Not to be confused with Greg Clark – no ‘e’ – who held this position for approximately two months following the mass resignation of many cabinet ministers which eventually forced Boris Johnson from office.
So, what next? In the Conservative leadership hustings over the summer, housing policy was an occasional, if not frequent, talking point and thus our sector has been waiting to see who would become the new Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) Secretary of State, and what policies would be followed.
Scrapping targets
In a broader sense, it looks likely that new-build housing targets are going to be abolished. The last Conservative Manifesto in 2019 committed itself to 300,000 new homes being built every year by the mid-2020s – in hindsight, quite an odd target given that by then, the next General Election would have taken place, and it would have been too early to hold the government to account on it anyway.
Now, with Liz Truss at the helm and with a supporter in Simon Clarke as Secretary of State, it seems 100 per cent nailed on that all sense of housing targets will be scrapped. Liz Truss called them ‘Stalinistic’ on the campaign trail, Clarke has called them a ‘cult’ and a ‘toxic distraction’.
The culling of targets won’t however take away the need for a huge improvement in housing supply, even if we do expect demand to dampen over the next couple of years. In that sense, building more homes looks likely to remain a ‘target’ for this ‘new’ government and Clarke has already committed to tackling “the curse of nimbyism” in order to up the numbers.
Cross-government collaboration
For the conveyancing sector, of course, it’s not just about how the government matches supply to demand. There has been a considerable amount of work carried out, and progress made, within DLUHC itself under various ministers and civil servants in terms of the means by which we improve the home buying and selling process.
It’s the Conveyancing Association’s sincere hope that this workstream is maintained and the solutions we have championed continue to be worked upon and eventually introduced.
It was interesting to hear Liz Truss at her first Prime Minister’s Questions suggest to Kier Starmer that she is looking forward to working with him on areas which have a consensus. Of course, she was primarily talking about the support for Ukraine, but I think it’s also possible to see a cross-party consensus of sorts in other key areas, perhaps when it comes to improving the home buying and selling process.
Few politicians that I have ever spoken with, or indeed members of the voting public or property market stakeholders, have ever suggested they have any problem with a government focus on ways to cut down on the cost, time, resource, stress and frustration that is still in evidence when buying or selling a home.
Indeed, the millions of pounds in wasted money each year emanating from aborted transactions – not forgetting the tax take that is also lost from every single property sale that fails – is evidence enough that the system can and should be changed in order to cut these to the absolute minimum.
Where there is some disagreement, of course, is the solution.
The ways and means by which we can improve the efficiency of the process, what we can introduce in order to deliver greater certainty, to cut down on our reliance on chains which can force multiple transactions to fall through, to deliver far greater consumer commitment, to ensure all parties are fully-informed from the outset, etc.
Change is needed
However, in order to secure these efficiencies and to curtail the huge amount of time it can currently take to get transactions to their completion, we need to understand that change is required.
We can’t simply hold onto the methods or processes we have used that keep delivering the same, longer timeframes and the same propensity for collapse.
As I’ve said many times before, the solutions are ready to use, but they will ultimately require governmental action to get them introduced and used.
We will be supporting this iteration of our government to keep pushing in its current direction of travel and to make the key changes required to get us to where we need to be.
