Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome The Right Honourable Sir Brandon Lewis CBE. Brandon Lewis was a businessman before he entered Parliament in 2010 and served in numerous Government and Cabinet roles for over ten years, during his time as Member of Parliament for Great Yarmouth from 2010 to 2014. During his decade as member of the British Government, he held several ministerial and Secretary of State positions under four Prime Ministers. His final role was as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, a role in which he was involved in the Accession Ceremony for King Charls III. Prior to that, he was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Minister of State at the Home Office, he also served as Minister of State for Housing and Planning, Minister for Local Government and Minister of State for Policing and the Fire Service. And for a period, he was Chairman of the Conservative Party. Having retired as an MP at the 2024 General Election, Brandon has since taken up strategic advisory roles, including Chairing the Advisory Board of Letter One, Main Board Director of Veon, Civitas Investment Management, FM Conway and Thakeham, providing high level strategic advice on digital strategy development and public and private sector engagement and advocacy. Laurence is the award-winning founder and CEO of Pavegen, an innovative, clean technology company. Headquartered in London,
So now we’re going to hear from Sir Brandon Lewis about his time in Government, with a particular focus on his two year stint as Housing Minister under David Cameron. Brandon, welcome to the virtual studio, it’s really, really good to see you again. I was thinking about when we first met and I think it was when you were responsible for High Streets, you were a Minister of the 2.39 LG and I came up with this brilliant suggestion that rather than meeting trade bodies, it would be really good to introduce you to some of the landlords and we organised a roundtable to make some introductions.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yes, actually, I’d forgotten about that because obviously with the property connection was I was Housing Minister but yes, I, yeah before that I do remember now, with the High Streets and yeah, that was, I enjoyed that job, we got the Great British High Street campaign going back then as well which was good fun.
Susan Freeman
Yeah. So that actually was pretty early on in your Parliamentary career I now, I now realise.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yes.
Susan Freeman
So, before we get going, let’s talk a little bit about your background because you became an MP in 2010 but you had a life before so, I thought it might be useful to have some context on what you’d been doing before 2010.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Sure, yeah, no, I was not somebody who set out in life to be a Member of Parliament actually. Yeah, I had a life before. I qualified as a lawyer, I was a barrister. I didn’t practice but yeah, I passed the Bar exams and having passed that, the Inns of Court School of Lawyers, Member of Inner Temple and I went to do a Masters in sort of commercial and competition law at Kings, which was a brilliant experience actually with some great lecturers and tutors and while I was doing that I also started doing a bit of commercial work and that developed so I ended up sort of doing consultancy work and had a little business doing that and got involved with some schools which I’m still an owner of and director of again, so yeah so I had a career outside. I came into politics sort of accid… I’d always been interested but I got actively involved actually while I was doing my Master, I got involved in an issue in our community, helped a special needs school and was successful and then after that, a couple of people said oh you should get more involved, you know, you seem to enjoy that, you should get involved with local community, local business, which are schools are, so I did and yeah, suddenly found myself standing for council and became a councillor in ’98 so, when I stood down this year, I’d managed to do 25 years as an elected politician so, that felt like quite a neat point to say somebody else’s turn.
Susan Freeman
Yeah that’s fair enough. And so what made you go into politics in 2010? You’d done you know your stint as a Council Leader, what made you make that change?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Initially, when I got involved actively, I’d got to know a little bit through the local community, Eric Pickles was the MP where I live and I remember having a conversation with Eric where I explained to him what I thought about where the Party was – this is the late ‘90s – and he sort of said, “Well you’re probably right but if people who think that don’t get involved, why would it ever change?” which was a fair point, so I got involved and I, you know, 26, getting involved in the Conservative Party at 26 years old in ’97, there wasn’t many of us so very quickly I had people saying “oh you should come and do this”, “get involved in that” so I, you know, I was, timing-wise I mean I got involved in quite a lot quite quickly and it just evolved for me, I was quite happy just doing the like, I, you know local business with our schools, my consultancy business was doing quite nicely, became a Councillor, then I got talked into standing for General Election, somebody in the Party, a Party professional, said to me, “Oh you should think about standing” and it just seemed like a good experience to me, it wasn’t because I particularly sought to be an MP, I just thought yeah so I did and I ended up standing in a very, very safe Labour seat in 2001, about an 18,500 Labour majority in Sherwood in Nottinghamshire and that’s when I got hooked on actually, I do want to be an MP, it was half way through that which I’d only as I say I did it for experience and just an interesting thing to do and it was during that campaign, I thought no I really like this and I think I can make a difference and there’s things I want to do and I had a view about what Labour were doing and saying during that campaign that sort of motivated me, so that’s when it got, being an MP became a really serious thing for me at that point. So I remember coming back to Brentwood and thinking yeah now I need to this so, that and eventually then in 2… I didn’t stand in 2005 but in 2006 I got selected for Great Yarmouth and then we had the election in 2010 when I got elected and as you say, I was very, very fortunate, completely out of the blue in the September of 2012 David Cameron asked me to join the Government, which I was not expecting in a month of Sundays and yeah, yeah I then did ten years in Government.
Susan Freeman
And during that ten years in Government you, you obviously held a string of very senior Cabinet positions under four Prime Ministers and those roles, as you mentioned earlier included being Housing Minister and that was from July 2014 I think until July 2016 so, actually that two years was a long, long stint compared to some of the others.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah, I think, I think it makes me the longest serving Housing AND Planning Minister for quite a long time. Grant Shapps did a little bit longer as Housing Minister but he wasn’t Planning, so Housing and Planning together, I think I’m one, be one of the longest in about thirty years or something but part of the problem, I do think part of the challenge has been where I got promoted in July as you say 2016 and there’s been nine or ten Housing Ministers since me and that’s just too much churn, there’s, you know if you haven’t got stability to understand and develop ideas, nothing’s going to happen and I think that’s been part of the problem actually.
