David Cameron’s announcement today that the government will be involved in the direct commissioning of new homes on public land isn’t a huge surprise in that it continues an exploratory policy announced in the last Parliament. But what is a surprise is that this policy was announced by the Lib Dems and is now being continued, rather than killed, by the Tories.
It was Danny Alexander who said at the launch of the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan that ‘we will be undertaking a detailed government review to examine the potential of direct government commissioning for housing to deliver the number of homes we need’. Yet it is Cameron today who is trumpeting a ‘huge shift in government policy on housing’. The government will commission up to 13,000 homes on public land, including those announced by Alexander at Northstowe in Cambridgeshire.
This suggests that the Conservatives have concluded that the state does indeed need to be involved in order to deliver truly mass housebuilding. It is another sign that those at the top of government are not as ideologically dogmatic as their critics like to claim, but rather more pragmatic. George Osborne made this most clear in an interview with the New Statesman last autumn, in which he said ‘I’m a Conservative who understands, perhaps more than I did ten or 15 years ago, the positive role for government in making things happen, and using the enormous resources that the state spends, in very particular interventions that help areas or indeed industries’. Given Osborne has made housebuilding part of his pitch to be Tory leader, it seems likely that this decision to continue with direct commissioning after the Coalition has a lot to do with the Chancellor’s thinking on the role of the state in getting things done.
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