Housing Minister Says Housing Is "Never Really The Problem"

Housing Minister Lee Rowley has said that housing itself is "never really actually the problem,” a few months after taking on the job of leading the UK government’s strategy on housing, planning and building safety.

“The thing I’ve learned is housing is never really actually the problem,” Rowley told The House.

“It's the manifestation of where people have concerns where the challenges are visible, actually it’s a manifestation of other things.”  

Infrastructure, the quality of living conditions, and the ever-contentious issue of migration and the UK’s growing population – these are just some of the “actual” problems which Rowley said were troubling the nation.  

“Housing is super interesting because it brings all of those together, but actually, if you want to make further progress in housing, you've got to make sure you link it to all of these different things and take everything along in the right direction.” 

The consensus among many campaign groups is that when it comes to housing and the issues connected with it, the UK has been going in the wrong direction for some time. Private rents are increasing at the fastest rate since records began, mortgage rates are soaring, the number of evictions have escalated, and by 2030, an extra 1.7m households will be living in unaffordable homes, an increase of more than a third compared to most recent official figures from 2020/21, according to a report in September by Pragmatix Advisory on behalf of the National Housing Federation (NHF).

In November, Rowley became the sixteenth housing minister since the Conservatives took power in 2010, having also been the thirteenth minister when he briefly held the role in 2022. Organisations such as the Institute for Government have criticised