Susan Freeman
Yes, and obviously during that two years you really engaged with the property sector, which we really, really appreciated and I think for the purposes of this podcast we will, will focus on the Housing and Planning element and as you say, there’s been such a revolving door with Housing Ministers that it just doesn’t appear that although we talk about a housing crisis, it just doesn’t appear that you know the Government had taken housing seriously and I remember a dinner at the Conservative Party Conference when Robert Davis was at Westminster Council and he said across the table, “the problem is, you Housing Ministers, you just use it as a stepping stone to other things” and I think that was the feeling so, I don’t know I mean whether you have any thoughts on why it’s been like that, why you know there hasn’t been any one person who stayed in the post because it takes a long time to make these things change.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah, it does and look I was very fortunate that I had that role predominantly under David Cameron. David actually, one of the strengths I think of that coalition period was there was quite a lot of stability so, if you remember the Cabinet through that period, there were reshuffles but there wasn’t a huge amount of change at Cabinet level, sometimes people moved around between jobs but generally the Cabinet were fairly static so, if there was movement at least you had the stability and in DCLG as it was called back then, we had Eric Pickles for the whole five years and a few departments were like that and when you got a job, you were on the understanding, you sort of kind of knew and hoped obviously you were going to be there for a little while. I think there’s a mixture of things that have happened since and it’s not just Housing that suffered, it’s a lot of departments, a lot of ministerial roles have a lot of churn, partly because we decided to keep changing leader quite regularly and of course every leader wants their own team but also I think the way, and this is a risk for any Government now, the way that life is changing, you know you’ve got this constant pressure of digital media, social media, general media 24/7 and certainly social and digital has moved dramatically quickly in the period I was in Parliament means that people are looking for movement and change really quickly and you’re finding more and more colleagues and MPs who they get a Parliamentary Undersecretary job which is the first ministerial job, then they want to be a Minister of State or Cabinet Member within six or twelve months when in reality, that used to be two, three, four, five years and what I would argue if, and it’s for others to judge if was any good as a Secretary of State but, if I was it’s because I had experience as a Parliamentary Undersecretary for a couple of years and then I had experience as the Minister of State for a couple of years and then yes, the majority of my time, five and a half, six years, was in Cabinet in various roles but that progress through gives you time to learn. There’s also a reality that I mean in the Housing role after me, some of the changes were not because of anything else other than just circumstance so, straight after me I think came Gavin Barwell and then Gavin lost his seat so he couldn’t carry on, but you still had sort of continuity because he became Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister so you had somebody in Number 10 with Gavin who really felt strongly about housing so that was quite a good thing for the sector. And then you had, you know, the movement with Dominic Raab and Alok Sharma who both then got promoted so it may look like a steppingstone but the individuals when they go in don’t necessarily go in thinking oh I only want to do six months, it’s just the nature of how politics has come on now and then obviously we had that period of changing leader and Boris had that sort of period in the summer where he had an odd Cabinet and Ministers for sort of eight weeks or whatever it was so, but it is unfortunate because you are absolutely right, I think in any role and particularly the Housing role, if you don’t have a background in housing, you need six or twelve months to really get to understand the sector, some would argue a lot more but in a political sector, to understand the sector and to really formulate what you want to do and what you think you can contribute and do and then in the second year you’re starting to do it and deliver it. Now I’m very pleased and still proud of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 but that was two years’ work and it built on the back of a lot longer period of work with the MPPF etc that Greg Clark and Eric Pickles etc did involved in doing so, that was a long period of work and then after that it became quite fractious and then obviously we’ve seen a period where housing delivery has fallen as I think partly as a result of that and people not necessarily understanding the dynamics of how the sector works and how different parts of the sector interplay with other parts and even when I was there the interplay between the private rented sector and the buyer owner side of things and how they interplay and how they do impact on each other, I’m not sure outside of DCLG was always understood by parliamentary colleagues and even other Government departments actually.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, I’m not sure it’s even understood now, I was at a Build to Rent conference yesterday and one of the speakers was saying you know people just don’t quite understand what it is and we’re talking about I suppose ten years ago when you became Housing Minister, we weren’t building enough homes and I now that as you know in the few months as a backbencher, you were making the point sort of quite recently that the Government’s not building enough houses and the housing crisis is the single biggest issue facing Britain and the only way we’re going to fix it is by actually putting spades in the ground and building more homes. I mean if you were Housing Minister now and you know with all the benefit of all the experience and time spent, I mean what would you do? Leading question.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
I’m sure Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook will be listening with bated breath about my…
Susan Freeman
I hope so.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
There’s, there’s a range of things and I always look back to when I got promoted, if I had stayed in that department, there were things we were going to go onto do which I still think would have been and would be helpful so, some things I think this Government actually are looking at, particularly in terms of we need to go back to a system puts the duty on local authorities to actually get planning permissions through and built, not just an advisory thing but actually you know places need to have a proper assessment of what their housing need is and then a proper plan to deliver it and if they can’t do that, one of the things I was always quite keen on was to say to local authorities and to put this into legalisation effectively, would be to say if you do not have an up to date housing needs assessment with an up to date local plan to deliver it, then there will be a legal presumption for development both at your level and certainly at the inspectorate level. Now, there is an argument that creates developers charter but actually if the local authorities do their job it means the local authorities are in charge and gives them a real motivation, you know a carrot stick in one go to get a local proper local plan in place. I think there are other things as well though but it’s I’ve always made this point it’s, there’s no silver bullet in terms of delivering housing and it’s