Gavin Smart on... Homes for All and the Church of England’s support for housing

Last month, the Church of England and the Nationwide Foundation published a report highlighting the severity of the housing crisis and what needs to be done to fix it. As with anything the Church gets involved in, the report attracted a lot of attention, and it is hoped it will help align current and future governments to housing issues. 

The report, titled ‘Homes for All: A Vision for England’s Housing System’, was published following consultations with some of the sector’s most long-standing and knowledgeable organisations, including the National Housing Federation, Crisis, and the Town and Country Planning Association. 

CIH also had a hand in the report’s creation, with CEO Gavin Smart one of several leading industry professionals invited to sit on a roundtable convened ahead of the report’s publication. 

We caught up with Gavin to find out more about the extent of CIH’s involvement and the significance of the Church of England’s support for housing.

What was CIH’s involvement in the report? 

CIH’s involvement started because we were one of the organisations that were asked to go to a roundtable event, which was convened and chaired by Bishop Guli, who is the Church of England’s Bishop for Housing. The Archbishop of Canterbury attended for a while as well. 

The Church’s motivation for running a roundtable and producing this bit of work was that they see housing as a key problem facing society. They wanted to bring together a few people to talk about it and say, is there a contribution that we can make? 

They had had conversations with colleagues from the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Excellence (CaCHE) and were attracted by the idea of taking a systems-thinking approach. They were trying to think of housing in the whole, in the round. ‘Can we make a contribution to the debate which will help to move things forward?’ I think that was the motivation. 

The report has 25 recommendations. Did you have a say in those recommendations, or put forward any yourself? 

The idea of the roundtable was to give Ken Gibb and Alex Marshall, who were the primary authors, a steer about how they might want to apply a systems-thinking approach to try and describe a long-term vision for what we need to do with housing. 

They wrote a report off the back of that, driven by their own experience in their own academic work. They made a copy of that report, and it was circulated to the various people who attended the roundtable. Each of us then made some comments and some contributions, and I made a few. 

It was that process of refinement that then led to the publication of the final document. 

How significant is it to have the Church so involved in housing? 

I think it’s really helpful and important to have non-sector voices, non-sector players, who’ve got significant moral authority at the heart of our national life, [who are] saying, we’ve got to fundamentally look at how housing is working and what we’re going to do to fix it.

It’s going to be a long-term project, not the kind of thing we can fix in 18 months, and to have them join that is really important. 

The report sets a target date of 2050, which evokes the UK government’s aim of achieving net zero by the same year. Does that say something about the scale of the challenge? 

I think it speaks to two things. It speaks to a realistic assessment of what level of action is needed to get this sorted, and in particular to do it properly, which is talking about a whole-system analysis and getting the whole system working; it’s not a 48-hour problem. 

But I think they took express inspiration from the climate change agenda, because the report recommends setting up an independent committee for monitoring [Housing Strategy Committee], or holding government to account, against whatever long-term plan it comes up with.

The timescales we’re talking about well exceed the likely lifespan of any government; it’s a call of arms to the whole political class to say, you need to sign up to the idea that this is a systemic problem that needs a systemic solution

The report suggests that not only should there be a strategy but also a framework for monitoring that strategy and holding government, successive governments, to account against the plans that have been put in place. 

I think also, by implication, that structure is by design cross-party. The timescales we’re talking about well exceed the likely lifespan of any government, and so it’s a bit of a call of arms to the whole political class to say, collectively, you need to sign up to the idea that this is a systemic problem that needs a systemic solution. It has to have a shared agenda, and it needs to be independently assessed. 

What needs to happen to ensure the committee recommended in the report gets established? 

My understanding is that they’re taking inspiration from the climate-change agenda. I believe that the committee would be set up by legislation. The idea is that it should not only be independent, but also not a creature of government. 

So, if the government appointed a group of people, then it could unappoint a group of people when it decides that they’re inconvenient. Whereas setting something up by statute, it doesn’t mean it can’t be undone because governments could pass legislation to change it, but the barrier is pretty high.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has stressed the need for a values-led revolution of the housing system. (Cr: LCV/Shutterstock)

It would give it independence, authority and longevity, whereas other advisory systems set up by government are set up and removed as and when they’ve decided they’ve served their purpose. 

That independence is key, it seems. 

Yes, but I think it’s also the longevity and the idea of being created by legislation and not being dependent on the favour of government or landlords or anyone else. 

Is there anything else you can add about the report and CIH’s involvement? 

It’s worth trying to stress the way in which they’ve set out to have a systemic approach to thinking about housing. So, the four elements [better homes, an effective housing market, better systems, better policy and policymaking] are really important, because if those four pillars are in place, that will give the framework that the committee will use to hold government to account.

I think it’s important to finish by noting that, at the House of Lords event, the Archbishop of Canterbury reflected on the fact that the Church is a significant owner of land and property in its own right and that it was important that the Church questioned itself about the role it might play in helping to address the housing crisis.

• Read the full report