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Labour housing minister freaks out when questioned on housing

On 29 September, Labour’s new housing minister Steve Reed was asked if he knew how many houses Labour had built since returning to power. Instead of saying ‘sorry, can’t remember that figure,‘ he had what can only be described as a ‘nuclear-grade temper tantrum’.


Figures

The deeply unserious British media are fond of asking MPs about figures to try and generate ‘gotcha’ moments. The quickest way out of this is for a politician to admit they can’t remember, roll their eyes at the amateur dramatics, and let the interviewer show themselves up. Steve Reed chose the long way out of it.

The exchange began with host Camilla Tominey asking:

How many homes have you built so far under Labour?

Reed responded:

Well, do you know how long it takes for our planning application to go through? Do you know how long it takes? Well, we’re currently dealing with the tail end of what the Conservatives were doing because it takes more than 18 months from an application to the home being built.

Throughout his response, Tominey was asking him to answer the question; she also stated she had the answer in front of her. As things continued, Reed became increasingly infuriated, saying:

I’m not going to take the blame for what the Tories did. I’m going to take the blame for what Labour does if it goes wrong subsequently. We’re changing the rules to speed up planning so that the problem we’re seeing now doesn’t happen again in the future.

Tominey slowly responded:

Steve Reid, you’re the Housing Secretary. How many houses have been built under Labour so far?

After some more back and forth, Reed said:

I know it’s really low, and I’m appalled by it as well, but that is because the Conservatives didn’t get the applications through.

He went on to say:

I don’t have the exact… I’m not Wikipedia… No, I’m not Wikipedia. No, I’m here to talk to you about policy. That doesn’t mean I know every single statistic going on in the entire housing sector… You only know it because it’s written in front of you.

Reed could have diffused the situation with the same response if he’d looked amused, but he looked anything but. Later, he added:

you’re trying to do a gotcha moment… And that’s so sad for your viewers because they’d probably like a sensible debate.

Despite her protests, Tominey was most definitely trying to generate a gotcha moment, but the meltdown she received will provide significantly more milage. The exchange went on for another two minutes, by the way, and the number of houses ended up being 117,390. Arguably, Reed should have been able to give a ballpark figure of 100k, suggesting he actually had no idea what the number was.

Gotcha politics aside, are there reasons to worry about Reed and his housing plan?

The policy and the politician

We covered the launch of the Reed’s ‘build baby build’ event, noting that he weirdly decided to ape the aesthetics of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement:

Labour has promised to build 1.5 million homes before the next election, but experts agree this is extremely unlikely to happen (117,390 down – more than a million left to go). The Big Issue reported on the latest developments, noting:

The New Towns Taskforce recommended 12 locations for new towns across England as housing secretary Steve Reed addressed the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.

Reed pledged to establish a ‘New Towns Unit’ to fast-track development, promising to deliver up to 300,000 homes. The taskforce’s recommended a minimum of 40% of these homes to be classed as affordable housing with half of those for social rent.

The unit will be responsible for ensuring these homes are provided with accessible local amenities including GP surgeries, schools, green spaces, libraries and transport.

Britain does have a housing shortage, and Labour are promising to build more houses – slow start or no. The reason we’re worried about Reed is his track record.

In his time as the environment secretary, Reed stood ardently against re-nationalising the water industry. This is what We Own It wrote on the topic:

Privatisation is a legalised scam. Since the 1990s, investment from the privatised English water companies has gone down 15%, and they’ve built up a debt mountain of over £60 billion (paid for by us). Meanwhile, shareholders have extracted more than £85 billion over the last 35 years.

Research shows the cost of bringing water into public ownership could be very low and even zero in some scenarios. In fact, public ownership could save us £3-5 billion a year.

Reed fretted it would actually cost us more money to end privatisation (ha!). Despite this, he also wrote:

The water industry quite clearly is failing.

Our rivers, lakes and seas are polluted with record levels of sewage.

Water pipes have been left to crumble into disrepair.

And I share customers’ fury at rising bills.

There are hosepipe bans right now in place across the country because not a single new reservoir has been built in over 30 years.

And the lack of water infrastructure is blocking economic growth.

Water companies have been allowed to profit at the expense of the British people when they should have been investing to fix our broken water pipes.

Reed’s solution to this decades’ long scam?

More regulation.

Seriously.

It’s like promising to bring down the mafia by putting a cap on crime (or like when MPs brought in new guidelines to stop themselves fiddling their expenses – something which was already illegal).

All this is to say that the water industry will never serve the British people as long as it’s owned by shady shareholders, and Reed knows this. He failed to implement a solution to the water crisis, and now he’s been tasked with solving the housing crisis. Anyone would be worried.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we do already know that Labour will be working with private funding to deliver its housing commitments. The question we’ll keep asking is this: have Labour secured private funding to build more houses, or are Labour building more houses to give money to private funders?

Labour Together

Just yesterday, people were speculating that Reed might be planning to take a run at Starmer:

If Reed can’t even make it through an interview, it’s doubtful he can fight his way through a leadership contest.

Much like Starmer and his dodgy advisers, Reed is linked to the ‘Labour Together’ group which worked to prevent Labour winning in 2017 and 2019. These people aren’t serious about improving this country; they are serious about improving their own standing. Accordingly, we’ll keep a close eye on Reed and the housing department.

Featured image via GB News

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.