about understanding and looking at how the different tenures of housing interact and the need for all of them but I think we do need more PRS, we need to motivate, I’ve always regretted that we upped the Stamp Duty on private rented sector all those years ago because that has an important part to play not just because of finance but also for lifestyle for some people, it’s why private rented sector is so much more popular in other countries and it’s never, than it is here because it is a lifestyle and that I think that would develop and change with the younger generation as well. Also, social affordable housing, we absolutely need to see more building and social affordable housing and there’s a few things we need to do, we need to see I think reform on the delivery side and an understanding that one of the problems at the moment, there are thousands of homes across the country in social housing and affordable housing that are ready to be built, that can be built but are not being built out despite having planning permission in place because there isn’t a housing provider ready to take them on from the developer. So particularly with SMEs, they really struggle to get the providers to take them on because the numbers just don’t add up. So, there’s a lot there, you still haven’t, we still haven’t dealt with the nutrients issue, 160, 000 homes arguably ready to go but the nutrients issue is in the way, this Government blocked that, Labour blocked the reform to, that would have fixed that so, hopefully they will look at that again. And also how we, how we assess things and how you don’t just do it all through supply, there are reforms and further things we can do to speed up planning, look at how we do planning, you know, pre-conditions, things like that that slow sites down, the way the local authorities work but also there is a demand side issue as well, you know the reason Help to Buy drove up supply and we saw supply go up to 255,000 homes towards the back end of my period, was because the housing developers had confidence that demand was there, that buyers could get into the market and at the moment if you speed up supply, that’s great but people still need to be able to access the market and young people have moved from having the cost of living going from 45%, 46% of their income to 67% of their income so, you know, with higher interest rates, with cost of living going up, there’s a real challenge for people so we’ve got to also understand we need to do something on the demand side, particularly for young and first time buyers so it’s, there’s this whole panoply of things that need to come together that we need to do that can make a big difference but housing is a sector that responds quickly as well, you know, when we brought those changes in through the MPPF and our Act, you know housing had dropped down below 100,000 pre-2010, by 2014 it was up over 200,000 again roughly or approaching it and certainly by the end of my time we’d got to 255, so it can move relatively quickly, that’s good for GDP and the country, which is something this Government will want, they’ve made housing a really key delivery thing for them so I’m hopeful that if they do do those cover forms I’ll be, you know, I may not be a Labour supporter and I’d much rather have a Conservative Government but I will say if they can get housing moving they’ll be doing the right thing for the country. At the moment, they’re saying the right things on that but we’ve got to actually see it delivered.
Susan Freeman
Yeah. And it’s interesting in terms of the number of homes that are consented but just not viable now so somebody said yesterday there were 250,000 homes in London that had planning consent but weren’t coming forward because they were no longer viable and you know we keep hearing about construction costs, not enough skilled construction workers, you know additional costs because of environmental issues so, I mean there’s so many sort of plates to balance aren’t there to actually make things work.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah absolutely and look I can remember a very prominent individual in the property industry, in the housebuilding industry who’s no longer with us, said to me once you know, in the 1980s you could buy a piece of land and if you were going to get planning permission within eighteen months you’d have the land, planning permission and be on site building. You’re lucky to do that in five years now, particularly on larger sites and it can often take a lot longer with the sort of strategic land side of things so, there’s a much bigger cost in terms of turning property into it and when local authorities are then put on lots of pre-conditions, you know I’ve been talking to somebody recently who’s got a relatively small site, would be an SME builder kind of site, 30-odd homes, they’re five years in and they’ve still got the local authority messing around with “ooh well actually we’re not quite sure about this, can you re-tweak that, re-tweak this”, well two things that means, one is that’s all cost so every delay is cost so every delay is cost and you’re pushing up the price of housing at the cost of it but secondly because of what’s happened in the last couple of years with inflation costs going up so dramatically in terms of construction costs, you know a site that was viable in one format three years ago or even a year ago, the viability changes by the time the council have actually come round to make a decision, even if they make a positive decision and then the developer’s in a position where they’re having to re-argue viability because it has changed or the council then go and put Section 106 requirements in or pre-conditions in that change the viability and we certainly saw that in London when Sadiq became Mayor, I know a number of developers where the viability changed because of policy decisions that Sadiq as Mayor, that ultimately just means you’re delivering less properties and I think London’s delivering less properties under a Labour Mayor than it did under Boris Johnson so there, there are some real challenges there and the sluggishness of the planning system is a large part of the problem that drives up cost and that’s why supply side of reforms that get things moving and recognising what’s really slowing it down and of course what you do get and there’s always this debate and I used to have this a lot around land banking and non-built out permissions and there is often a mixture, you’re quite right as we’ve just been discussing there is an issue around viability which can vary between application and approval, if you get approval, but there’s also an issue that across the country you’ve got a lot of people and it does add up to a lot of sites who put in for a planning application, thinking they’re going to get, if they get planning they’re going to suddenly become millionaires, they get planning and then when they go out to the market, developers are saying well that’s just not a piece of land anybody wants to buy and build houses on and live in so, you have got this, again it’s not simple, there’s a number of reasons why things don’t get built out but quite a lot of the time, and I can remember one council came to see me complaining that we were putting pressure on them to get houses built and it wasn’t fair, they had given all these permissions, when I looked into it, on one site alone they’d put like hundreds of different pre-conditions on that meant the developer was eighteen months on and couldn’t get on site because of some of the pre-conditions the council had put on and the leader of the council didn’t even know. So all of these things add up and create these complexities of problems that I actually think there’s a point where we need to sort of stop and take a fresh look at this and simplify it dramatically actually.
