The new prime minister has channelled her inner (and sometimes outer) Margaret Thatcher in her enthusiasm for free markets, low taxes, deregulation and a small state.
If Ms Truss is serious about this agenda, then planning reform would presumably be a priority, except that it was thwarted in 2021 by a Tory backbench rebellion, just like it was in the late 1980s under Nicholas Ridley and just like it was in a more internal battle within the coalition in 2010 and 2011.
“Will renter reform legislation survive the new enthusiasm for deregulation, or will there be moves to water it down?”
Ms Truss made some ambiguous (perhaps deliberately ambiguous) comments during the leadership campaign about wanting to “rip up the red tape that’s holding back housebuilding”, but also “put an end to Stalinist housing targets” that suggest she wants more housebuilding but fewer new homes.
The manifesto commitment to progress towards 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s apparently remains, but looks less of a priority, and even less achievable, than it did before the pandemic and cost of living crisis.
That matters both in itself and because without radical land and planning reform, the only way to meet it is to fund more affordable housing.
On that front, what will the new secretary of state do about Michael Gove’s verbal commitment that any new Right to Buy discounts will not be paid for out of DLUHC budgets? Will he maintain the commitment to social rent?
Will renter reform legislation survive the new enthusiasm for deregulation, or will there be moves to water it down?
If the new government is serious about unleashing the power of the market, it will no doubt want to look closely at the implications of a proposed merger between two leading house builders.
Vistry, the fifth biggest, and Countryside, the seventh biggest, built more than 16,000 new homes last year, which would make the combined outfit number two behind only Barratt.
But the issue goes beyond that because Vistry is itself the result of a merger between Bovis Homes and the Linden Homes unit of Galliford Try. As recently as 2019, these two and Countryside were the seventh, eighth and 10th biggest house builders.
Many ministers have bemoaned a lack of competition in the sector, and the decline of small and medium-sized developers, and this deal will make things worse. Mr Gove went even further when he accused leading developers of being a cartel at the height of the building safety crisis.
“The temptation for Mr Clarke, and for a government resisting windfall taxes on energy companies, will be to reconcile with what were once natural Tory supporters, drop the anti-developer rhetoric and dial down the threats”
So what about Mr Clarke? On housebuilding, he may soon have to face up to the issue of what to do about a housing market downturn and whether to repeat the support for the industry that followed the crashes of 1992 and 2008.
On building safety, levelling up committee chair Clive Betts has already written to alert him to concerns that remain, but Mr Gove’s reforms may already have drawn the political sting from the issue.
So the temptation for Mr Clarke, and for a government resisting windfall taxes on energy companies, will be to reconcile with what were once natural Tory supporters, drop the anti-developer rhetoric and dial down the threats.
However, as he will be only too aware, that could be storing up problems with the Treasury and for his own budgets. Because it was Mr Clarke himself who was the Treasury chief secretary who made the agreement that allowed Mr Gove to act on the building safety crisis.
We know from a letter leaked to Newsnight that Mr Gove had to promise to “put safety before supply” and that existing departmental budgets would be the “backstop” if he failed to raise enough money from the construction industry to fix mid-rise buildings.
We also know that Mr Gove was allowed to make the “high-level threat” of tax or legal solutions in discussions with developers but that the Treasury reserved the final say and that the package had to exclude non-cladding issues.
As gamekeeper turned poacher, it now falls to the new housing secretary to deliver on the promises that he extracted from his predecessor-but-one.
But it’s just one of the many issues crowding his new in-tray.
Jules Birch, award-winning blogger and columnist for Inside Housing
