Max Salsbury takes a look at some recent housing headlines

Gathering the guilty

As the ninth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower catastrophe passes, the likelihood of prosecution for those responsible looms larger.

With a vast array of individuals from different institutions and companies seemingly culpable for the disaster that led to the wholly avoidable deaths of 72 people, families of the victims are hopeful that justice might be done.

In May, the police finally sent files to the Crown Prosecution Service, recommending charges against 77 individuals and organisations for their roles in the disaster – though the decision on whether charges will actually be brought isn’t expected until June 2027, with potential trials unlikely to begin until 2029.

According to Garry Moncrieff, from the Metropolitan Police, they have “gathered strong evidence,” adding that it’s “important that we do it once and do it right”. Indeed. Let’s hope that this interminable delay has all been worth it.

A quarter in numbers…

32,243 homes designated as affordable or social housing completed in England in the financial year to March 2026

Just over 2 years that Matthew Pennycook has been housing minister, the longest anyone has had the role since Grant Shapps (May 2010 – September 2012)

1,977 of buildings in England identified as having an external wall system-related life critical fire safety defect as of June 2026

100% of the people he doesn’t like Nigel Farage wants excluded from social housing

Over 1,000 monthly determinations made by the Housing Ombudsman

Rapid reformulation 

The completely sane Reform party has shown some signs of discord. Appearing on Sky, Tory turncoat Robert Jenrick was asked if the far-right party he currently represents would deport a legally resident foreign person if they happened to live in social housing.

The faded Dracula-looking former immigration minister explained that there’s more to it than that – they’d have to fail Reform’s “criteria”: not being in work, not bringing in enough money, talking with an accent etc. And if that’s the case, out they go.

However, this, likely protean, policy position didn’t chime with the party’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, who utilised X – everyone’s favourite Nazi propaganda and fake sexualised image-creating nightmare network – to state: “Robert’s answer is not Reform policy. As the person responsible for our deportation plan I want [to] ensure people know where we stand: If a foreign national lives in social housing at taxpayer expense, they automatically fail our economic test and will be deported.”

Dracula famously slept through the day and worked at night, so could his decrepit contemporary look-a-like, Jenrick, be showing signs of another kind of woke – offering potential dispensation for ‘hard-working undesirables’? The plot thickens. As does the blood.

Houses for spouses

Southwark Council has grown weary of housing the spouses of presidents, it appears: first out is Fatima Jabbe-Bio, wife of Sierra Leone’s president, Julius Maada Bio.

The first lady took up residence in Walworth in 2007 but has spent increasingly more time in Sierra Leone since her husband’s ascendancy in 2018 – which didn’t sit well with the council. The rules insist that council properties should be a tenant’s main residence – spending most of your time swanning about in a presidential lodge thousands of miles away is right out.

The flat has now been relet to Taku Yamamoto, husband of the Japanese premier, Sanae Takaichi. Not really. Obviously. Actually, I haven’t checked. It’s possible.

Around 18,000 households are currently sitting on Southwark’s housing waiting list, many of whom have barely dated any presidents, let alone married any.

Are you currently housing any conjugal partners of esteemed world leaders? Please let us know by visiting our Ceefax page, 329.

Weighty waits

Talking of waiting lists, new analysis has revealed that housing everybody on them in England would take 119 years at current speeds – nearly as long as any criminal trials connected to Grenfell can be realistically expected to begin.

Shelter’s poke around the government’s figures found that fewer than 10 new social homes were completed in 30% of local authority areas in the last two years, while 60 areas didn’t manage to pull together a single dwelling, not even a potting shed.

The homelessness charity’s CEO, Sarah Elliott, said: “If the government continues to deliver social homes at a snail’s pace, none of us alive today will live to see the end of the housing emergency. Unless the scarcity of new social homes is addressed, communities will continue to be ripped apart, and children trapped in homelessness for generations to come.”

If only new homes could be built out of announcements – by some estimates, the current Labour administration has managed 15 new towns-worth of them.

Committed committee

The all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has been very active in recent months (they should probably be put in charge of housing development). While acknowledging the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill is a nice bit of work, the group said the government needed to go “further and faster” to meet leaseholders’ expectations – and then provided a substantial list of demurs and suggestions.

Following this barrage, the committee had a go at stamp duty, insisting it needs to be reformed to help first-time buyers afford a home, and then put out a new report that concluded that the, much-abused, term ‘affordable housing’ isn’t really of much use, as “so-called affordable housing [isn’t] truly affordable for many people”. Who knew?

Rather sensibly, the report urges the government to “clearly and officially define affordable housing in a way that can be used for all relevant purposes, not just as part of the planning system”.

And the busy committee isn’t exactly stoked by shared ownership, either, claiming that though it might be a “useful tool” for some, it’s “not a long-term affordable option for many of the buyers to whom it is marketed”. Again, who knew?

Will any of these concerns be acted upon? Probably not – but it’s nice to know that at least some people in Westminster are trying to earn all that money we pay them.