Susan Freeman
And one of the issues and again this is something that came up at the conference yesterday was the distrust if you like between the public sector and the private sector and perhaps you know this drive some of these conditions, pre-conditions that you’re talking about that the local authority doesn’t necessarily understand, you know why the developer isn’t able to provide you know a higher percentage of affordable homes and you know give everything that they would like and I was sort of quite surprised to hear that yesterday because I’d hoped that things had got a little bit better because if we can’t have you know public sector and private sector collaborating it’s going to be quite difficult to deal with the problem.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Oh yeah and look I’ll give an example, I won’t name names obviously but I’ll give an example so, at two levels. One is I’m, I’m a patron of and do a lot of work in terms of think tank work with a couple of think tanks, one of which is the Adam Smith Institute and I’ve done some really good housing support and work with policy exchange and the CPS policy studies who are really pro getting housing built in the right way and it’s worth looking at their, I would encourage anybody to look at CPS policy exchange and Adam Smith’s Housing papers. I’m slightly biased because I’ve had a hand in all of them in one way or another but they’re good but one of the things that the Adam Smith Institute we found was we did some polling of focus group work and I think it was, I might be slightly off but something like 72% support for housing even if it was in previously green areas, if the local community could see why it was important for them and why there’s a benefit for them. And that’s an important point because, and again I won’t name names in terms of developers, it’s not fair but I do know of cases, and I give a good example, so one of the, a very, very large law firm whose planning partner is an old friend of mine, was telling me about a situation which I’ve heard repeated in various formats but this is quite a clear one where the developer had gone out to consultation with the local community about a particular place they thought they could develop, the community had come back very clearly saying that they would be supportive of this development but what they wanted to see and what they felt the area needed, I think it was a football pitch and a centre for the you know changing rooms and sort of community room etc, something like that, and the developer was very happy with this and it worked viability-wise so the developer puts it in the application but then going for the planning meeting and I am slightly oversimplifying but it makes the point, go for the planning meeting and the officers say to them well you need to take out the football pitch and the changing rooms, that can’t be part of the application that the councillors look at because it’s not, you know, a key part of the development, it’s not required, we will want a Section 106 but there’s other things we want and the developers sort of saying well I might be happy with your 106 but I want to deliver the football pitch because that’s what the community want and it had got something like 80% support if we do that. And the officer said well that’s not a material impact for the decision so we need to take that out for the councillors and the lawyers are saying yeah but the football pitch may not be a material issue but the 80% support for the development is and that only comes with the football pitch, we want to leave it in. And you’ve got this crazy argument now, so then what you end up with in some cases a developer says to the council, okay you win because I want to get my planning permission so I’ll take the football pitch out and agree to your 106 which is not what the community want. The developer then builds and of course the community’s angry with the developer because they’re not delivering what the community want, they’re delivering what the council want but the developer gets the blame and therefore communities become less trusting of developers. Now, I’m not saying all developers are angels and there are developers out there who are better than others at how they engage and how they deliver but you’ve got a situation now and this is being repeated too often where the community is clear about what it would support and the developer is happy to deliver it but then the local authority wants something else and you get this dynamic and the developer gets the blame and the community’s unhappy, nobody wins in that situation and it takes longer and you know and all of these, these kind of problems that comes back to the point we’ve both made now a couple of times, Susan, which is the problems are really complex and they’re so in baked over so many years, even the way we do planning, we have this quasi-judicial system now. I say quasi-judicial, Labour brought this sort of structure in for councils where it’s supposed to be quasi-judicial but the idea that councils are not going to sit in a council meeting thinking politically about a planning application is challenging shall we say, somebody who’s been a politician and I always avoided sitting on a planning committee as a councillor but, but the reality is it is a political decision, it’s the thing that affects councillors the most so, all of these dynamics come into play and there’s a shortage of good planning officers out there because there’s less people going into it. I could go on but all of these things play into why this is such a complex problem that we need to get under and why simplifying it would make life better for everybody so everybody then understands where they are.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, and you know as you say, the planning authorities are under resourced and we need to tackle that if we’re going to enable the planning authorities to actually deal with things more quickly, more efficiently.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Absolutely, and developers generally, I’ve got to say even in my time as Housing Minister, would say to me that they were happy to pay more to have good planning service. That doesn’t mean always getting a yes but it means getting a yes or a no in good time because even a no is helpful if you know where you stand and you can then make decisions based on that and so for them, there was always this issue we’re prepared to money into the system if it gets us a good service and there is a real challenge there and I think, and that’s something that needs to be resolved as well.
Susan Freeman
And then I mean one of the, there’s results of increased construction costs, you know increased funding costs and everything is that the cost of providing homes is going up so the problem of providing the affordable homes that we need becomes you know more and more acute and a comment that was made yesterday was that affordable housing should be regarded as, as infrastructure which is an interesting point because it’s really been outsourced…
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Very topical.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, it’s been outsourced to the private sector and ever since somebody decided it was a good idea to get the private sector to provide the affordable housing, it just hasn’t worked, I mean should we go back to local authorities building council houses, I mean I know they’ve started to build again?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah, look, I mean I actually think again this is an area where you need a bit of everything look and I work with, for transparency, I work with an organisation that is in the, and actually I’ve been talking today to somebody else who’s in the for profit sector of affordable housing delivery and social housing delivery, and I think there is room for that and actually I think the market needs that because we need more and more people in this sector, the problem is actually I think a mixture of a couple of things. One is, and I remember this from 2015 General Election when we had an issue where the OBR put social housing onto the Government’s books so we had to have a look at, you know one of the reasons we deregulated was to get them off the Government books, they went onto the PSBR which was just, if they’re going to be on the PSBR you know it is a question point, do we just nationalise all of them, there’s 1600+ housing associations out there, some of them haven’t built a house ever or in living memory, some are better than others, there’s an argument about how accountable are they and you know could you nationalise all of them then you bring in somebody to look at how you then split it into six regional bids and then put them back out to private sector. Obviously, we didn’t do that, we went for the deregulatory approach to get them off the books which is, which was in the 2016 Act in the end actually. So there is an issue in the sector, it’s very fragmented, you know and there’s very good examples of very good people, I remember working David Lewis at L&Q who were great, great example of people who have really forward thinking ideas, you know they’ve had challenges recently. You’ve got other housing associations who have interesting practices and you know chief execs who you know they’re experience in the housing market is interesting, if at all and they haven’t built houses and all, so you’ve got a whole mix going on which I think we do need to be alert to and there is room for the private sector who you know have a financial interest in doing it in a, in a positive way but also we’ve got to deal with this issue where if councils want affordable housing, it’s got to be viable and there’s got to be a housing association who can take on those properties, as I said earlier on we’ve got thousands of properties around the country that developers are ready to build, they’ve got the money to build, they want to build and they can’t because they can’t find a housing association to take on the properties. That’s something Government needs to give some capacity to the housing associations that can take those properties on as well so, again it comes back to because of the fragmentation of our housing system we’ve got so many complex issues that in any one area there’s no silver bullet, let alone across the whole piece so, but we do need to be building more social and affordable housing because you need capacity, in the same way you need private renter sector because it creates capacity. There are people who need and require social and affordable housing, there are people who need, require and want private rented and obviously people who want to buy and own their own home and you need to be providing across all those tenures and shared ownership and others obviously that we can, we can all think of.
