This month, Jacob Rees-Mogg kicked off his role as the newly appointed minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency with an article in The Sun, in which he asked the paper’s readers to identify “ANY petty old EU regulation that should be abolished”.
Although he has since argued Brexit is already a success, Rees-Mogg has also tacitly acknowledged that the benefits of his Sun reader appeal – and any economic dividends that might flow from them – won’t be fully realised for a long time. “The overwhelming opportunity for Brexit is over the next 50 years,” the MP for North East Somerset cautioned two years after the UK’s vote to leave.
Cast the vitriol and messiness of contemporary politics as the gradual arc of history, and anything is possible. But it’s interesting that even a shift as epochal as Brexit doesn’t claim first place on Rees-Mogg’s top list of concerns. That, it turns out, is reserved for housing.
“Once Brexit is delivered, resolving the problems of the UK’s housing market will be the most important political challenge we face,” he said in 2019, at the launch of a report he co-authored on the subject.
Although published by the Institute for Economic Affairs, the free market think tank, Raising the Roof sets out the housing crisis in markedly social terms. It is a crisis, says the report, because it increasingly shuts out large sections of the young and less well-off who aspire to own their own home. Like Margaret Thatcher, Rees-Mogg views home ownership as a bedrock of conservative values, and something everyone should be able to achieve.
Where the report differs from many is in its diagnosis of the causes of the crisis, which are variously pinned on state intervention, taxation, and the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which is blamed for causing “at least half” of the rise in UK house prices up to 2008. Ill-conceived green belt zoning is another major constraint, Rees-Mogg argues, as is general planning bureaucracy and decades of poor design, which in turn drives Nimbyism.
Seen from the other side of the pandemic, however, the solutions proposed in Raising the Roof may require a re-write. For one, a sharper Stamp Duty Tax cut than the report called for was introduced, but rather than facilitate downsizing, there is some evidence that it pushed up prices. Second, calls to concentrate housebuilding where they would boost productivity – in and around cities – has been complicated by the more recent detachment of swathes of jobs from any specific location. Third, taming Nimbyism isn't easy: at first sight of plans to help developers build new houses in so-called “growth zones” a disgruntled electorate in the Tory stronghold of Chesham and Amersham voted in a Liberal Democrat MP.
What’s more, while a regulatory bonfire would please the property industry, the current housing minister is busy taking the sector to task for lax standards and its role in the cladding scandal. All the while, house prices continue to climb at a faster pace than wages, further eroding hope for a “gradual stabilisation of prices nearer the normal multiple of three times earnings” any time soon.
Indeed, we may well conclude, as Rees-Mogg has with regard to Brexit, that the housing market could take half a century to reconfigure into a shape that works for all. Until that happens, it’s hard to imagine how housebuilders’ economic moats will be drained.
