This week’s report by the National Audit Office (NAO) allowed the media to put housing policy under the electoral spotlight. Starter Homes, homes sold at 20% discounts to first time buyers, was a previous Conservative manifesto commitment. The Government had earmarked funding to build 200,000 of them in the 2015 Spending Review.
The NAO report published this week found that despite a serious funding commitment, not a single one has been built. Whilst many will say that Starter Homes was a bad policy and good riddance what this example really illustrates is the paralysis in UK politics and how it is affecting policy across the Government.
There are three broad observations I would draw from the NAO report which are both relevant to housing and the general body politic:
- A lack continuity at the top is undermining housing delivery
Starter Homes was launched under a Cameron Government when Brandon Lewis was Housing Minister. Since Lewis who departed the role in 2016, we have had another five Housing Ministers.
If you don’t have anyone at the helm for very long, nothing innovative is going to get done. Moreover, the art of successful policy is continuity. Whilst the same party has been in power since 2015, there clearly is not a sustained level of presence and focus and this is affecting delivery.
- Brexit has knocked domestic policy delivery off course
It’s an obvious point to make: Brexit is diverting attention from important domestic issues. However, it’s useful to reflect on Starter Homes in this context. The policy received £2.3 bn of backing in the November Spending Review in 2015, just months before the Referendum decision to leave the European Union.
The NAO report observes that whilst the Housing and Planning Act made it through Parliament in 2016, there has not been the necessary secondary legislation to breathe life to Starter Homes. This then is zombie legislation. Starter Homes is just one example, and a pertinent one, of many different policy initiatives that have become zombified by Brexit.
- The Civil Servants are running the country
What became of the £2.3 bn cash the Government made available to support Starter Homes? Well, the NAO tells us that quite a bit of it got spent, just not on Starter Homes.
The money was used buying land and remediating sites for Homes England’s wider delivery programme of thousands of homes. In a sense, whilst our politicians have been fighting over what kind of relationship we wish to have with the European Union, our civil servants have been adapting to the leadership gap by using budgets to implement existing projects in other ways. So the world has not entirely stopped functioning, just our political class.
