Hi everyone,

How are we all holding up? As we settle in for longer nights and a dreaded prospect of turning the heating back on (note there’s a hard November deadline in the Hough household), we’re still recovering with a hot toddy from the busiest month in politics.

The party conference season finally closed on Wednesday with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch making a last-ditch bid to hold on to her job. By the time you read this on Friday, that ship may have already set sail.

Labour may be struggling to hold control of the narrative, but it does seem there is one thing Starmer’s government is getting done: turning housing policy into a genuine political dividing line. For the first time since the Thatcher era (she died 13 years ago, which is easy to forget when the Tories still seemed to have her as their headline act this week), housing policy is a battleground of ideas.

We might not welcome every new pitch out there, but it’s nothing but good news to see the issue being taken so seriously.

In our latest Round Up we’ve got all the latest news from on and off the stage during the conference season, including who’s coming out of their gatherings looking stronger and who is limping back to their constituencies.

We’ve also got coverage of all the other news you might have missed at the end of the summer and a brief look ahead to next month’s highly-anticipated big budget announcement – where there’s still everything up for grabs, but you’ll need to be increasingly careful how you ask for it.

It was great to catch up with so many of you in person at our own fringe event at Labour Conference in Liverpool (more on that below), and at Cardo’s now famous Cavern Club do at the Housing Summit, but if you haven’t dropped us a line for a while, do give us a call. And don’t forget to keep an eye out in your inbox for our post-budget briefing in late November.

See you then!

Bobbie, Els, Will, Siobhan, Emma and the HB team

 

PARTY CONFERENCES: THE BIG ROUND-UP

LABOUR

Keir Starmer entered conference season bruised by weeks of personal attacks from inside and outside his party, and the ever-present existential threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform taking a commanding lead in the polls. Hours before Labour’s Liverpool conference opened its doors, the prime minister attempted a high-stakes gamble by announcing his new policy on digital ID cards – a huge government commitment which was not mentioned in either last year’s election manifesto or his major speech to party delegates a couple of days later. It has since granted him the questionable accolade of possessing the “reverse Midas touch”; support for a national system of digital ID has plummeted since Starmer promised to deliver one.

But in other ways, Labour’s annual meeting served the PM well. The communications team in Number 10, once again reshuffled, appears to have improved its work, and he delivered an impressive and mostly convincing leader’s speech, which directly took on the threat of rising populism and warned against the danger of trusting in Farage and Reform. Starmer had the confidence to make a strong moral argument about the Britain he believes we are, characterising the next general election (still four years away, don’t forget) as a choice “between decency and division” and a “fight for the soul of Britain.” To which the general response was: “Finally!” He also talked a lot about “national renewal”, which is a big idea that nobody understands. Still a bit more to be done on the storytelling, but…he found some guts, stuck to core values, spoke for his people, and got his rewards. Something for us all to remember in strange times.

The PM used his speech (backed up by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her own speech, which also hinted at future tax rises) to turn his five rather botched missions into one overriding obsession: growth. This term risks becoming as much of a policy buzzword as “austerity”, and the PM may come to wish he hadn’t staked his premiership on one outcome, but here we are.

Meanwhile, the Labour deputy leadership rumbles on. Widely considered to be in the lead in that race is the Manchester MP Lucy Powell.

Powell has been framed as a proxy for Andy Burnham, whose own leadership ambitions are no longer a quiet whisper in the corridors of power, but more of a wailing siren. Her rival, the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson MP, has been labelled as ‘team Starmer.’ Hough Bellis is adopting a slightly more grown-up view that this, in fact, is a contest between two talented women at the forefront of British politics.

Powell was right to dismiss the sexist framing of the battle to be the party’s second in command, but her lead demonstrates how much of the parliamentary party is dissatisfied with the current state of Number 10.

Meanwhile, the Mayor of Greater Manchester used a fringe event at Conference to slam Starmer’s leadership for suppressing internal debate, but everybody knows those debates are ongoing – whether Starmer has legitimised them in public or not.

