Alok Sharma was promoted to housing minister on a Monday in June. The following day, a huge fire engulfed a 24-storey tower in Kensington, and changed everything.
“What happened at Grenfell has caused everyone who is involved with the housing sector to ask some very serious questions,” Sharma says.
Responding to the failures of UK housing policy exposed by the tragedy will be a priority for Sharma in his new role. He will oversee a green paper on social housing and is preparing for a tour around the country to talk to social tenants and tenant organisations to discuss their concerns.
Sharma will also oversee the Conservatives’ attempt to show how the party is making housing “fairer”, having recognised that the party’s failure to win a majority in the June snap election was in part down to its failure to adequately address the housing crisis.
“If we don’t get this right, as a Conservative party, we will have an issue at the next election,” Sharma says. “The reason why people are superficially finding some of the things that [Jeremy] Corbyn is saying attractive is because if they don’t have skin in the game, they might as well listen to the guy – even if they are not sure that he can deliver any of this stuff.”
Skin in the game
Giving people “skin in the game” is where the Conservative vision of home ownership comes in. “I am a great believer in the fact, when it comes to homes ownership, that it is a great social leveler, so of course as well as building new homes for rent, we want to be building new homes to buy.”
A plan to win back support from generation rent was unveiled Monday by the communities secretary, who announced a £10bn boost to Help to Buy and tougher rules for landlords who charge “rip-off” tenancy fees and provide an inadequate service.
Beyond those two priorities of rethinking social housing and making policy fairer, Sharma’s main job is to navigate the route to fixing the housing market set out by his predecessor Gavin Barwell. In his post for just 11 months, the former Croydon Central MP, who lost his seat in the election, oversaw a shift from a home-ownership dominated policy model to a mixed-tenure one, delivering a “how-to guide” in the form of a housing white paper.
“My job is to deliver this,” he says, waving a hard copy of the document. Giving councils powers to increase planning fees, supporting build to rent and promoting SME housebuilders are among the policies established by Barwell that Sharma plans to implement. He has spoken privately with housing professionals at conference about a model for housing delivery on public land where local authorities give a plot of their land to housebuilders, who then build out the development and give back a certain number of homes to the council.
Consistency of approach will be welcomed by the industry. “All you have to do is follow through [with the housing white paper]”, says L&Q chief executive David Montague. “The missing part of the jigsaw is that there are many more tenures than home ownership.”
Will the government move quickly enough with the reforms? If the party’s flagship conference housing policy updates were already unveiled on Monday then there is some scepticism.
A vision for housing
“Sajid Javid [has] set out this…vision of investing across all tenures, this vision of housing for everyone, and I think we are being prepared for something more, so I’m hoping that on Wednesday Theresa May will be setting out the other half of this Macmillanesque vision,” says Montague. “Because a lot of young people cannot afford Help to Buy, and there are an awful lot of people that cannot afford to buy as well, and so I think if we are going to fix the housing market we really must focus on more than home ownership.”
Another announcement around housing on Wednesday is unlikely. However, Sharma is promising “more soon”. The next thing to look out for will be a response to the community infrastructure levy consultation. “There has been a consultation and we will be responding,” Sharma says.
Will the 15th housing minister in 17 years be in post for long? He says he hopes so, and appreciates that the high turnover of ministers is a problem. Sharma has kept a relatively low profile compared with Gavin Barwell’s energetic approach at party conference in Birmingham last year, where he spoke at around 10 fringe events in three days.
A chartered accountant by profession, Sharma worked in corporate finance before entering politics and has served in the Foreign Office and the Treasury but has no experience of housing and planning beyond his duties as an MP. He is understood to be keeping his head down while he gets to grip with the issues.
After Barwell, who impressed the industry with his hard work and engagement, Sharma has a tough act to follow. But at least he was left with a solid ground from which to start making improvements. All he has to do is follow through.
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