Susan Freeman
And we’ve talked about you know Help to Buy to help younger people get onto the housing ladder and I always wonder why we aren’t focussing more on the older people who you know are rattling around in, in larger homes and if we were building the sort of accommodation that suited them, there is a lot of housing that could be recycled.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
And this comes back to your point around changing in ministers and look, I loved doing that job, it’s one of the sort of two, probably, I mean I’m very lucky I enjoyed all of the jobs I had in Cabinet but it’s definitely one of my, my top couple of jobs and it sort of sticks with you because you realise once you’re in that job, you realise how important it is to the economy morally and ethically as well as economically as it were, and that is an area that I definitely wanted to do things on but as I say I got promoted and partly because I learned a couple of things from my own constituency actually in Great Yarmouth, one was we were building bungalows and you do need bungalows but where land value is high, bungalows are very hard viability-wise for developers to justify but it can be done and I’ve seen good developers, I’ve, you know I’m an advisor to Thakeham, I’ve seen them build bungalows on their site at Pease Pottage, which are brilliant but in places like Great Yarmouth where you’ve got lower land values, much easier to do that but the other side of it is encouraging people and motivating people and making it viable to downsize, so I always remember the – I’m sure she won’t mind me using this story – but the Editor of my local newspaper in Great Yarmouth was not a Conservative by any stretch but a really, really great Editor, I used to have really enjoyable conversations with her and she was always made the point, she had a beautiful Victorian home in a lovely part of Great Yarmouth and they’ve got these great traditional Victorian houses, sort of three storeys etc and it was her and her husband and, I can’t remember if it was four bedroom or something, it was a big sort of three storey house I think from memory, she doesn’t need that but what’s the motivation to downsize when you then get whacked with Stamp Duty etc, etc, the costs of moving so, one of the things I think we do need to look at and we should have looked at as a Government and done something about is what can you do to motivate people to downsize and make it financially attractive to downsize, as well as how do you make it more viable to build appropriate properties, whether it’s bungalows, apartments or just or smaller properties for people because some people want the beauty of a garden and of course these people who want to downsize but still want a garden etc and outdoor space, and how do you make that viable and attractive for people, particularly the population that, I would say there’s a couple of challenges with housing, one is we are all living longer so we need housing a long, literally longer, but also families are growing in the sense of there was a time, I can vaguely remember as a child my great grandparents living with my then grandparents, that really doesn’t happen anymore, you know, I love the fact my son has just come back from six months travelling, he’s living at home but he’s been home 24, 36 hours, I suspect by hour 48 we’ll be thinking you know he’s 6 foot 4 in his mid-twenties, it’s time to get your own apartment so, you know, families are growing and also, sadly, when families separate, you know a home that would have a husband and wife in if there were kids in, is now a home for the mother, a home for the father and the kids so you literally need more homes and we’re all living longer so, what do we do to deal with that? One of the things is if you are, you know, my parents are fit and still with us and in good health but my dad is in his early 80s, they live in a very, very large house. What is the motivation then, what is the product that would attract him at high quality to move to that is smaller and viable without getting smashed on Stamp Duty etc, etc and there will be lots of people out there who can think of older people they know who have got lovely homes they don’t need to move from so, two things, what’s the financial incentive to downsize but also what’s the product that is good enough and some companies are starting to offer really interesting, exciting, good quality products for over 50s actually and above, like the American model does, but we’re not far enough ahead of that in this country and certainly the planning system that makes it harder because of the viability so, I think again there’s a demand side in terms of the financial thing and there’s a supply side in terms of how the planning system discourages it as well and we’re going to have to get to grips with that because hopefully we’re all going to carry on living longer, I certainly plan on being around for a fair while and that’s going to put more and more pressure on housing if we don’t find a solution to that. And part of what can make it more viable is the Government can do something around Stamp Duty or something, a tax structure to say look if you are downsizing, here’s an incentive to do it because look, we’re all, most of us have got some sort of material drive and will be conscious of that and therefore making it attractive. I think going back to a point you made earlier on that does impact all of this as well is how the Government treats housing and on that demand side more generally, I think one of the things will be, this will be one of the interesting things in the Budget is how revolutionary and dramatic the Labour Government is prepared to be to deliver on housing increase and looking at housing as an infrastructure project and considering housing in particular, social and affordable housing as infrastructure, would be a big fiscal change that could be hugely beneficial to housing delivery and supply and how the Government books add up. Now some people will accuse them of fiddling around with the books but in terms of from a pure housing point of view, housing as infrastructure does change the game dramatically so in terms of what local authorities can then do with lending against it and also, starting to look at the Government’s property book, you know the Government owns a lot of property, it has effectively an interest in a lot of property through Help to Buy and there’s capital appreciation on those Help to Buy properties as well that the Government can start thinking about what it does with that so, it will be interesting to see what they do in the Budget and they’re the areas I would have thought they’ll be looking at.
