WIREDGOV

Housing Minister Kit Malthouse MP speech given yesterday to the Housing Market Intelligence (HMI) conference.

Thank you Steve. You are quite right I am this Housing Minister this week.

You are probably wonder who is this guy? You are quite right, I was appointed Housing Minister 12 weeks ago.

Plucked from obscurity from the Department for Work and Pensions where I had been responsible for housing benefit and introduced to the dynamics of social housing.

Before that I developed commercial property in the 1990s and later became the finance director of a small boutique development firm.

When the Prime Minister asked me to take on this job, she was clear about my task. These are now 3 words I live by: more, better, faster.

So today I’d like to talk a little more about that mission statement – more, better, faster – and how we can get there.

More

Starting with more. Back in 2010 we were getting 134,000 net additional homes a year. You are have all done very well and today that’s up 55% to 217,000.

My first note to you is thank you! On behalf of government and the hundreds of thousands of people who now have a home.

But moving forward to our target is 300,000 – we’re a government in delivery mode. But that needs a bold and radical approach.

Anyone that wants to be building houses should be enabled to do that.

The last time Britain was building enough homes, local councils were making a huge contribution.

And again today, councils want to step up and play their part. But they need to borrow more to build more.

So, as the Prime Minister announced in her conference speech, we’re scrapping the cap on how much councils can borrow against their Housing Revenue Account – entirely.

We’ve empowered them to build the next generation of council houses – homes that will help make the housing market work for everyone.

As well as enabling local authorities to deliver as many as 10,000 homes a year, it will help diversify our building market, with councils able to take on projects and sites private developers might consider too small.

Homes England – our new national housing agency – is buying and assembling land and building the infrastructure we need. They’re ironing out those market failures that all too often hold us back.

And we’re freeing up surplus public land for development – from the likes of the NHS and the Ministry of Defence – enabling thousands of homes to be built and helping us to reinvest in vital public services.

But as everyone here knows, to build more homes we’ve got to move beyond that conventional wisdom of supply and demand.

We need to recognise that this is not just a housebuilding industry, but a finance industry. When I was involved it was much about our finance structure, than our supply numbers.

I’m reminded of that great moment in the film The Founder, where Ray Croc – the guy who expanded McDonald’s and made it what it is today – was getting schooled by his financial advisor.

He told him: “You don’t seem to realise what business you’re in. You’re not in the burger business. You’re in the real estate business”.

Like them, we recognise that land and finance are at the heart of growth.

And since the crash of 2007-08, these have been 2 particularly tough challenges.

It’s why we in government are taking a more assertive approach on both – intervening in the market where it isn’t working.

But there are other clever things we can do, like our recent deal with Barclays: we’ve put in £125 million targeted at housebuilding with a tilt to SMEs, and they’ve topped it up to a billion pounds.

Or the Build to Rent market, which hardly existed 5 years ago, but because of our support we’ve now got more than 125,000 Build to Rent homes delivered or in the pipeline.

It’s only these kinds of bold and innovative steps that can get us to our 300,000 targets, and we are keen to do more of this.

Lastly, we need to send long term capacity signals.

Ambitious developers need to know their commitment is being matched by the government, which is shown with our £44 billon of total investment.

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