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As David Cameron’s return to frontline politics dominated the headlines on Monday, there were rumblings of disquiet within the Conservative Party about the revolving doors of ministers at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
Rachel Maclean, the sixth housing minister since 2022 and fifteenth since 2010, was sacked and replaced with Lee Rowley, who returns to the post for the second time during his career after a stint as local government minister.
Number of housing ministers since 2010: 16
Number of housing crises solved: zero
Though Ms Maclean made headlines for the wrong reasons at the Tory party conference in October when she said that not all private renters “smoke weed” or are “bad people in gangs”, she was dedicated to the job.
I interviewed Ms Maclean, the MP for Redditch, in front of a packed-out room of delegates from the Renters’ Reform Coalition in Westminster back in March when she was newly installed in her ministerial role.
Though she was heckled by some tenants’ union members, she responded to questions thoughtfully, clearly understood the human cost of the housing crisis because members of her own family are affected by spiraling private rents and was steadfast in her commitment to banning ‘no fault’ Section 21 evictions – even when other members of her party tried to block it.
Ms Maclean was also across the incredibly technical and equally controversial Leasehold Reform Bill as well as being staunchly pro-planning reform – she wanted to get building homes. She was described as a “crusader against nimbyism” and didn’t seem to mind it too much. Other Conservative MPs liked it less, one imagines.
She has now been replaced by Mr Rowley, the MP for North East Derbyshire, who returns to DLUHC for the second time in his career. Her sacking, just days before the committee stages of the Government’s Renters (Reform) Bill, illustrate how disruptive the Conservatives’ psychodrama can be in the real world.
Ms Maclean had been working closely with stakeholders on the new legislation which will ban “no fault” evictions as well as shore up renters’ rights.
Ben Beadle, chief executive of National Residential Landlords Association, told i the chopping and changing was disruptive.
“At a time of significant change for the private rented sector, the extremely high turnover of government ministers has only worsened the long-running instability affecting the market,” he said.
He warned that the new minister would have had “only a matter of hours to get their head around the complexities of rental reform” before debates on the Bill began in Parliament.
“It is crucial that the Government provides the certainty which landlords and tenants need in order to plan for the biggest upheaval the sector has seen in decades,” he said.
Similarly, Ben Twomey, chief executive of campaign group Generation Rent, said: “The short tenure of housing ministers has become a joke, but there’s nothing funny about the minister responsible for abolishing Section 21 evictions being sacked on the eve of Bill committee sessions starting.”
The Renters (Reform) Bill was promised by the Conservatives back in 2019 and has faced numerous delays since, as well as rebellions from landlord Tory MPs and backbenchers who see reining in landlords rights as “unconservative”.
“Renters have already been messed around so much with delays to this vital law – this is yet more chaos that makes us nervous of the Government’s commitment to protecting renters,” Mr Twomey added.
The Housing Secretary, Michael Gove, is understood to be as equally unimpressed. Westminster sources tell me he is “obviously furious” and they can’t understand why Ms Maclean was sacked because she “wasn’t awful” at her job.
The Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch broke ranks to tweet that she was “very sorry to see” Ms Maclean “leave government”.
“You were an excellent minister, always attentive to MPs and their constituents and got some very tricky legislation over the line!” she added.
Mr Gove retweeted the post.
While the squabbling continues in Westminster, the housing crisis worsens.
Key Housing
Last week, the Government’s own data on evictions showed that the number of people being made homeless under Section 21 has just hit a seven-year high.
The housing charity, Shelter, have sent me some new research which exposes the turmoil facing private renters in England as 1 in 10 – equivalent to 885,000 adults – are now at risk of losing their homes.
The figure rises to an estimated 1.1 million people if you include the number of children affected.
To calculate how many people face the threat of losing their home this winter, the charity looked at the number of private renting adults who have received or been threatened with an eviction notice in the last month (474,000), as well as the number of tenants who are behind on their rent (411,000).
Shelter also conducted a survey of 1,937 renters and they’ve shared some findings exclusively with me:
3 in 5 (59 per cent) private renters have seen their rent increase in the last year.
3 in 4 (76 per cent) of those struggling or behind say this is due to an increase in the cost of food with 2 in 3 (66 per cent) saying it’s because of an increase in the cost of heating and electricity.
If there was ever a time to get a grip on the housing crisis, it’s now.
Ask me anything
An interesting question has come in via Instagram:
“If Labour gets in, what will change?”
I sat down with Labour’s deputy leader and shadow Housing Secretary Angela Rayner last week to press her on the details.
Read my exclusive interview with her as soon as it’s live here.
Ask your question via Twitter @Victoria_Spratt, Instagram @vicky.spratt or email vicky.spratt@inews.co.uk
Vicky’s pick
And now, for something a little different. I have lived in London nearly all my life but I have never made it to the Friday late night opening of the British Museum. That all changed last week when I got down there and enjoyed walking through its halls until 8pm. The most magical thing about it was that volunteers give free guided tours of their favourite parts of the museum. I am extremely nerdy about Ancient Egypt and managed to tag along to one which focused on mummies and the afterlife in rooms 62-63.
This is Home Front with Vicky Spratt, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