Either way, the immediate threat from Burnham seems to have passed. The timing of the conference fell fortuitously for Starmer: rather than weeks of corridor whispering, the chance to meet up face to face and talk it all out seems to have resulted in a promise to unify behind Starmer – for now.

Nevertheless, Burnham will be aware that this month Labour managed to hold on to a crucial council seat in Ellesmere Port, which it had been expected Reform would take.

It will be a signal to the Mayor that he would be able to avoid an embarrassing by-election defeat and a secure route back to Westminster if he does find a seat where he could stand (all eyes on what happens to Gorton and Denton MP, Andrew Gwynne, who is currently suspended from the Labour Party).

Housing at Labour

For housing leaders, though, there was plenty of policy debate to get stuck into away from the political soap opera.

The housing crisis is still front and centre of Labour thinking, with newly-appointed housing secretary Steve Reed using his conference appearance to announce that work on three of the 12 new towns promised by Labour will start before the next election, with sites confirmed at Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Crews Hill in London and Leeds South Bank. These will include 40 per cent affordable housing, and around 20 per cent social – although we’re still waiting for the final numbers right across the country as the government finalises the Social and Affordable Homes Programme.

Reed’s turn as a MAGA-style baseball cap campaigner has, however, raised some eyebrows as he turned up sporting a red hat with the words “build baby build” on it.

It certainly grabbed attention, but there were plenty of questions raised over whether a splash of Trumpian campaigning was really what the doctor ordered at a Labour Party Conference given the perilous political state this country is in.

Others pointed out – most notably former Tory Housing Minister Michael Gove (who we can only assume was at the conference having gotten lost following a big night out on Mathew Street) – that while the mantra of building loads more houses is something everyone can get behind, the real solution is far more nuanced.

Gove was right in his assessment that it will never be in the interest of volume housebuilders, with a focus on ‘units’ and profit, to build our way out of a housing crisis.  It’s our job to make sure the government understands this – and the ability of social housing to deliver new homes of all kinds – as we get deeper into the parliament.

Still, there are reasons to be very cheerful. The Labour Housing Group had its first ever ‘housing zone’ at the conference, hosting dozens of fringe events tussling with the biggest questions facing housing. There was a real buzz around these sessions, with policymakers making it clear they were still very much open to practical solutions from the sector.

The Hough Bellis team was out and about at the conference, and supported the CIH’s widely discussed fringe event during which MP Amanda Hack urged her own government to prioritise building social housing, rather than high-end developments just to hit promised development figures. Salford mayor Paul Dennett echoed her concerns, fearing the government would funnel money into products such as shared ownership, which are inaccessible to low-income families. CIH chief executive Gavin Smart concluded that while Labour’s housing ambitions are positive, success now depends on delivery and collaboration across the social housing sector.

REFORM 

And so to Birmingham’s NEC, where Reform met for its annual gathering, which can at best be described as policy light and at worst as, well, unhinged. At every other conference, housing was a core debating point; here at Reform, not one aspiring minister of government thought to present a housing proposal. In fact, Britain’s acute shortage of affordable housing to both buy and rent was reframed as an immigration issue, and not the economic or structural domestic crisis it clearly is.

This is, nevertheless, a party that is ahead in the polls. So though there seemed to be little evidence of deep policy thinking in action, Farage cast himself as the prime minister in waiting, declaring himself and his party as “preparing for government”.

In so much as there is a plan in that preparation, the focus for his team is on immigration and law and order above all else. The party used the leader’s speech to reaffirm its hardline – many would say immoral – stances on these issues, including programmes of immigrant deportations. He even threw in the old trope of accusing some communities of eating swans.

A handful of other predictable yet controversial promises were also made, such as scrapping net zero obligations, deregulation and support for the fracking industry, and cutting local government waste. Perhaps the party should listen to the advice and experience of its own councillors in local government: in Kent, Reform representatives are warning that they may have to put local taxes up after all. It turns out that there wasn’t any slack in council budgets at all. Who could possibly have guessed it?