Susan Freeman
I should have spoken to you after the Budget shouldn’t I?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
You can go back and score me out of 10 for if we’re in the right ballpark but if, you know, as I say, I would imagine, look, one of the things I know from Government is, you will have the political view that the political advisers, the special advisers have got, the ministers themselves have got political views, Number 10, the Treasury ministers, but there’ll also be from the Civil Service side, you know they’ve got the experience, they won’t be feeding in politically but they will be feeding in, these are things the Government has looked at, this is ideas and stuff, that’s what they do and you know my experience has always been very positive like that and if housing is going to be a key driver of growth for this Government, I would imagine they will be looking at things on both supply and demand side to, to try and speed that up and get delivery moving and they’re the kind of things that seem quite logical for them to look at.
Susan Freeman
Well, fingers crossed and I think something has to happen because the amount of money being spent just housing people in temporary accommodation is colossal and you could build so much with the money that’s being spent just on this temporary accommodation.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah, and it, well it’s not even just temporary, in 2014 I think it was, I was over in the US and I went to see the Secretary of State for Housing who was an Obama appointed Democrat and really nice guy, really good guy, Joaquin Castro, but on the Left of the Democrat Party as was then, and I’m sitting there as a Conservative Housing Minister and I remember him leaning across the desk and looked at me sort of slightly confused about our system and he said to me, “Let me get this straight, in the UK you use taxpayers’ money, public money, to build houses”, so I said, “Yeah” and he went “Right. You then use taxpayers’ public money to pay rent on the houses you built” and I went “Yeah” and he just looked at me and went “Rrright”. The concept of you’re using taxpayers’ money to pay the rent on the houses you used taxpayers’ money to build, he just was like this is just, because in the US, their structure is quite different in that the Government will issue vouchers effectively and the private sector will build the houses knowing that they they’re going to get the income stream from effectively the rent through the vouchers whereas we do both. So, getting something organised around that and the structure of that does make sense because the cost of social and affordable housing in terms of rent is a very large part of the Government’s budget so fixing the supply side of that is also part of getting control of the budget as well in a way that’s it’s affordable and you know the more you can get people onto the housing ladder for their own benefit then the more you take them off the public purse which is, at the end of the day, good for the economy and good for people’s own self-esteem as well.
Susan Freeman
I think though possibly there’s quite a lot to learn from the Americans, I’ve just been in New York on an Opportunity London study trip and you know we went to see various developments and everywhere we went people were talking about the tax incentives and the tax breaks at you know city level, state level, government level and it was quite clear that something like Hudson Yards wouldn’t have been built without you know the tax incentives but maybe they pay higher property tax to start with that enables them.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah, I mean actually I love Hudson Yards, the, there was something else in the States that I was looking at and again we never got away, I’m not quite sure what happened with it but I think the Treasury weren’t so keen on it but, that might be a bit unfair on the Treasury, one of the things I thought was quite interesting for the American model was a tax incentive, particularly for SME builders whereby you say to SME builders if you’re developing Site A and your profit line from Site A means you’re going to be paying tax at Y, rather than having to pay that tax by the 1st January whatever, you can roll that tax, you don’t avoid the tax but you can roll it forward as pump priming for Site B, so that it gives cash because one of the problems for SMEs is cashflow, now that is also multiplied because of the cost of getting planning permission is so high now and this issue we talked about earlier on and the time it takes means it’s difficult for SMEs, this is why I’m also quite a fan of zonal planning because SMEs go to the bank and say look, I want to build ten houses here, I’m going to make a million pound of profit, business plan stacks up, bank’s happy and says come back when you’ve got planning and the developer is like, yeah well I need a third of a million to half a million to get planning in the first place and the bank’s like well yeah but that’s a gamble, we don’t gamble, once you’ve got planning come back, well where does the developer get that money? So there’s two poss ways, I’m sure there’s more but two ways always occurred to me, one is zonal planning, so you’ll go into the bank and say I know I can build ten houses there, what I don’t know is are they going to be Tudor or modern or Huf Haus whatever and there’s a variation on the business case for that but we know we can build houses so it’s not a gamble anymore. So the planning is about detail, not principle. I think that would be a good model and we laid the groundwork for that in the Housing and Planning Act in 2016 actually, but the other model is also and maybe you look at more than just one of them, is to say look, if you are an SME and you know building signs of certain amount of blow to help your cashflow you can carry your tax liabilities forward to pump prime your next site, you still end up paying the tax but you can effectively delay it, which also helps cashflow and it’s cashflow that is king for those SME developers so, there’s things like that that I think the Americans do quite well and we, that’s certainly an area we can learn from. And that’s one of the harder things, I read an article last week actually, I can’t quite remember which outlet it was but I read an article about how we’re not always very good in this country and Government of learning from and looking at other countries and what they do and I will say one of the things I benefitted from, from examples like the UK at the very beginning Susan, when you brought the landlords in to see me as High Streets Minister was engaging with the sector you’re in is actually quite important because even if you disagree with a sector, you can then start to understand how they work and why they make decisions, even if you disagree with them, at least you can understand how and why and then you can work with it. I remember the Home Builders Federation used to say people, they may not have agreed with everything I did but we had a good working relationship because they knew I took the time to sort of understand the methodology and the housing and the way they did it and I think that’s quite important and one of the problems for Government now and has grown over the last few years is as ministers engaging, particularly with the private sector, can often be put over in a very negative way and therefore as a minister, it’s very easy to say well I won’t do that, I won’t engage because people assume that there’s complicity etc going on, when actually you need to engage, particularly if you’re in an industry that involves the private sector, you need to engage to understand what the issues are, you’ve also got to engage with the public sector as well and I did a lot with the housing associations etc so, you need that time to engage with what the sector’s doing to understand it and you can learn from the sector’s doing in other countries, even if you learn what not to do, you know, that’s still beneficial and I certainly benefited from spending some time, I did a visit over to Chicago and Washington to look particularly at the private rented sector actually.
