16 housing ministers in 13 years - has it stopped the job getting done?
This Is Why
Sky News
4.0 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2023
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With Lee Rowley taking over the housing brief after the prime minister’s latest reshuffle, on the Sky News Daily we’ll be exploring why there has been so many, and if any of them managed to make a difference to the housing crisis.
Presenter Sally Lockwood is joined by Gurpreet Narwan, our political correspondent, on why there has been so much churn. Plus, Sally speaks to Lord Gavin Barwell, who was housing minister for a year under Theresa May, and Polly Neate, CEO of housing charity Shelter explains the challenges facing renters.
Sky News Daily contacted the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities for a response to this episode. A spokesperson said:
"We recently laid out an ambitious long-term plan for housing that includes speeding up the planning system, cutting bureaucracy, and reducing delays to ensure we deliver the homes that local communities want and need.
"We are already on track to deliver one million homes this Parliament, and we have announced £10 billion investment to deliver more of the right homes in the right places without concreting over the countryside.
"Our Renters Reform Bill will deliver a fairer private rented sector, abolishing Section 21 'no fault' evictions so that all tenants have greater security in their homes and are empowered to challenge poor practice without worrying about retaliatory eviction."
Producer: Alex Edden
Promotions Producer: David Chipakupaku
Editors: Wendy Parker and Paul Stanworth
Transcript
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| 0:53.7 | Investments above €100,000 are charged at 0.2% commission. FX fees may apply. Limited availability. T's and Cs apply. So we're still digesting a lot of the Rishi-Soonak reshuffle here in the Sky News Westminster Office. And you'd have been hard pushed to miss the level of change and churn in this government. |
| 1:11.4 | I mean, you just need to look at the number of prime ministers, five, home secretaries, seven, |
| 1:17.0 | including Suella Bravaman twice. |
| 1:19.5 | But one brief stands out above any other, and that's housing, |
| 1:24.3 | because that department has had 16 ministers in 13 years. |
| 1:29.4 | Now, the Prime Minister just sacked the last one, Rachel McLean, who'd only been in the job |
| 1:33.9 | for nine months, and it's now over to Lee Rowley with a pretty challenging intro. |
| 1:40.5 | Let's speak to Gurpreet-Narwin, our political correspondent, on what might be some of his most pressing issues. |
| 1:46.6 | So housing is really one of those endemic issues that successive governments have just failed to get a grip of, even though there's a lot of talk about solving the problem. |
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