Reality bites for the leadership, too. Preparing for Number 10 the party may be, but there is still leadership tension visible within Reform. The suspended whip Robert Lowe continues to be publicly critical of Farage.

Note: The Roundup refuses to share a link to Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ impromptu Stars In Their Eyes performance of her self-written song Insomniac on the grounds of taste.

LIB DEMS 

The Liberal Democrats are the party set to do best out of the turmoil in Westminster and the country right now. Politically homeless Tories and disgruntled liberal Labour voters angry at the PM’s kowtowing to an anti-immigrant agenda are flocking to Ed Davey’s calm, measured promises that are rooted in long-held values. It feels like a breath of fresh air, and the latest polls show that the Lib Dems are likely to obliterate the Conservative Party at the next general election.

Upbeat though they might be about their own fortunes, the bigger picture is no less bleak. The focus of the party’s meeting was on resistance to Reform and defending the UK’s democracy and institutions against populists. Davey’s leader’s speech was righteously angry, placing himself and his party as the bulwark against extremism in the UK. “Don’t let Trump’s UK become Farage’s Britain,” he said.

He needed to do something: a More in Common survey which was seen by delegates, found that voters still remained unclear what the party stood for and that Davey’s reputation for carrying out crazy stunts for the press pics was starting to overshadow its substance.

Of course, unlike the other main challenger party, the Lib Dems came armed with a lot of policy ideas too, including a windfall tax on banks to tackle fuel poverty, an energy security ban to “halve energy bills by 2035”, and electoral reform with the promise of proportional representation. On housing there were no new policy commitments made, but the promise to build 300,000 new homes per year with wider planning reforms was reiterated.

CONSERVATIVES

Hardly anyone with even a vague interest in politics could be bothered to go to Tory Conference in Manchester, so we can’t tell you what happened.

Even those who did go don’t seem too sure what they witnessed. Nor do they seem to care.

The press coverage suggested that highlights included a display made up of some of Thatcher’s old dresses, a load of empty seats, and Robert Jenrick saying he didn’t see “another white face” when he was out in Birmingham.

Still, it’s an improvement on the Liz Truss era.

The psephologist John Curtice had a warning for the Tories: the electoral system, he said, now treats their party the way it once treated the Liberal Democrats. Their vote is no longer concentrated in winnable seats, and the Lib Dems will win more seats than them at the next general election.

Is there still time to stop that from happening? The one thing the Tories must do to save themselves from oblivion is make a serious commitment to younger people. Enter one shadow chancellor Mel Stride, who thinks he has the answer. He used the party’s annual conference in Manchester to unveil what he described as a “first job bonus” – a £5,000 National Insurance rebate for first-time buyers to be redeemed against a property purchase. This would be funded by – wait for it – a cut to benefits. Leaving the obvious unfairness aside (the majority of today’s first-time buyers have far more than £5,000 in family support to take that step), he seems to have missed a crucial point: the fastest rise in new benefit claims is from young people. This is not a measure to draw them back into the fold. The measure is part of a wider plan for more welfare reform, including restricting benefits for non-citizens. It’s a brutal vision of the future.

On the main stage, Kemi Badenoch showed no greater understanding of the size of the party’s alienation from the public. Her big offer to the public was scrapping stamp duty, a bung that can’t offset the reality of the Tories’ position in a climate where Reform are now outpolling them almost three to one. She also used the conference to announce plans for an ICE-style “removals force” to deport 150,000 people per year, using facial recognition checks.

Some commentators described her speech as a valiant attempt to hold on as leadership rival Robert Jenrick breathed down her neck. Combined with Farage’s stranglehold on the public imagination, her vision for the future of the country would be frightening if it weren’t so slapstick. It’s hard to take a party that spells this great country “Britian” on its marketing material very seriously whatsoever.

