'Events, dear boy, events'
The quote commonly attributed to Harold Macmillan seems particularly relevant at the moment. The Conservative Party Conference was supposed to see our embattled Prime Minister relaunch her premiership and refocus on the policy issues she spoke so passionately about in her maiden speech on the steps of Downing Street.
Instead, she is fighting for her political life after a series of unfortunate yet remarkable events involving a protester, a coughing fit and a collapsing set. Today's headlines question whether she can see out the weekend without the plotters moving to dethrone her. My guess is she will limp on, further weakened but still seen as the least worst candidate to lead the country through the ongoing Brexit negotiations. It is the latest instalment in the seemingly neverending Tory psychodrama.
It was not supposed to be like this. The Prime Minister and her team believed the policies announced in her speech, including funding for a new generation of Council housing, would demonstrate that the party had learnt lessons following the summer General Election. The housing proposals are now at risk of being relegated to the footnotes of history as the media obsesses with political process over policy.
However, the policies announced do in fact represent a radical shift in how the Conservative Party views the issue of housing and are worthy of further examination. Under David Cameron, the Party prioritised home ownership above all else. This was shown by the reintroduction of 'Right to Buy' and the new 'Help to Buy' scheme, which critics claim simply inflates house prices. Help to Buy continues to be a cornerstone of government policy but, for the first time since Labour left office in 2010, delivering new socially rented homes (Council housing in old money) is once again Government policy. Whether ￡2bn is enough to deliver any meaningful change remains to be seen, with initial predictions suggesting this will amount to only 25,000 new homes over the next five years. There is also a considerable lack of detail, with no timeframe for when local authorities or registered providers will be able to bid for this funding or where the homes will actually be delivered. One radical idea proposed by Cllr Gary Porter, Chairman of the Local Government Association, is to go further and allow Council's to borrow in order to directly build new social housing.
I have long thought that housing is a sufficiently weighty issue to justify its own dedicated seat around the Cabinet table, instead of being a subset of DCLG. When you consider the above challenges alongside reforming the private rented sector, the proposed White Paper on social housing following the Grenfell disaster and the ongoing planning consultation on changes to the OAHN and NPPF, it seems plain to me that a new government ministry is required before we begin to really address housing policy in this country.
I for one believe the Prime Minister is still the best person to oversee the response to these issues and reform housing in this country. But there is a growing sense that the list of setbacks is piling up. Whether or not he ever said the titular quote, it was in fact events which were Macmillan's ultimate undoing. Only time will tell whether the same fate awaits Mrs May.