Who should be housing supremo in what we all assume will be Mrs May’s new administration? Brandon Lewis and Gavin Barwell, recent junior ministers with that brief, achieved nothing — if we also assume the brief was to procure an adequate supply of new homes, in the private sector or ‘social’ one, which the ‘just about managing’ could afford. The number of affordable homes built in 2015-16 was just 32,000, half that built in the previous year and the lowest since 1992. But action is coming — apparently. ‘We will fix the broken housing market,’ declares Mrs May, mustard-keen on fixing broken markets, ‘to build a new generation of council homes right across the country.’ It was left to lieutenants to explain that there was no new target or new money behind this beyond the 40,000 homes and £1.4 billion mentioned in last year’s Autumn Statement, and no new ideas beyond unspecified reform of compulsory purchase.
She must be aware that she’ll have to do better, however, because there really is a crisis of housing affordability and availability — with knock-on effects for growth, productivity, care provision, urban crime and much else besides. What’s needed is a big beast in the perhaps unlikely mode of Harold Macmillan in the early 1950s — capable of fighting the Treasury, grabbing resources, slashing red tape and marshalling contractors and investors.
How did the initially reluctant Macmillan succeed in passing the 300,000-houses-per-year target set for him by Winston Churchill? His biographer says he deployed ‘a combination of cajolery, threat and sheer political cunning’ through well-chosen subordinates who included a shrewd industrialist (Sir Percy Mills), a dynamic civil servant (Dame Evelyn Sharp) and an ambitious junior minister (Ernest Marples). Between them they got the job done.
Who could repeat that feat today, or even achieve Jeremy Corbyn’s relatively modest target of 100,000 homes? Well, there’s one senior Tory who may not be returning to his last job, who needs to be kept busy and to notch up tangible cabinet success, who knows how to surround himself with able people, and who has experience of launching a town-sized brownfield housing scheme.
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