As the Tories went into the conference, less than a fifth of the public believed Badenoch was doing well, and that dial isn’t moving. Party members are fed up – 20 councillors defected to Reform during the conference – and increasingly they support a pact or merger with Farage’s party, fearing oblivion awaits if they don’t. The only serious figure still operating in the party is housing secretary James Cleverly. At a fringe session, he said the housing market had been “killed” and was currently incapable of responding to demand. He blamed the “difficulty, complexity and cost of getting anything built” and pledged to fix it. Unfortunately, he’s unlikely to be in that job for much longer.

GREENS

Under the new leadership of Zack Polanski, the Green Party are getting a fairer hearing and are rivalling the Liberal Democrats as a left-wing party of protest, actually overtaking them in membership numbers. In his first major conference as leader, Polanski delivered a combative speech attacking both Reform for its dangerous extremism and Labour for failing to tackle it.

The conference floor also debated a daft motion to “abolish landlords” – an unrealistic and unserious discussion at a time of crisis. More significant proposals on housing from the party include ending buy-to-let mortgage lending, business rates for empty homes and holiday lets and councils being granted first-refusal on sales of ex-council homes. Given the over-reliance on developers witnessed at Labour conference, a plan to create a state-owned house-building factory producing rapid pre-fab council homes is an interesting proposition worth discussing (feels like a concept a certain Labour mayor might consider borrowing and reframing with a touch of Northern-gloss in the not too distant future).

After the conference a YouGov poll suggested the Greens are understandably trusted more by the public on the environment than other parties, but are seen as weak on defence and managing a broad government.

 

BLOWING THE BUDGET

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is delivering her next Budget on Wednesday 26 November, which is somehow still technically Autumn. There’s still a lot of Whitehall wrangling going on around the contents, so arguments are still there to be won.

Tax increases are so widely expected that they now feel inevitable, but whether the Chancellor will have the confidence either to go for wealth taxation alongside the widely expected shake-up of property taxes, or indeed a rise to income tax across the board, remains to be seen. It’s anticipated that income tax thresholds will be frozen for longer, which will raise a lot of money, though will prove controversial with Nigel Farage in particular taking a strong stance on that.

A levy on rental income for private landlords is predicted, and the end of the two-child benefit cap may finally come to pass.

For housing, there’s a careful path to tread. It’s clear that the government feels (perhaps fairly) it has treated the sector very well: the rent settlement and a huge social development programme is confirmed, even if the details around allocating that funding are still under discussion.

The chances of any new pots of funding are pretty much zero. So the message from housing associations to the government needs to be around the detail – and what leavers can be pulled to make things happen quicker.

There’s space to make the case for specific requests when it comes to planning and development – and how to get the Social and Affordable Homes Programme funding out of the door at pace.

There’s definitely room for manoeuvre on how to implement building safety regulation, with ears open to listening about the way the gateway system works (the Lords inquiry is also ongoing).

With Reform lapping them in the polls, Labour needs something that shows results, fast – that means changes that can be delivered swiftly, don’t require years of legislation and can be delivered within the money that’s already been allocated. So, pretty straightforward.

 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Buying overhaul: Just after its party conference, the government announced plans to overhaul the homebuying procedure in England, a huge relief to anyone who has been engaged in that miserable exercise in the last decade. The plan, currently out to consultation, contains three key elements. First, it would require property sellers and estate agents to provide more information about a home upfront, saving money on the buying process and cutting out time sinks such as individual local authority searches.

Second, there is a proposal for a binding contract at an earlier stage in the process, if both sides agree, to prevent gazumping and other practices which lead to one in three transactions falling apart. Finally, there is a plan to offer more information to consumers about the work of estate agents, including a new code of practice and a set of professional standards to improve practice. All long overdue; other countries have shown this process can be easier, faster and cheaper for decades.

New faces: Three new ministers have joined the new-look housing department in Whitehall. Local government and homelessness minister Alison McGovern and building safety minister Samantha Dixon join the team, as does minister for devolution, faith and communities Miatta Fahnbulleh.

