Alex Balkan, of the Tory YIMBY tribe, is a former councillor who works in community engagement and communications across major housing and infrastructure projects.
Sir James Cleverly is now exactly where he needs to be.
His decision to leave the Shadow Cabinet and seek to be Mayor of London makes sense. The capital needs a Conservative capable of making a serious and captivating argument for growth, aspiration and competent government.
But his departure should also force Conservatives to confront a big question: why do we keep changing the person at the wheel of housing policy?
Cleverly’s departure is not itself the problem. He has left for a significant political project. The problem is that it exposes an institutional weakness which has plagued Conservative housing policy for years.
Housing has too often been treated either as a stepping stone for an ambitious politician or as collateral damage in a wider reshuffle. A leader needs to promote somebody, remove somebody or rebalance the frontbench, and one of Britain’s greatest structural challenges gets another captain.
The result is a headless-chicken housing agenda.
One minister champions planning liberalisation. Another beauty. Another brownfield, targets or localism. None of these things is necessarily wrong. The problem is that the ship keeps changing course before it has travelled anywhere.
That is particularly damaging because almost everything serious in housing operates on a longer timescale than the reshuffle cycle.
A (Shadow) Housing Secretary must master planning, local government, land markets, infrastructure, construction capacity and development finance. They need relationships with councils, builders, housing associations and infrastructure providers. Just as they have worked out where all the departmental pipes lead, we have historically had a habit of sending them somewhere else, or they choose to themselves.
Housing is a system, so it needs a steward.
This became particularly clear to me while recently leading a Next Gen Tories member and supporter response to the Conservative Policy Forum’s housing consultation.
The exercise deliberately tested competing instincts rather than manufacturing agreement. But one conclusion ran through almost everything we discussed: Britain’s housing crisis is fundamentally a systems problem.
Planning uncertainty, delayed infrastructure, barriers to entry, underused land and buildings, weak consumer choice and dependence on a narrow development model all reinforce each other. The consequences extend into productivity, labour mobility, family formation and intergenerational fairness.
Supply is the only durable long-term answer. But that cannot simply mean squeezing more units through the existing machine, because the machine won’t allow it.
Planning needs to become more predictable. The strongest argument from our discussion was for a more rules-based system in which democratic argument happens earlier. Communities should shape local plans, land allocation and design codes; compliant development should then be able to proceed with much greater certainty.
It is a Conservative reconciliation of localism and growth: local authorship, not permanent local veto.
Brownfield should be used much more aggressively, but “brownfield first” cannot mean “brownfield only”. Some lower-value Green Belt land in sustainable locations will need to be released.
Infrastructure must arrive alongside homes, not years afterwards. And a planning system that takes years and requires expensive professional advice inevitably disadvantages the smaller housebuilders. Conservatives should want SMEs, self-builders and new entrants comfortably competing.
This leaves us with a peculiar contradiction.
We say housing needs a twenty-year strategy, then often administer it with annual ministers.
Perhaps the answer is a peer
This has led me towards a conclusion that is rooted in growing pessimism about MPs’ relationship with housing: perhaps the next Conservative (Shadow) Housing Secretary should sit in the House of Lords.
A Secretary of State in the Lords cannot personally answer MPs at the Commons despatch box, but…
Peers do not have to contemplate a marginal constituency every time the Government proposes building somewhere. That matters because we ask MPs simultaneously to support hundreds of thousands of homes nationally while are pressured by the vocal minority of their constituents who are vehemently opposed to proposed local homes and infrastructure.
More importantly, the Lords contains people who have spent years, eons even, thinking about the built environment rather than politicians briefly encountering it on the ministerial escalator.
Consider Lord Gascoigne.
I’m not suggesting that he possesses a magic housing wand, nor attributing every conclusion of a select committee personally to its chairman. But the work of the Built Environment Committee under his chairmanship demonstrates exactly the systems thinking housing needs.
Its work on new towns has considered development corporations, infrastructure-first development, land assembly, patient investment, land-value capture, SME participation, design and long-term stewardship.
These things interact. Infrastructure creates land value. Capturing some of that uplift can help pay for the infrastructure and amenities which make development acceptable. Breaking large sites into smaller parcels allows more builders to compete. Long-lived development corporations can maintain a coherent vision beyond the lifespan of individual ministers.
That is housing policy understood as institution-building, not simply hitting an annual target.
Gascoigne is not the only possibility. Lord Jamieson combines sustained involvement in housing and local government with extensive council experience. Lord Banner KC offers formidable expertise in the planning law and legal machinery that determines whether ministerial ambition becomes development or paperwork. Lord Porter brings practical local-government, construction and affordable-housing experience.
