly politicised, environment.
“Yet, there would be massive gains to any political party that managed to generate a set of coherent policies which helped more people find acceptable affordable homes.”
Family Building Society’s Bogard adds: “Any long-term housing policy cannot just be about new building.
“It must be about the quality and use of the whole housing stock, including support for landlords, and the circumstances of all households including reforming stamp duty which disincentivises moving.
“Housing policy is broken. Why don’t we actually fix it?”
In April, Levelling Up secretary Michael Gove also said the UK housing market is “broken” and “desperately” needs a greater supply of new homes and higher standards.
The government currently has two pieces of major legislation making their way through parliament under DLUHC.
Gove has said the government’s wide-ranging Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, “strengthens local leadership and reforms our planning system in a way that puts neighbourhoods firmly in control”.
While its sweeping Renters Reform bill, introduced last month, will among a range of measures scrap Section 21 no-fault evictions and apply the country’s Decent Homes Standard to the private rented sector for the first time.
However, in November the government was forced to water down its commitment to build 300,000 homes a year after a threatened revolt by backbench Conservative MPs, which turned this instruction to local authorities to advisory from mandatory.
