Yawn and stretch, Keir Starmer has appointed a new Housing Secretary to replace the discredited Angie Rayner, former Deputy Prime Minister, who no doubt is ‘licking her wounds’ for having been caught with her ‘fingers in the till’.

Steve Reed, who may fleetingly think of himself as the ‘Milky Bar Kid, who is tough and strong’ (am I showing my age?) will be the seventeenth housing minister to go into bat to get Britain building more homes.

But I am sure we are not looking at a David Gower or Geoff Boycott. You don’t need to be a clairvoyant to work this out but my advice to him is, don’t give up your day job and let the funeral director of career prospects measure your torso for its burial.

He has come out fighting with a catchy soundbite, ‘Build Baby Build’ (I am sure Trump does not feel threatened by this version of slogan plagiarism) which sounds great on first hearing, but oh dear, if only life was so simple.

I hear overtures from Shakespear’s King Lear: ‘I shall do such things – What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be the terrors of the earth’.

And I always wear a wry smile when the new appointment assures us how much more that they are going to do than the previous incumbent, particularly as Angela Rayner was so proud of her ‘achievements’.

Sound bites are all fine and dandy but as we all know, they make better press headlines than they do to change anything on the ground. But what does Reed face as he takes up office?

His key challenges will be overcoming planning approval bottlenecks, central funding constraints, a shortage of construction skills, rising material costs and developers keen to land bank until the housing market improves as well as rising land prices.

Also, environmental regulations and Green Belt protections can limit development, and the new housing secretary will need to take an axe to this if he wants to improve the poor results to date.

Where are we now?

No Government since the late 1960s has built 300,000 homes a year and this year it’s the same – despite Labour’s much-vaunted efforts, 2025 will see a shortfall of 33% on the 300,000 target and if you project this forward to 2029, there will still be 500,000 homes not built under this pledge.

The solution?

Housing doesn’t just happen like the flow of a tap – it needs to be relentlessly pursued with brutal determination encompassing fundamental grass root reform, to meet these targets.

Many toes will have to be trampled upon and howls of ‘ecological nimbyism’ will need to be ignored if Labour’ target is not going to be another fanciful aspiration.

We wish you luck Mr. Reed, but as your predecessor found out to her cost, making forward progress through the corridors of bureaucracy on the housing issue, is akin to ‘swimming through sago pudding with a rucksack on your back’.

Author bio

Trevor Abrahmsohn is Chief Executive of Glentree Estates.

Read more: Government to run roughshod over local planning rules.