Housing minister MacLean says resources devoted to housing more important than cabinet representation
The prime minister should establish a dedicated secretary of state for housing, the boss of L&Q has argued.
Currently the sector is represented in cabinet by Michael Gove as part of a wider portfolio which includes levelling up and communities.
But Fiona Fletcher-Smith, chief executive of L&Q and the new chair of the G15 group of housing associations, has urged the government to split out the brief from Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
At a panel event yesterday, the final morning of the Chartered Institution of Housing’s (CIH) annual conference, Fletcher-Smith said: “Housing has got to be regarded as part of the national infrastructure.
“It is a drag on the economy that our housing is so poor in so many ways – it is unaffordable, it is leaky in terms of heat and energy.
“I would love to see a secretary of state for housing sitting at the cabinet table, because if you think of the impact of poor housing [for] a child born into unsafe, insecure and unaffordable housing, their life chances are just ruined from birth and that is intergenerational.”
In recent years, the housing sector has had little consistency in terms of its representation in government.
Rachel MacLean, a minister of state within Gove’s team at DLUHC, currently handles the housing brief and was the sixth politician in a year to do so when she was appointed in February.
When the question of upgrading the housing brief to cabinet level was put to her in the conference’s final panel session, she said it was “up to the prime minister who he puts in his cabinet”.
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“Clearly housing is vital, it affects everybody […] without a house no one can fill their potential, it is a vital thing,” she said.
“Whether or not it is in the cabinet is possibly a little bit less important than the amount of focus and resource that we put into delivering housing.
“We are backing housing with government funding to enable houses to get built, we are changing the planning system – these are concrete things that will actually deliver housing [and] have delivered housing”.
CIH president Oyedele, who was on the same panel, responded that she would “happily promote” MacLean, noting that housing was “not just a side thing that we come to when we have sorted education and health”.
“It should definitely be around the cabinet table,” she said.
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