McGovern, MP for Birkenhead and the Wirral, was once an aide to Gordon Brown and chair of the centrist group Progress, now known as Progressive Britain. She also took over the local government brief from Jim McMahon, who was sacked in the post-Rayner reshuffle.

Dixon, MP for Chester North and Neston, moved over after Alex Norris was shifted into the Ministry of Justice. She was quick to get to work and has already introduced draft regulations on the Building Safety Levy to the Commons.

Fahnbulleh, who is the MP for Peckham, will be well known to some in housing from her previous role in DESNZ. Matthew Pennycook remains in his role as minister for housing and planning.

Prove yourself: The government has confirmed it will press ahead with a new set of mandatory professional qualifications for social housing staff, which it claims will “eradicate unprofessional attitudes” in the sector. The minister has directed the English regulator to bring in the new competency standard from October 2026. The government has also issued guidance on which staff will be required to hold professional qualifications, which confirms that all senior executives and housing managers must have or be working towards a qualification in housing management.

Seat at the Table: A new report by TPAS, which found that tenants from ethnic minority backgrounds are poorly represented in decisions about how their landlords are run, has been backed by housing select committee chair Florence Eshalomi MP. In her speech at the launch, Eshalomi said the report, authored by Kai Jackson, “will be seen as a starting point for changing the culture and stigma around social housing”.

 

WHAT WE’RE UP TO

• It was great to see so many clients, friends and stars of the sector at the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool. Our thoughts go out to the conference organisers who had to wrestle with a complete overhaul of the government’s housing team on the eve of the summit (does nobody ever think of the PRs?!) It was a fantastic event with lots of debate and a real focus on delivery. We were attending inspiring sessions around procurement and social value, rebuilding housing’s reputation with politicians and tenants alike, investing in heating infrastructure, and tenant engagement.

• Els joined our client Cardo at the Buddy Bag Foundation packing event hosted by Places for People in Liverpool at the Labour Party Conference and in the historic and beautiful St George’s Hall. The Buddy Bag Foundation provides bags made up of essential items to thousands of children upon arrival in emergency accommodation. Buddy Bags help restore a sense of safety and security into children’s lives during a traumatic time, which is one of the first steps to recovery. They help to make this transition a little easier.
• It was great to see Claire Griffiths from Cobalt speaking with the Liverpool Echo. From her new role as Chair of Liverpool City Region Housing Associations to Cobalt’s Croxteth regeneration work, Claire highlighted how housing providers can step in where private landlords step out.
• We secured some great coverage for BTP Architects on their recent completions, including a story on BBC News on their project in Trafford, converting a car park into a housing development for homeless people.

• Hough Bellis is proud to be working with the team at the Housing Diversity Network. We had the great pleasure of joining their team away day earlier this month to discuss storytelling.

• We helped our client Cardo share the big news on its latest acquisition of CTS Projects, marking Cardo’s first acquisition on the island of Ireland and its fifth acquisition this year. Cardo’s chief executive Liam Bevan also featured in Inside Housing with a great interview on how resident engagement positively impacts communities.

• We’re continuing to support our clients with awards submissions – and Switch2 have just been shortlisted in two categories in the upcoming H&V News awards.
• We’ve been working with our friends at HQN to organise their upcoming event: Hoarding – from hidden crisis to proactive support, taking place on 6 November. We have some great speakers lined up, and the event will be chaired by Megan Karnes, founder of Hoarding UK.
• Finally, keep your eyes peeled for our friends at The Joshua Tree, with the children’s cancer charity set to feature on the special Children in Need episode of DIY SOS next month. The show will appear during the week of Children in Need, which is on Friday, November 14 this year.

That’s your lot for now! See you next month when we’ll provide all you need to know in our Big Budget Breakdown.

 

For more updates on all things housing and politics, you can find us on LinkedIn here.