By Alistair McIntosh, HQN CEO

I hope everyone that goes to the housing conference in Manchester this week has a great time. And to say thanks for all your hard work, the government will kindly provide free transport there and back. That’s why they gave Avanti yet another contract to run the trains.

You can guarantee that Avanti is running very late so you will get a delay repay refund straightaway. Think of it as a free lunch. When I go from Glasgow to London, Avanti staff check your ticket again and again. No one trusts the tight-fisted Scots! We get the gag. But by the end of the trip their attitude miraculously changes. They start bellowing down the intercom to urge us to claim the fare back as the train is late. The same folk that took my cash with gusto want to hand it back with alacrity. What’s going on? It turns out that bosses at Avanti get their cut no matter how badly they perform. So, who pays the compensation? Yes, you’ve guessed it – the taxpayer. More often than not, we travel Scotch-free.

Imagine if we ran housing like this. The minister would ring up Richard Blakeway and Kate Dodsworth to find out who are our worst landlords. The laggards would get a job for life.  And the rest of us would foot the bill.

This nonsense is reason enough to ditch the government. But will things look any better by the time the CIH and NHF gather in Liverpool this autumn? On the bright side, Avanti might be clinging on, so free travel could still be possible.

If you look at the manifestos, we’ll be moving into millions of brand new houses while paying no tax whatsoever. Back in the real world, it’ll be a long haul to fix housing. And everyone knows that.

The basic problem is that the UK produces orators not operators – to coin a phrase used by the tycoon John Caudwell to slap down Nigel Farage. One of the country’s top turnaround experts says much the same thing – strategy is for amateurs, logistics is for professionals. Ouch!

On the basis that Labour will win, unless they do a Devon Loch, to whom will they be listening? This week’s left-leaning New Statesman tries to help by asking “leading thinkers” to “explain what Labour must do to rebuild a broken Britain”. All I can say is God help Keir Starmer. Here are some of the brutal assaults on the English language contained therein:

“Mission-oriented industrial strategy can turn issues such as climate change, health crises and the digital divide into market opportunities, catalysing cross-sectoral innovation and investment.” Cramming a pile of good causes into a sentence, however clumsily, will not butter any parsnips.

How about this for aching superiority? – “Voters fail to grasp how atypical our system of governance is.”  Perhaps us plebs should sit an exam on such matters before we get to vote.

Of course, there are some good ideas in there, too. But no one talks like this. How does this help Labour? They’ll be grappling with running a country, not hosting a sociology seminar.

It reminds me of a lot of the material I see in housing. Our typical strategies describe a problem in enormous detail. The longer the better – just to make sure it’ll never work.

We’ve just got out of the habit of doing the things that really matter. Ask us to run a board meeting and we’re flying. Ask us to build a new estate and that’s when the trouble starts. As the residents get their keys, staff will start to brace for years of complaints about build quality and service charges. We’ve got to recruit and cherish a whole new generation of practical people. That’s the only answer. A few years ago, we believed that factory homes would solve all our problems. Sadly, gimmicks never do that. With all his great experience, Obama’s advice to young people is to “just learn how to get stuff done” and not fall into the trap of simply describing problems or offering excuses.

Outgoing Tory MP Charles Walker was on the TV the other day. He’s so pro housing that he’s never once given in to locals that asked him to object to new homes. That really marks him out, doesn’t it? Charles was encouraging young people to choose practical options, like bricklaying. He pointed out that you could earn £200 a day, which is a lot better than getting into a lot of student debt. And he may be right.

But it also brought home to me how little things change. A century ago, on 23 of June 1924, John Wheatley stood up in the House of Commons to say “the bricklayer and the bricklayers’ labourers cannot afford to purchase houses which the bricklayer and the bricklayers’ labourers are building”.

£200 a day won’t buy you a home in many places today. Wheatley’s answer was to pump in central government subsidy to build council homes. It worked then and it would work today. You give people the homes they need and at the same time boost construction. Now, that’s a growth plan bang in line with what Keir Starmer wants. So, we’ll be getting to grips with this at HQN’s annual conference, just after the general election. Look forward to seeing you there.

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