Steve Reed must choose: will he side with reformers who understand the need for the private sector to be allowed to deliver, or with the old guard whose obsession with social and affordable housing means perpetual scarcity dressed up as compassion? Asks Simon Clarke
When the new Housing Secretary, Steve Reed, declared on Monday he is ready to “Build Baby Build”, my phone lit up. Conservative YIMBY’s slogan, splashed across the papers and recycled by Labour’s man in Marsham Street. It was flattering, if a little disorientating. One of our now infamous blue caps – and the bill – is in the post.
But slogans are easy; delivery is what matters. And the challenge facing the secretary of sState is whether he wants to be remembered as a builder, or as the next victim of the social housing mafia.
Who are the social housing mafia? I refer to the group at the heart of government policy on homes, who are united above all by their profound lack of interest in private housebuilding. They include minister Matthew Pennycook, Toby Lloyd, the architect of the 2018 National Planning Policy Framework that helped trigger an ongoing collapse in housing projects, Shelter veterans like Kate Webb, now ensconced back in Whitehall, and policy advisers like Catriona Riddell and Rosie Grayston. Their preference is nationalising supply, funnelling everything into state provision and suffocating the private sector in red tape until it gives up. There is a pervasive scepticism that building more homes will in fact bring prices down.
Angela Rayner’s brief tenure as housing secretary is already a cautionary tale. Her legacy? Devastating data last week from the Home Builders’ Federation shows planning permissions in the last quarter fell to their lowest level since 2012. The number of new homes approved was down 23 per cent on the same time last year.
Her inheritance was full of challenges. Big issues like the Building Safety Regulator are causing chaos. Desperately-needed planning reform under Robert Jenrick for the Conservatives was torpedoed in 2021, ironically by an anti-development campaign fronted for Labour by Steve Reed himself, the then shadow spokesman.
Rayner was the worst housing secretary in modern history
But Rayner messed up a once in a generation chance for a fresh start. When she floated some sensible green belt release, she married this with a golden rule of 50 per cent affordable housing or nothing. Planning reform, so exciting last summer, has regressed and a veto for Natural England is back. Small builders have folded. Supply has dried up.
Hers is, in short, the worst housing record of any housing secretary in modern history. And it happened in part because the social housing mafia got their way.
The irony is that Reed seems to know this. But instincts need allies. Will he challenge his own MPs, and reverse the recent watering down of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill? Will he take on the EU legacy Habitat Regulations that stymy so many critical developments? And above all, will he side with reformers who understand the need for the private sector to be allowed to deliver, or with the old guard whose obsession with social and affordable housing means perpetual scarcity dressed up as compassion?
Labour will never be on the side of those who want to get on if they are captured by Shelter-schooled ideologues
Housing isn’t just another policy area. It is the foundation of growth, family life and aspiration. Labour will never be on the side of those who want to get on if they are captured by Shelter-schooled ideologues.
So my message to Steve Reed is this: prove you mean it. Don’t just borrow our slogan. Borrow our seriousness. Break with the social housing mafia before they break you. Recognise that real reform means market supply, planning reform and unlocking private capital.
The social housing mafia always promises protection. In practice, they deliver stagnation. So will the secretary of state stand up to them? Or will he be remembered as another Housing Secretary who talked like a Yimby, but governed like a Nimby?
Sir Simon Clarke is the Director of Onward, and the Chairman of Conservative YIMBY