Hoping for stability on housing policy

7 June 2010

Under Labour we had nine housing ministers in 13 years and look what happened to housing - despite a target of three million new homes by 2020 construction slumped and home ownership fell by around 3%.

Now we’ve had three first secretaries to the Treasury in less than a month. This doesn’t bode well. First, we had Labour’s outgoing Liam Byrne leaving his successor a note saying the financial cupboard was bare.

The recipient, David Laws, wasn’t amused but the Daily Telegraph discovered that Laws’ cupboard was not all bare - there was a skeleton in it.

The bad news is that he felt compelled to resign but the good news is that he’s so talented he’ll probably be back in office once he’s done his spell in purgatory.

We then saw the appointment of first secretary number three, Danny Alexander, whereupon the Daily Telegraph alleged that he had avoided paying Capital Gains Tax on the sale of his London flat.

But while we had nine housing ministers in 13 years the failure to deliver on housing policy probably had more to do with problems in the economy and poor leadership than the lack of continuity a succession of incompetents brought to the job.

On that score we had one man in the hot seat for most of that time as chancellor - Gordon Brown, who then became Prime Minister. And he has surely done more than anyone to show that numbers in politics can be misleading,

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