Labour has been in power for a year and while it’s received a pummelling for multiple policy U-turns in recent months, this cannot be said for its approach to the housing market.

Also, one thing the Government should be lauded for is the tenacity of housing minister Matthew Pennycook, whose most obvious skill over the past 12 months has been to stay in the job.

Gone are the days of revolving doors at the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), and it’s obvious that Pennycook has been waiting with some relish to run the housing brief within Whitehall, having held it in opposition during the bleak Tory years beginning in 2015.

Also, unlike his many predecessors during the May, Johnson and Sunak premierships, he gets how the housing market works.

He also enjoys a rare thing for a housing minister – his Government has a huge majority. The passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill, unlike its Tory version championed by Michael Gove, has not included many concessions to landlords or letting agents.

Fury

Despite warnings from respected voices within the estate agency and landlords worlds, the Bill is going through as promised – although to the fury of tenancy campaigners it will go live most likely next Spring rather than earlier, as promised. And only a few days ago Pennycook said that it delivered on Labour’s promise to give tenants greater ‘security and stability’.

Delivery of other promises has been somewhat patchier. Regulation of estate agents has been slipped through the back door within the Government’s leasehold reforms – but only for managing agents – and Labour has been criticised for dragging its feet on the ‘feudal’ leasehold reforms, which don’t really ‘abolish leasehold’ in the way many were hoping it might. One property management giant, the Ringley Group, earlier this year slammed the housing minister for his ‘limited engagement on the subject’.

Instead, the Tories’ Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 is being implemented properly but, some argue, somewhat partially, the most recent update being greater transparency on what fees are charged by managing agents for their services, enabling leaseholders to challenge unreasonable bills.

But many other key reforms needed to make the housing market work better are still gathering dust at MHCLG.

But many other key reforms needed to make the housing market work better are still gathering dust at MHCLG.

This includes Lord Best’s RoPA reforms and also a promised overhaul of the conveyancing system.

In February Pennycook promised to ‘fully digitise’ the ways homes are bought, something several companies like Coadjute have spent many years and millions of pounds trying to achieve, alongside the Home Buying and Selling Group industry initiative.

But to date his department has gone quiet on this – I would guess because saying the system needs an overhaul, and achieving it are very different things, as many entrepreneurs have found to their cost.

The biggest elephant in the room at the moment for Labour is its ill-advised promise to build 1.5 million homes before the next general election.

There are some promising signs; 22% more new homes were started during the first three months of this year when compared to the same period last year, but it’s still only 28,100 properties, or approximately 100,000 a year, lower than the last house building peak back in 2023.

At the current run rate some half a million new homes will be built by 2029 when Labour and its promises face the electorate – and therefore the quarterly run-rate for housing starts needs to triple to 75,000 to deliver that. Good luck getting there, I would say.