Here to go

Some seats around the Cabinet table come with shakier legs than others. Traditionally, the home secretary’s perch has been the wobbliest. Having to take the flak for everything from prison break-outs to intruders in the Queen’s bedroom meant that being home secretary was, more often than not, the breaking rather than the making of a political career.

The balance of risk has now shifted. The hiving-off of responsibility for prisons from the Home Office to the new justice secretary means Jacqui Smith and Jack Straw get to divide the danger between them. Jack handles the prison buggings, while Jacqui deals with police pay, and the damage isn’t concentrated on one person.

But, while the heat is off Home Office ministers, the person in charge of homes is finding life increasingly tough. The housing minister job was, until recently, one of the government’s backwaters. Capable lieutenants with canny instincts, like Keith Hill, or skilled technocrats who enjoyed debating the finer points of planning law, like Nick Raynsford, tended to keep housing out of the headlines and the government was none the worse for that.

In the past couple of years, however, being housing minister has meant courting controversy. When Yvette Cooper took over the job properly in 2005 it inevitably rose up the agenda. Yvette, whom I shadowed for 18 months, is a former journalist with a handy turn of phrase and a confident broadcasting manner. As a key member of Gordon Brown’s inner circle she had the political support to range more freely than most others of her rank, and when the Barker review signalled that Brown’s Treasury saw housing as a key area for change, she was positioned for more exposure.

Yet the issues that dominated Yvette’s time in charge of housing were not those she, or her colleagues, anticipated. Her period was overshadowed by the controversy over home information packs (Hips), a poorly-conceived policy that was executed appallingly. Yvette’s department succeeded in uniting almost every expert body in the housing field against Hips, and even early allies such as the Consumers Association abandoned the scheme in despair when the government ditched the home condition report – the key survey element of the package – and dithered and delayed over implementation. The nadir of Yvette’s tenure there must have been last summer’s forced surrender on the deadline for introducing Hips, when it was revealed that the government simply hadn’t enough trained inspectors in place.

Yvette’s resilience and wider political skills have seen her promoted since then to chief secretary at the Treasury, but being housing minister hasn’t become any easier a berth.

The Housing Bill is a bureaucratic bodge job, with little in it to tackle the big problems of land supply and planning sclerosis

Caroline Flint, the new housing minister, is also an intelligent operator with good media skills, but a fortnight into the job she has already run into two big problems, with more down the road.

The first is with the government’s own Housing Bill, which is making its way through committee. Advertised as a measure to tackle our chronic shortage of new homes, it’s actually more of a bureaucratic bodge job, with little in it to tackle the big problems of land supply and planning sclerosis.

The biggest headache for the government at the moment is last week’s revelation that measures in the bill to give the government more control over housing associations will effectively nationalise the sector, and land the Exchequer with responsibility for its debt.

At a stroke, the government would bust its own fiscal rules and massive sums presently off balance sheet would push the Treasury far deeper into the red. Nobody in government appears to have thought this through, and Caroline has to clear up the mess before further embarrassments ensue.

But rather than getting these crucial issues right, the minister has stirred things up, suggesting that council tenants should lose their right to a home if they don’t demonstrate a willingness to work. The Hills report highlighted that there is a problem with high levels of worklessness among those in social housing, even though a subsidised home should be a springboard for finding work. But Caroline’s intervention provoked stinging rebukes from housing charities and local governments who wondered how her plan fitted with the duty to house the most vulnerable. Indeed, when it comes to wondering if the vulnerable are really safe in their billets then it’s the housing minister, after her intervention, who looks in most danger of an unfortunate eviction …