I’ve never been speed-dating, I wouldn’t have the patience for it. The concept seems to be that potential suitors sit in front of each other for a few short minutes to see if there’s any kind of spark that might lead to something positive and long term.
This brief encounter is just enough time to ascertain a wide overview of a person’s existence (are they human, can they speak, do they have hair etc) and to establish on a scratched-surface basis if it’s likely that you might quickly hate that person and might be best to avoid them thereafter.
It’s by definition not enough time to get your feet under the table nor to assess any issues in depth, least not to plan next week’s Costa meet let alone some resemblance of a rosy future.
Being drunk probably helps. Being somewhat distant from reality and less cautious no doubt makes for a more irresponsible encounter and one that may soon even be forgotten entirely.
And so, my analogy mirrors the approach that the UK government has to housing policy and in particular to its Housing Ministers. Yes, we are about to see another one spin through the revolving door of Whitehall imminently as this week Lucy Frazer MP leaves the housing brief after just 105 days to become Culture Secretary, a promotion that can have had nothing to do with a successful tenure at the Dept for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities given that Ms Frazer has barely had time to order cake and donor-funded wallpaper for her new office.
So fleeting in tenure now is this particular office of state that Michael Spicer of The Room Next Door fame quipped on Twitter on Tuesday “More chance of being a housing minister than there is of buying a house”. Very apt.
And more astonishing than Rishi appointing the 15th Housing Minister in 13 years? Is the fact that he is about to appoint the 6th in 12 months. Some of us have had ham in the fridge longer than this average.
Isn’t it patently unfeasible that UK housing policy can prosper when the person at the helm, the Housing Minister, disappears faster than a magician’s assistant? Is it any wonder that lessons and indeed action from the Grenfell disaster have taken half a decade to bring about? Or that new house building remains at around half the level of the 1950’s? Or that social housing is a mere tab on a spreadsheet with over one million households on waiting lists now?
Housebuilding volume, housing quality, affordable rent, shared ownership, cladding, easing up on the relentless penalising of landlords, a broken planning system, reforming council tax, re-thinking stamp duty, solving the epidemic of vacant publicly owned dwellings and land, homelessness… these are all rather pressing matters that frankly will never be remedied when the persons responsible are only in the job for a few months. It’s not even that the problem is that Raab, Malthouse, McVey, Pincher, Rowley and Frazer haven’t had time to perform. The issue is that each new recipient of the post knows that they are only going to be there for a matter of weeks. Hardly a situation to embrace with passion.
I’ve long thought that successive governments haven’t really cared about housing as an issue despite using the issue as a political football with which to grab regular headlines feigning progress. The fact that successive prime inisters are proven to have seen its senior job as one so temporary and so ineffectual, rather demonstrates that I’m right.
Is this incompetence or is it arrogance? Or have administrations over the past few decadems simply failed to comprehend solutions to these problems, especially when we realise that not one of the last fourteen Housing Ministers has been any kind of expert in the sector? ‘Owning a house or two’ seems to have been the only qualification at best.
Or is it that our politicians and their parties are on their knees to the biggest property developer donors, a handful of which control over 60% of new build output? Dating? No, I reckon this is more like prostitution.
Russell Quirk is co-founder of ProperPR, and a regular commentator for national media on the housing market