There is a mind-blowingly serious housing contingent on the red benches but it doesn’t have to be a Lord
There are good reasons to prefer a Commons Secretary of State.
If so, apply the same test. Don’t ask who needs promotion. Ask: who understands housing, has the courage to take difficult decisions, and actually wants to spend at least five years doing it?
Neil O’Brien deserves serious consideration. His previous housing work has grappled with land assembly, new settlements, infrastructure, density, planning reform and smaller builders. David Simmonds brings deep local-government experience and has focused on the neglected question of converting permissions into completions.
The individual matters, but the principle matters more.
The next Conservative leader should commit that Housing Secretary will not be treated as a routine reshuffle post.
Choose someone who understands the subject. Give them authority across planning, infrastructure and delivery. Set measurable objectives.
Then, barring failure or misconduct, give them the Parliament and, ideally, longer.
This shouldn’t mean protecting an incompetent minister—rather, it’s replacing ministerial churn with long-term accountability and direction.
Certainty should begin in Whitehall
There is a particularly Conservative logic to this.
One word surfaced repeatedly throughout our housing discussion: certainty.
Builders need to know what they can build. SMEs cannot finance years of planning limbo. Infrastructure providers need dependable pipelines. Communities need to know what development will look like and what services will accompany it.
Yet government itself has repeatedly injected uncertainty from the top.
And housing goes directly to the credibility of Conservatism.
We tell people that work should bring independence, saving should be rewarded, families should be able to put down roots and ownership should be achievable. Yet access to those things increasingly depends upon whether your parents already own an expensive house.
Our discussion repeatedly identified reliance on the “Bank of Mum and Dad” as evidence of how far housing has drifted from ordinary Conservative ideas of aspiration and self-advancement.
A property-owning democracy cannot survive indefinitely by inheriting its property owners.
Cleverly is right to go and fight for London. His departure gives Conservatives an opportunity to think differently about who replaces him.
Look seriously at the expertise in the Lords. Look at the strongest housing reformers in the Commons. Find someone who understands that solving the crisis requires planning reform, land, infrastructure, competition and public legitimacy working together.
Then put them at the helm and leave them there long enough to navigate the storm.
The next Conservative Housing Secretary should not be appointed until the next reshuffle.
They should be appointed to finish the job. The job is to solve the housing crisis.
Alex Balkan, of the Tory YIMBY tribe, is a former councillor who works in community engagement and communications across major housing and infrastructure projects.
Sir James Cleverly is now exactly where he needs to be.
His decision to leave the Shadow Cabinet and seek to be Mayor of London makes sense. The capital needs a Conservative capable of making a serious and captivating argument for growth, aspiration and competent government.
But his departure should also force Conservatives to confront a big question: why do we keep changing the person at the wheel of housing policy?
Cleverly’s departure is not itself the problem. He has left for a significant political project. The problem is that it exposes an institutional weakness which has plagued Conservative housing policy for years.
Housing has too often been treated either as a stepping stone for an ambitious politician or as collateral damage in a wider reshuffle. A leader needs to promote somebody, remove somebody or rebalance the frontbench, and one of Britain’s greatest structural challenges gets another captain.
The result is a headless-chicken housing agenda.
One minister champions planning liberalisation. Another beauty. Another brownfield, targets or localism. None of these things is necessarily wrong. The problem is that the ship keeps changing course before it has travelled anywhere.
That is particularly damaging because almost everything serious in housing operates on a longer timescale than the reshuffle cycle.
A (Shadow) Housing Secretary must master planning, local government, land markets, infrastructure, construction capacity and development finance. They need relationships with councils, builders, housing associations and infrastructure providers. Just as they have worked out where all the departmental pipes lead, we have historically had a habit of sending them somewhere else, or they choose to themselves.
Housing is a system, so it needs a steward.
This became particularly clear to me while recently leading a Next Gen Tories member and supporter response to the Conservative Policy Forum’s housing consultation.
The exercise deliberately tested competing instincts rather than manufacturing agreement. But one conclusion ran through almost everything we discussed: Britain’s housing crisis is fundamentally a systems problem.
Planning uncertainty, delayed infrastructure, barriers to entry, underused land and buildings, weak consumer choice and dependence on a narrow development model all reinforce each other. The consequences extend into productivity, labour mobility, family formation and intergenerational fairness.
Supply is the only durable long-term answer. But that cannot simply mean squeezing more units through the existing machine, because the machine won’t allow it.
Planning needs to become more predictable. The strongest argument from our discussion was for a more rules-based system in which democratic argument happens earlier. Communities should shape local plans, land allocation and design codes; compliant development should then be able to proceed with much greater certainty.
