Thread by @PeteApps

Think this is worth unpacking a bit. What the (majority Tory) committee has accused MHCLG of is a “deplorable... cycle of policy invention, abandonment and reinvention".

It's really a broadside at the mess we've made of housing policy full stop over the last few years

https://twitter.com/PeteApps/status/1336594654893125632

The main focus is Starter Homes which (now famously) the government spent £173m buying brownfield land for, and then didn't build any. But the PAC has broadened its criticism.

"This Committee has reported regularly on housing delivery since 2015, and not one of the promised housing programmes has delivered its objectives. Indeed, most have fallen woefully short."

That is a pretty extraordinary, but frankly entirely fair.

A big part of this is politics: David Cameron's majority government tried to implement a suite of ridiculous right wing housing policies based on the ideas of niche right wing think tanks. They were completely undeliverable, but legislated for anyway.

Theresa May then totally abandoned all this (which is where Starter Homes disappeared) but often didn't really have the guts to clearly admit she was dropping stuff, hence policies which twisted in the wind for years like Starter Homes and the Voluntary Right to Buy

She then made a bit of a start on her own ideas about housing, but left office before seeing many of them through - leaving another set of ghost policies in her wake. How's the scrapping of Section 21 evictions going exactly?

But there is also a weird phenomenon with housing where new ideas get picked up, talked about, consulted on and then apparently completely forgotten about. As someone who is contractually obliged to write about this stuff, I can tell you, it's pretty annoying.

Remember when the government was going to be a direct commissioner of new homes (2015), or the bespoke council housing deals (2017), or the mass CPO of stalled development sites (2017)?

This stuff comes up, it's taken seriously, written about considered, has money allocated to it and then nothing actually happens. And this happens again and again and again. I honestly feel like the last really significant housing policy we had was Help to Buy in 2013.

The root cause of this is various PMs and secretaries of state pulling in different directions for a year or so at a time, while being undermined by Treasury anyway. The country critically lacks an overall housing strategy, or any real idea of what it wants to achieve and how...

... beyond a vague idea about homeownership. This is important because over the last decade we've seen the number of households in temporary accommodation rise from 50,400 to 98,300. That's the price of the policy drift (ends)

NB - left the building safety crisis out of this because, well, that really is an entirely different car crash subject to its own 30 tweet thread here

https://twitter.com/PeteApps/status/1298930754567766016