Our man at the treasury

When he takes the podium this morning in Birmingham, he will be the first Treasury chief secretary to address the National Housing Federation conference. The Treasury may only recently have begun taking a keen interest in housing, but Paul Boateng has had ties to the sector since the late 1970s.

Then a tenant of Paddington Churches Housing Association in Brent, north-west London, he was forging his reputation as a campaigning solicitor in the Paddington Law Centre by working mainly on social and community-related cases involving housing, women’s rights and police complaints.

This initial interest in housing developed through four years as a member of Ken Livingstone’s left-leaning Greater London Council in the early 1980s and then as an MP on the select committee for the environment between 1987 and 1989, when he specialised in housing policy and homelessness.

More recently, he has arguably been driving Treasury thinking on housing as much as, if not more than, chancellor Gordon Brown.

Meanwhile, wearing his other hat as MP for Brent South, he has a working relationship with Genesis Housing Group as many of his constituents live in PCHA homes. Through this, he has struck up a friendship with Genesis chief executive Anu Vedi.

“He is very passionate about social housing,” says Vedi. “We always talk about local housing issues whenever we meet and he is very conscious of the wider issues as well as more localised ones, such as overcrowding.

“Although he hasn’t had a ministerial office in housing, he’s very passionate, committed and informed. In my experience of ministers, Paul is uniquely able to link housing and high policy with people matters. He will have had a strong say when the ODPM was putting together the Communities Plan.”

Boateng also flexed his muscles when it came to negotiations with the ODPM earlier this year over the resurrection of the Estates Renewal Challenge Fund in the guise of a £180m gap-funding regime for negative value stock transfers.

Although he remained in the background, Boateng was, according to a Treasury source, “very much a driving force behind pushing this through”, having been swayed by the arguments of Steve Stride, chief executive of Poplar HARCA in east London, and Oona King, Stride’s local MP.

In a speech to the Chartered Institute of Housing’s presidential dinner in February this year, Boateng could not have been clearer on where he felt housing fitted into Labour’s priorities. “Housing needs to exist alongside sound investment in public services such as health, education, transport and social care. [It] is critical to fulfilling the government’s wider social and economic objectives.”

Sarah Webb, director of policy at the Chartered Institute of Housing, says Boateng’s speech amply demonstrated his commitment to housing. “He used the opportunity to convey his personal convictions about the negative impact of poor housing – not just on the economic success of the country as a whole but on the life chances of individual citizens,” she says.

“Most people there were impressed by the strength of his message on the links between housing and the economy – and, of course, since then we have had the Barker review and the spending review settlement.”

These sentiments have rapidly become the accepted Treasury party line whenever referring to housing and have since been echoed by Ed Balls, former Treasury economic adviser, and Brown himself.

Boateng’s speech today will offer more of the same in terms of stressing the importance of housing in the Treasury and government’s overall thinking – much as deputy prime minister John Prescott did on Wednesday night in his opening address.

However, Boateng is also likely to deliver a reminder to housing associations not to take the sector’s new-found prominence for granted. He will point out that although the report by economist Kate Barker into housing supply held many messages for government, it also spoke to RSLs with regard to their management costs. The implied message will come across loud and clear: “We’ve given you more money to build more homes – don’t waste it or there will be no more.”