Robert Jenrick’s number one objective is to deliver more homes. Will he succeed?

INTERVIEW BY JAY ELWES

Back in 2015, Andrew Adonis, the Labour peer, wrote a piece for Prospect on what he termed Britain’s “housing crisis.” Rents, he said, were sky high and there was a gross under-supply of housing. Adonis put the blame for this crisis on “the planning system, the Green Belt, land banking by private developers, financial controls on local authorities, low numbers of houses built relative to available land (low “density” in the jargon), the operation of the “right to buy” scheme… buyers treating London property as gold bars, the absence of a private rented sector managed by institutional investors, and more besides.”

That was four years ago—and when I met the Secretary of State for Housing Robert Jenrick in the run up to the general election, I began by asking whether he accepted that such a housing crisis existed. “There’s a huge generational challenge to build more homes,” he conceded. The scale of the challenge is perhaps recognised more concretely in the government’s target of building 300,000 new homes every year by the middle of next decade.

“That’s a big challenge,” said Jenrick, “but one that I want to embrace.” At the heart of it all, he said, is the planning system, which is “out-dated, complex, convoluted and a product of our post-war settlement and in need [of] serious reform.”

“I also want to refocus on home ownership. I believe that’s at the heart of what Conservatives should do in office.” Jenrick is somewhat younger than the average Conservative minister—he is 37 years old—and suggested that this partly inspired his focus on home ownership. It’s true that home ownership has become more of a challenge for young people today. But even so, the idea of the home-owning democracy is a longstanding Conservative leitmotiv with strong Thatcherite overtones. Not quite a new idea then, but perhaps a politically attractive one, especially now that the average house price in England stands at £233,000, while the average wage is £28,677.