Dear Steve (if I may)
No government department has been more transformed by the recent reshuffle than the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The changes matter for local government, for reorganisation, for devolution – and for the dozens of other reforms set running under your predecessor.
You have inherited from Angela Rayner the most radical policy agenda anywhere in Whitehall. And now you're facing a local government sector with a lot of questions.
In choosing you, the Prime Minister has chosen wisely. A pioneer of the ‘cooperative council' model in Lambeth, you now inherit the department with perhaps the busiest inbox in government. You face immediate tests on housing and planning, while also carrying responsibility for the promised ‘devolution revolution', with an English Devolution Bill currently working its way through Parliament.
To succeed, you and your new ministerial team need to recognise the need to treat that Bill as a starting point, rather than a final statement. Progress on local growth and delivery on the ‘build baby build!' mantra are both dependent on making further progress on devolution. The Bill can only be the beginning.
It's encouraging, then, to see media reports of ambitions around devolution of health and education. Progress in these areas will mean overcoming resistance from departments that have historically guarded their powers very fiercely. Now you must look ahead to the moment when the Bill becomes an Act, and articulate a vision for what comes next.
With a relatively consistent tier of subregional-scale strategic authorities rolling out across England, the real task is moving beyond frameworks to the powers, responsibilities and accountabilities that could best be held at such a scale.
That means fiscal devolution: giving places greater control over the resources they raise and spend. It means ensuring that integrated settlements contain meaningful funds for much needed public service reform and innovation. It means empowering strategic authority chief executives to act as accounting officers, rather than having the buck stop with Whitehall. And it means devolving powers to enable housebuilding and development, so they sit where they can be tied directly to infrastructure, transport and economic planning.
There is nowhere, and least of all in Whitehall, a lever labelled ‘build more houses'. Our recent New House Rules paper set out how devolving Homes England could shift focus from centrally dictated programmes to place-led housing strategies. If you want to be remembered as the minister who got Britain building again, you will need to recognise that housebuilding and devolution are not separate priorities but two sides of the same coin.
Reorganisation remains a live issue too. The timescales are punishing. Structural change ultimately doesn't matter if new councils are not designed with innovation and integrated services ‘baked in'. If reorganisation becomes a narrow exercise in line-drawing and a hell-for-leather race to ensure ‘safe and legal' from day one, a unique opportunity to reshape the local state will be lost.
The political challenge is equally acute. Angela Rayner's reputation rested on her ability to drive the agenda through Whitehall and win arguments with the Treasury, creating the space for radicalism. You will need to demonstrate similar energy if you are to avoid being seen as a caretaker rather than a reformer. In short, you must remember that you are not only secretary of state for housing (however much the media prefers to call you that) but also the custodian of England's most ambitious programme of state reform in decades.
The Government has only a short window to prove it is serious about remaking the English state. If momentum is lost now, it may not return.
I wish you luck with these crucial next few months.
Yours sincerely,
Simon
Dr Simon Kaye is director of policy at think-tank Re:State
