What do you know about James Brokenshire?
Or, put another way, what does our new housing Secretary of State know about housing?
According to the Parliamentary register of interests, as reported by Inside Housing, he appears to be a private landlord who owns and gets rent from a property in Essex.
If so, he presumably has no problem with Right to Rent checks that must be carried out on all prospective tenants – the checks were introduced under his watch when he was immigration minister.
He is also a non-practising lawyer – and he is a Remainer, who campaigned against Brexit.
He does not seem to have mentioned housing very much at all in the past – something he has more than made up for in the past few days.
On his website, he wrote in 2014 of his approval of George Osborne’s Stamp Duty reforms, and in 2016, he noted that “for too many, the goal of home ownership remains out of reach”.
However, our new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government is clearly mugging up fast on his new brief.
On Monday he told the Commons that “the essential issue of housing . . . will be a core priority for me in the time ahead”. Which, being charitable, is probably how it should be.
So, let’s open a book: how long before Mr Brokenshire mentions the broken housing market?
* The National Landlords Association has written to new Home Secretary Sajid Javid – Brokenshire’s predecessor – asking him to review Right to Rent, saying the policy is costing £4.7m a year and that its checks are “excessive”.
Another ineffectual under achiever who talks rubbish and joins the bash landlords crowd is predicted. As a remainder he demonstrates no propensity for common sense, achievement, democracy and respect for British law and self determination. So watch this spot.
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I am one of his constituents as my MP I am personally totally unimpressed. A conservative party man through and through. Mind you with the throughput of housing ministers – here today and gone tomorrow. He strongly supported right to rent checks and suggested landlords would not be criminalised under the system which would have civil penalties – which then turned out to be criminal penalties. But hey ho never trust a politician. I have very low expectations in order to avoid disappointment. It seems the conservative party continue with the “Windrush Standards” as they do with the disabled – a total absence of social conscience.
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He is known to the campaigning group behind Axe the Tenant Tax as they met him over S24 and he is a) clueless about housing and b) a keen supporter of all the attacks on the sector. Thinks that removing rented property lowers the demand for it.
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Yes, I remember him speaking out in Parliament against private landlords. One would need to do a thorough search to find the details.
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Hopefully as a Landlord himself he might have a better understanding of the impact of changes…. hopefully..
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I just love an optimist.
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I am optimistically hoping that he follows the logic of ‘if I make new laws to punish Landlords then I will get stung too, and if I screw over letting agents then they will either charge me through the nose for things or tell me to take a hike.’
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What does it really matter what he knows about housing? He’ll be moved on in a few weeks to the ministry of dung beetles or something else that government consider more important than housing; the department is the whipping post of government!
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Going by the departments past performance, sounds to me he has the perfect credentials, knows sweet FA.
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