It is a Conservative reconciliation of localism and growth: local authorship, not permanent local veto.
Brownfield should be used much more aggressively, but “brownfield first” cannot mean “brownfield only”. Some lower-value Green Belt land in sustainable locations will need to be released.
Infrastructure must arrive alongside homes, not years afterwards. And a planning system that takes years and requires expensive professional advice inevitably disadvantages the smaller housebuilders. Conservatives should want SMEs, self-builders and new entrants comfortably competing.
This leaves us with a peculiar contradiction.
We say housing needs a twenty-year strategy, then often administer it with annual ministers.
Perhaps the answer is a peer
This has led me towards a conclusion that is rooted in growing pessimism about MPs’ relationship with housing: perhaps the next Conservative (Shadow) Housing Secretary should sit in the House of Lords.
A Secretary of State in the Lords cannot personally answer MPs at the Commons despatch box, but…
Peers do not have to contemplate a marginal constituency every time the Government proposes building somewhere. That matters because we ask MPs simultaneously to support hundreds of thousands of homes nationally while are pressured by the vocal minority of their constituents who are vehemently opposed to proposed local homes and infrastructure.
More importantly, the Lords contains people who have spent years, eons even, thinking about the built environment rather than politicians briefly encountering it on the ministerial escalator.
Consider Lord Gascoigne.
I’m not suggesting that he possesses a magic housing wand, nor attributing every conclusion of a select committee personally to its chairman. But the work of the Built Environment Committee under his chairmanship demonstrates exactly the systems thinking housing needs.
Its work on new towns has considered development corporations, infrastructure-first development, land assembly, patient investment, land-value capture, SME participation, design and long-term stewardship.
These things interact. Infrastructure creates land value. Capturing some of that uplift can help pay for the infrastructure and amenities which make development acceptable. Breaking large sites into smaller parcels allows more builders to compete. Long-lived development corporations can maintain a coherent vision beyond the lifespan of individual ministers.
That is housing policy understood as institution-building, not simply hitting an annual target.
Gascoigne is not the only possibility. Lord Jamieson combines sustained involvement in housing and local government with extensive council experience. Lord Banner KC offers formidable expertise in the planning law and legal machinery that determines whether ministerial ambition becomes development or paperwork. Lord Porter brings practical local-government, construction and affordable-housing experience.
There is a mind-blowingly serious housing contingent on the red benches but it doesn’t have to be a Lord
There are good reasons to prefer a Commons Secretary of State.
If so, apply the same test. Don’t ask who needs promotion. Ask: who understands housing, has the courage to take difficult decisions, and actually wants to spend at least five years doing it?
Neil O’Brien deserves serious consideration. His previous housing work has grappled with land assembly, new settlements, infrastructure, density, planning reform and smaller builders. David Simmonds brings deep local-government experience and has focused on the neglected question of converting permissions into completions.
The individual matters, but the principle matters more.
The next Conservative leader should commit that Housing Secretary will not be treated as a routine reshuffle post.
Choose someone who understands the subject. Give them authority across planning, infrastructure and delivery. Set measurable objectives.
Then, barring failure or misconduct, give them the Parliament and, ideally, longer.
This shouldn’t mean protecting an incompetent minister—rather, it’s replacing ministerial churn with long-term accountability and direction.
Certainty should begin in Whitehall
There is a particularly Conservative logic to this.
One word surfaced repeatedly throughout our housing discussion: certainty.
Builders need to know what they can build. SMEs cannot finance years of planning limbo. Infrastructure providers need dependable pipelines. Communities need to know what development will look like and what services will accompany it.
Yet government itself has repeatedly injected uncertainty from the top.
And housing goes directly to the credibility of Conservatism.
We tell people that work should bring independence, saving should be rewarded, families should be able to put down roots and ownership should be achievable. Yet access to those things increasingly depends upon whether your parents already own an expensive house.
Our discussion repeatedly identified reliance on the “Bank of Mum and Dad” as evidence of how far housing has drifted from ordinary Conservative ideas of aspiration and self-advancement.
A property-owning democracy cannot survive indefinitely by inheriting its property owners.
Cleverly is right to go and fight for London. His departure gives Conservatives an opportunity to think differently about who replaces him.
Look seriously at the expertise in the Lords. Look at the strongest housing reformers in the Commons. Find someone who understands that solving the crisis requires planning reform, land, infrastructure, competition and public legitimacy working together.
Then put them at the helm and leave them there long enough to navigate the storm.
The next Conservative Housing Secretary should not be appointed until the next reshuffle.
They should be appointed to finish the job. The job is to solve the housing crisis.