Susan Freeman
No, and it was notable I think during your time as Housing Minister that you really did engage with the sector and talk to the developers and as you say now, sometimes politicians are a bit concerned about engaging but you need to understand what you’re dealing with and as we’re talking about engaging with the property sector, I mean in your experience, does the property sector interact effectively with Government or are there things that it could do better?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah, look in my time I think it generally did. I do have a caveat though which you and I have spoken about outside of podcast before, I mean, generally I think the housebuilders, yes, I think you’ve got, you’ve got a couple of key organisations in there, NHBC and the HBF who have got clear roles, they engage constructively, they’ve got good teams to engage, I think in the housing association sector, there were times when David was chief exec there where there was a bit of confrontation particularly because we were extending and looking at how we extend the right to buy which they were quite resistant to but there was a cohesive voice so, actually engaging with them was actually, there may have been disagreements on things but it was, they had a very clear voice in a structured way but private rented sector was okay but it was more fractured. I always forget the issue but I do remember one particular issue and I remember going to a conference at the ExCel where I was getting pressure literally 50/50 around what to do and how to do something and saying to the sector, well look there’s no point coming to a minister when the sector is so split, sort yourselves out, once you’re clear what you want then come to us and I had the same when I was Pubs Minister, which was around the time I was High Streets Minister and there’s always a debate in the pub industry around business rates because they’re assessed differently for pubs to how they are for retail and other sectors and they wanted them reformed but again the sector was split because actually it was the sector who pushed for the structure of how pubs’ business rates are done at the moment and the sector’s quite split about how they want it changed and my view always was well if you want a minister to make a change that isn’t part of a government’s manifesto but is there in a way that will change how the sector works, then the sector has at least got to have both an argument that is positive and clear around the community benefits and why it improves the, the offer to the country but also the sector’s got to be pretty united on it because otherwise a minister’s got lots of other things to do rather than doing something that isn’t at the heart of Government policy and the sector itself is split on. So, my advice to any sector and organisation that’s looking to get to Government to do stuff, is make sure you have a united voice and are clear about why it’s a positive change. And generally in housing that was the case but occasionally in the private rented part of it that was, there were differences of opinion so, that was my general experience.
Susan Freeman
Yes, I do remember your frustration with that. To be fair, it was early days, the name ‘Build to Rent’ I think was just being used and people were trying to work out how this new sector should work and what, you know, what the planning should be and people did have different views but things have moved on a lot since then. And then I know I’ve asked you in the past about, you know we talk about housing and sort of residential but commercial real estate, which obviously is you know key to the economy, the Government seems to focus on you know housing, commercial real estate sort of somehow you know can get lost in the mix and is that because it's dealt with by different departments?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Yeah, I mean it’s so, everything we’ve been talking about comes basically under the remit of, when I was there, what was DCOG, now is I think DLUHC or something, you know Angela Rayner’s department as is now and the Communities and Local Government and Housing department. Having said that, don’t underestimate particularly in housing associations, obviously the input of DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions, because they pay the rents and affordable and social and supported housing so, but basically it’s, it’s a planning issue and demand side issues is for them and Treasury in part on the demand side but it’s really led by that department. Commercial is completely different, if you’re looking at commercial property, it depends on what sector it is in but it’s arguably the Business department, you could argue bits of it the planning side of it obviously is DLUHC but not the sector itself and because commercial property sort of sits as, the developers and the builders sit under the Business department but of course the users, the operators, you look at residential, they are constituents and communities who come under the Communities and Local Government, as do the housebuilders, whereas in commercial you could be anything from you know a retailer let to an office space that comes under you know the Science department or the Business department or whichever so, within Government, it’s got quite a fragmented ownership and that makes it hard to really get a clear, a minister to give a clear focus and drive behind it and if you look at what happens in Government, you tend to find issues, topics or sectors surge and do well and they’ve got a minister who understands it and has a personal desire to want to drive it and push it and I suspect commercial property slightly suffers with being a bit fragmented in terms of where it sits and how it sits and the sector itself, you know, the sector itself is not, doesn’t have a clear unifying sort of body and voice.
Susan Freeman
You almost need a minister who sort of brings all these elements together because if, you know, you take infrastructure, you know commercial real estate, residential, you need all that if you’re going to build communities.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
I’m always quite defensive of Government, both my Government and I would defend the Labour Government around, everybody always wants their Minister to be in Cabinet, and you don’t necessarily need that because ultimately you’ve got a Secretary of State that covers everything so you’ve got that but also, the problem with that is, that would be a, either a Secretary of State or Minister who’s got the whole, I mean that is such a big portfolio but what does work and I saw this working is where, where you’ve got different sectors or portfolios if you like that need to come together, like infrastructure, housing and if you like, general construction, commercial etc, what you can do is rather than having one minister trying to manage all of that because they all, they all have unique needs actually and infrastructure is far bigger than just housing and housing is far bigger and varied than construction and vice versa and infrastructure so, but what you can do is you bring together a sort of cross Government working group or committee where you have the key three or four ministers with key civil servants sitting round the table on a regular basis to just make sure they’re kind of joined up and understand what’s going on, that’s, that’s probably a better way of dealing with it. I think sometimes across sectors they fall into the trap of ooh we need the Tourist Minister to be a Cabinet Minister or we need the Tourist Minister to own all of Hospitality, it’s not necessarily the case, as long as you’ve got a structure that works and you can do that with those kind of working groups that, and they can be very effective if they’ve got the backing of the Prime Minister.
Susan Freeman
So, you obviously had to balance lots of you know different interests when you were, you were Housing Minister. Were there any sort of particularly difficult moments?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Oh yeah! Absolutely. I mean, for me, particularly when David Cameron was Prime Minister in the run up to 2015, and the 2015 manifesto had housing, I would argue very much at the heart of it, and we were very focussed and had the full support of Number 10 to deliver more houses, get housebuilding moving for economic growth but also to deliver for first-time buyers which is what led to what we called Starter Homes and things like that. So, that was a really key focus for me. If there was a really high point of difficulty, I would say it was probably after the 2015 election when we had said we were going to extend the Right to Buy to housing associations but we came back with a majority of about 25 which means doing anything that controversial, even with the manifesto, I remember sitting down with David at the housing associations telling me you’re going to do this but effectively over their dead body and me pointing out well, I have a manifesto commitment to do it so I’ve got the Salisbury convention so this is happening, it either happens to you or you can work with us and we do it with you kind of thing but that was a difficult period because obviously housing associations were very concerned about what that would mean, how that could work and we had that difficult job of working with housing associations to try and find a way through that. So that was difficult but and challenging, for all the right reasons, you know, the sector rightly, you know I have no issue with that, you know they were fighting for their own sector and what they felt was right for their constituents and their organisations and we were looking at what we thought was right from our point of view as well so, but that was probably the most challenging in terms of the most complex, hardest thing to do, aside from generally getting housebuilding going again but on that, everybody was you know they were all views on how to do it but everybody wanted to do the same thing. With extending the Right to Buy, you know there were parties who were you know going out of their way openly to block us from doing it and you know that’s, that’s their right and, but that was probably the most challenging bit in that particular role, not the most challenging thing I’ve done in Government but in that particular role.
Susan Freeman
I won’t ask you what the most challenging thing you’ve done in Government. Actually, maybe I should ask you?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Either working on legacy in Northern Ireland, immensely challenging because of the complexity and the sensitivity of what it is and oddly in some ways and it’s, it’s a real shame but actually getting access to equality of healthcare support for women, particularly on abortions in Northern Ireland, some of the resistance from people in Northern Ireland from certain factions in Northern Ireland to that, quite shocking actually. I was quite, well I wasn’t surprised because I knew but getting your head around the fact that women in Northern Ireland do not have the same access and, or did not, I’m very proud of the fact we got this done but did not have access to abortion care and support in Northern Ireland in the way they do across the rest of the UK was, was astonishing. So that was challenging and difficult but also one of the things I’m probably most proud of having delivered actually.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, and compared to that, I think coming to MIPIM the day after Stamp Duty was announced as going up.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
Oh yes, yes, yes, that was, well actually, yeah, it was, yeah, that was, I remember when they announced that and I was on the 6am flight out to MIPIM and I think if I remember correctly, my very first event about half 8 in the morning was to the PRS sector and just thinking ohhhh, yeah, I thought I was… We did work it out and I think from memory I was able to explain to the sector that there was a way of managing that situation which we managed to work out but yeah, I’m not sure George was, when he pulled that in, was thinking through the fact that I was going to be doing 8 o’clock rounds with the PRS sector the next morning so, yeah, that, I do remember that, yeah, yeah, that was a real, really interesting morning.
Susan Freeman
So, you were a Minister in David Cameron’s Government, Theresa May’s, Boris Johnson’s, briefly Liz Truss’s, all very different, I mean can you say anything about who was best Prime Minister to serve under?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
No, and I, on this I’m, I suppose in a way I’m slightly boring in the sense that I in different ways I, I had a good experience under all of them but David gave me my first opportunity as a Minister and when I was doing Housing, as we’ve been talking about, he was immensely supportive of what we were trying to do in Housing and very interested in it and that was a really good experience. Theresa May promoted me, I was Chairman under Theresa May, I had an issue she allowed us to do our job and that was a really interesting time, difficult time more generally because obviously just in the aftermath of Brexit. Boris, I’ve got to say, you know, for all of what different people’s views are, I found him as Prime Minister very, very easy to work with, very good to work with, gave us the space to do our job, gave us the support to do our job on very, very difficult, complex, challenging issues, both as well as Security Minister and we had the London Bridge attacks and as Northern Ireland Secretary on National Security issues, he was always absolutely up to speed, knew what we were doing, understood things, he’s attention to detail was far better than he often gets credit for and his work ethic actually, so I found him very good to work with and obviously Liz was only a few weeks but I, I was able to in two weeks put an end to the Bar strike because Liz as Prime Minister gave us the space and capacity to get on and do it and didn’t interfere and that’s what, you know, as a Secretary of State that’s what you want, it’s the space to do your job so, obviously the way the Budget was handled back then was something out of legend and law so, you know, but that didn’t affect me directly in the job I was doing other than it brought it to an end fairly quickly so, as Liz moved on and although I technically served as Lord Chancellor for about 12 hours under Rishi, I had already decided, I made a decision when once, when Liz put her resignation in, my view was I’d done ten years in Government, I think I’m going to, I think that’s quite enough and it’s time for other people to have a shot so, yeah, no, as I say I, I’d a pretty positive experience with all the Prime Ministers in different ways so I did not serve in Cabinet under David Cameron so, but I did serve in Government under him for sort of four, five years so, yeah, I had a pretty positive experience of all of them to be fair.
Susan Freeman
It’s been a pretty amazing ten years so, have you finished with, with politics now or are we going to see you in Parliament again?
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
I don’t think you ever quite, if you, look if you’re interested in politics, you never quite finish, as I’ve, I’m already, I work with and help a couple of think tanks and I’ll always get involved with that and I am a Conservative and I believe in our Party and I’ll always help our Party and do what I can to support but no, I have no intention, plans, thoughts and I don’t see there any possibility of me ever standing to be elected again, I think 25 years elected is quite enough but I don’t think you’re ever done with politics, I care about our country, I care about Party and contributing in one way or another to help with that is always a, is a positive thing to do and a positive experience so I’ll certainly carry on doing that but, but I think there’s, there’s plenty of space for other people to be Members of Parliament now so I’m quite happy to let them get on and do that.
Susan Freeman
Brandon, that’s brilliant. Thank you very much.
Sir Brandon Lewis CBE
No, thank you.
Susan Freeman
Thank you very much Brandon for sharing your unique perspective on the challenges facing the housing sector based on your period in Government. It was fascinating to hear your thoughts on some of the key issues and how we might be able to unlock the log jam.
So that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.
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